TIL THEY CROAK Beta Sign-Ups: Punch Fast or Explode

TIL THEY CROAK has one of the more stressful premises I've come across in a while. Someone has planted a bomb in your chest, your heart is about to blow, and the only thing keeping you alive is hitting people. Hard, and often.

The game calls itself a melee-only boomer shooter, which sounds like a contradiction until you think about it for a second. You keep the speed and the room-clearing rhythm of the genre, but you leave the guns at home. A beta sign-up is now open for anyone who wants to try it early.

A Ticking Heart

The core idea is simple and a little cruel. You get 10 seconds to clear each floor before your heart detonates. Every enemy you take down adds time back to the clock. Every hit you take drains it. So you can't really hang back and play it safe. Standing still is basically a death sentence.

I like that kind of pressure. It turns every room into a quick puzzle: who do I hit first, and how do I avoid getting smacked while I do it? The setup reminds me of the time-attack energy in Vacuum Pilot 2, just with a lot more knuckles involved.

Your goal beyond surviving the next ten seconds is to track down whoever put that bomb in your chest. That hunt takes you floor by floor through the Under City, a police state at street level, and then upwards into an experimental lab in the floating overcity above it.

Jabs, Hooks and Frog Tongues

Combat mixes leaning with punching. You get jabs, hooks, uppercuts and a ground pound, so this isn't a single-button brawler. Judging from the developer's mention of "froggy combat skills", the hero is very much an amphibian, which explains the name and makes the whole thing a bit sillier in the best way.

Then there are the body mods. You can swap in new arms, augment your tongue and give yourself heart injections. These upgrades are meant to stack into strong synergies, which is the classic roguelite hook of finding a build that suddenly makes everything click.

Each act ends with a boss fight, and the developer describes these as challenging. You'll need to have your punching down before you get there.

Death Isn't a Full Reset

Here's the part that might win over people who usually bounce off roguelites. Dying in TIL THEY CROAK only resets the act you're currently in. It doesn't throw you all the way back to the beginning. You keep the progress you've already made.

That's a smart choice for a game with a 10-second timer. Losing a run every few minutes would get tiring fast if it also meant starting from scratch every single time.

If you want to give it a go, the beta sign-up is open now, and the game also has a page on Steam you can wishlist.

Our Take

TIL THEY CROAK lands in a busy season for early tests. Over the last few weeks we've covered sign-ups for everything from the mythic RPG Durga: The Lionhearted to the haunted attic escape Lost in the Roots. This one stands out because its pitch fits into a single sentence: punch fast or explode.

The act-based reset suggests the developer is aware that a timer this tight could scare off less hardcore players. Whether that's enough to make the game approachable is something the playtest should show. For relaxed players, the 10-second clock might honestly be too much.

It is also worth watching how the body-mod synergies hold up. Builds can make or break a roguelite, and a melee-only design leaves less room for variety than a shooter with a whole arsenal. If the arm, tongue and heart upgrades really change how fights play out, TIL THEY CROAK could be a sweaty little gem.