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Lock and Toad
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About the game
Lock and Toad starts as a block-pushing puzzle in the Sokoban tradition: each room has a few heavy blocks and the same number of target squares, and the round is won once every target has a block on it. Blocks only move when you walk into them, so pushing one into a corner can leave it stuck there for good.
Then the room starts shooting back. Spawners in the walls release drones that hunt the toad, fixed turrets and rapid-fire guns cover the corridors, and sprinklers spray bullets in every direction. The toad answers with a pair of pistols and a kick. Bullets chip away at blocks, so a block can be a shield, an obstacle you shoot out of the way or, if you are careless, a puzzle piece you just destroyed. Pushing a block onto a spawner shuts it down.
The campaign has 30 rooms, roughly ordered by difficulty, plus a timed bonus round in the middle and a boss at the end. The game counts how many times the toad croaks and shows the total time when you finish.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Mega Drive: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in ClownMDEmu, a Mega Drive emulator compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play now, press Enter on the title screen and choose New Game.
After each cleared round the game saves your progress on the cartridge's battery memory, which this site keeps in your browser automatically; next time, the menu offers to load it. F2 also saves the full state of the emulator and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too. The game is in English.
Controls
| Key | Mega Drive button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | walk; walk into a block to push it |
| X | B | fire |
| C | C | kick the block in front of you |
| Z (hold) | A (hold) | strafe: keep facing the same way while moving |
| Z (tap) | A (tap) | centre the toad on its square, to line up a shot |
| Shift (hold) | Mode (hold) | strafe |
| Enter | Start | pause and resume; on the title screen, open the menu |
| Z, while paused | A | restart the round (it counts as a croak); skips the bonus round |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Solve first, shoot second. Before moving, look at which block has to go to which target. A block pushed against a wall can only slide along it.
Kicked blocks slide. A kick sends the block gliding several squares at once, which is quick but much harder to control than a push.
Shut the spawners. Drones keep coming out of the spawners until a block sits on top of them, and that is often the first job in a room.
Watch the tongue. The toad in the bottom-right corner is the health bar: its tongue gets shorter with every hit.
Stuck? Restart. If a block is jammed or destroyed, pause and press Z to start the round again.
Credits and licence
Lock and Toad was made by Safety Stoat Studios (Zachary Rubenstein) with SGDK, Stephane Dallongeville's development kit for the Mega Drive. The code is under the MIT licence and the game's original assets, including the music, are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. The title picture is based on "Cowboy frog" by Linnaea Mallette (CC0), the 8x8 text uses the Calstone font by DamienG (https://damieng.com/zx-origins), and the title lettering is set in Bench Grinder Titling. Sound effects are adapted from work by Q009 (CC BY-SA 3.0), spookymodem (CC BY 3.0), Varkalandar (Hansjörg Malthaner, CC BY 4.0 and CC BY 3.0), Thimras, bart, AntumDeluge and Kutenjnikov (CC0), and the explosion sprite from Dave Newton (CC BY 4.0). Some rooms are inspired by a public-domain Sokoban level set. The licence texts and the full list of attributions are linked from this page.