A little monkey takes on a gold-mining duke in Toada Brava, Brazil's new RPG

Games

Article • Nov 4, 2026 • 2 min read

Every hero fights with a musical instrument, and under the cute surface runs a story of colonization. Whether it gets finished now depends on a crowdfunding campaign.

A little monkey hero standing at the entrance of a dark gold mine in the pixel-art world of Toada Brava

Kako is a little monkey, and he is heading down. Below him lie the Masmorras de Santacrúz, the dungeons where prisoners dig gold for a duke, and somewhere in the dark is his mother. That descent is the premise of Toada Brava, the Brazilian RPG by artist and animator Mateus Grazina and Asteristic Game Studio, which now has a public demo on Steam and a live Kickstarter campaign.

The road to Mom is crowded. Kako crosses paths with the Ratos Nóia, a gang of rats named after Brazilian slang for someone wired or strung out, with the Gatos Paiaço, and with the Beleguins, a squad of police dogs. Each of them meets a hero armed with a musical instrument. In Toada Brava, every character conjures magic by playing, and the title says as much: a toada is a kind of song from Brazil's countryside.

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Toada Brava RPG plays the classics with a Brazilian accent

The lineage is easy to spot. According to the gaming site Drops de Jogos, the game is a turn-based RPG inspired by Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG, the classics that taught a generation to wait their turn and pick a move. What changes is the vocabulary. Brazil's fauna fills the cast, its slang names the enemies and its music becomes the spell system, so the country shapes the way the game looks and plays.

The team behind it has shipped before. Asteristic Game Studio already released Vengeful Guardian Moonrider and the Dreaming Sarah series, so the project comes from a studio with a catalogue.

That cute surface carries weight. A duke, gold, prisoners in the mines, police dogs on patrol: Toada Brava tells a story of colonization and popular resistance, and it tells it to players abroad in an accent they rarely hear in the genre.

A turn-based battle in Toada Brava where heroes face rats and police dogs with musical instruments

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The Kickstarter runs until November 6

The demo is out, but the full game is not guaranteed. Toada Brava depends on crowdfunding to be completed, and the Kickstarter stays open until November 6, according to Drops de Jogos.

So Kako's descent is also the studio's. A game about Brazil, built from Brazil's own fauna, slang and music, is now waiting to hear whether enough people want to play along.