Toejam & Earl are two peaceful, hip-hop loving aliens from the planet Funkotron. Toejam's the red, three-legged red alien, while Earl's the big orange guy in the polka-dot shorts. While cruising out one day in their spaceship, the Righteous Rapmaster Rocketship, Earl ends up taking the wheel and promptly crashes the ship into an asteroid, forcing them to crash land on Earth. Considering that "Earth" in this game is represented by floating chunks of land covered by quicksand, tornadoes, and people who want to kill them, it's understandable that they would want to escape as soon as possible. The problem is that their rocketship ended up breaking into ten pieces on impact, and the only way off the planet is through finding them all.

From the start, you can choose one or two player modes, or if you're playing alone, whether you want to play Toejam or Earl. This does make a small difference: Toejam's faster, but Earl starts off with more health. You also get the choice on if you'd prefer the levels to be randomly generated or fixed, although considering how the levels actually look, it doesn't make too much difference either way. There's also a pretty neat "Jam Out" mode, which is basically a sound test where Toejam & Earl perform dance moves with the push of a button in front of one of the game's trippy backgrounds.

The game itself involves Toejam & Earl, either alone or together, making their way up the 25 "floors" that make up the planet in order to find all ten scattered pieces of their rocketship. While the first level starts you off on a small island surrounded by water, every stage after that is surrounded by nothing but space. If you end up falling off the edge, you won't die, but you will end up tumbling back to the previous floor. The goal of each stage is to find the elevator that'll bring you to the next floor, unless there happens to be a rocketship piece on that level, in which case you'll want to go for that first. The game will let you know if there's a rocketship piece on your current stage, but it's quite common to go for several stages before finding one.

What's mostly stopping you from doing all this, besides the gaps in the world you'll have to find a way around, the quicksand that slows you down, and the water that drains your health (and mostly restores it once you climb out, provided you don't drown) are the earthlings. These go from crazy dentists that let off crazy Joker laughs every time they manage to drill you, to hula dancers that hypnotize you into dancing with them, to giant hamsters rolling around in hamster balls to nefarious devils to swarms of bees. They quickly go up in threat level as you get further into the game, and for the most part, there's not a whole lot you can do about them besides try to run away. Also, the stages are filled with roads, allowing you to walk faster and outpace your foes, providing there's any nearby.

You're not totally defenseless, though, thanks to the presents you'll find laying around the levels. These bestow a random effect once you open them, and once you know what one type of present does, every other present of that type will be automatically identified for you. Some of these are useful, like extra health, super high-tops for more speed, Icarus wings to fly over enemies, inner tubes for floating over water, and tomatoes you can throw at the earthlings to stun them for a while. On the other hand, not all of them are helpful, and there's a good chance you'll end up having all of your identified presents randomized again, reading a boring textbook that makes you fall asleep, or killing you instantly, right then and there. Some items are good in the right situation, like the rocket skates, which will send you zooming around at high speed, but it's also possible to totally lose control and send yourself falling off multiple levels.

It's usually a pretty bad idea to open a bunch of unidentified presents at once, which makes it a good idea to look out for the old man in a carrot suit, who'll identify what a present actually does for some of your "bucks". The money you'll find is good for a lot more, too, like buying presents from mailboxes, getting healing from a wizard, or having an opera singer kill all the earthlings on screen by singing at them. You can also occasionally find Santa Claus, who will bestow upon presents if you can sneak up on him properly. Sneaking can be used to get past sleeping enemies too, although occasionally Toejam or Earl will sneeze, totally thwarting their plan. There's also a hidden level 0, which features a lemonade stand and a hot tub, allowing you to recharge your health should you uncover it.

If this is all starting to sound like some sort of insane, real-time roguelike, that's not really a bad comparison. While actual combat tends to be incredibly rare, since the tomato power-ups aren't all that common, they both share wandering around a randomly generated environment, experimenting with different items to see what effect they'll have. There's even an experience system, where get points every time you explore one "square" of the map or open a present. Every time you hit a certain score, you rank up, lengthening your health bar and possibly earning yourself an extra life. Your rank on the status bar will increase, too, starting from "Weiner", before moving to "Poindexter" and "Dude", before finally hitting the prestigious rank of "Funklord". There is also perma-death, in a sense, since there's no way to save the game, and no continues if you run out of lives.

This is entirely possible, too, since the difficulty curve quickly starts to crank up once you get a few floors in. The early enemies usually aren't too much of a problem, but after a while, they start to get faster and much more aggressive. The toughest enemies tend to be so fast that once they start hitting you, they'll keep running into you and "juggling" you to death unless you have some spare food or an item to help you escape. The game starts you off with four sets of super high-tops, and it's highly recommended you keep these for emergencies like this.

The co-op's pretty neat, and there's so much work and polish put into it you could say it's almost the point of the game. Toejam & Earl are free to split apart and do their own thing, and if they get too far away from each other, the game will go into a split-screen view, coming back together if they meet up again. If they walk into each other, they'll high-five and trade some health, and if a player ends up running out of lives, their ghost can ask to borrow a life from another player to come back into the game.

The actual game is full of this kind of zaniness throughout, and all this is barely covering it. Both Toejam & Earl let off tons of 80s and 90s slang, and they're frequently get into silly conversations in one of the elevators to next level. While looking at the characters and listening to the game's music would give you the impression that the whole game has a hip-hop thing going on, the sense of humor is much closer to something like Earthworm Jim. Speaking of the music, there's not all that many tracks in the game, but what there is probably the best hip-hop you'll ever hear coming out of the Genesis's sound chip, and the numerous digitized sound clips are quite goofy.

Finding all ten of the missing rocketship pieces is worth the journey, too, as the ending has Toejam & Earl safely making it back to their home planet. The game doesn't end there, either, as you're still free to wander the surface of Funkotron, where the residents congratulate you for winning the game. It's a bit strange that, throughout the entirety of the main game, there's one single tileset, but the ending has a distinct, neon purple look to it, reserved solely for those who see it through to the end.

What really makes Toejam & Earl a cult classic is just how original it is. Sure, the Roguelike was hardly a new concept, even on the Genesis. Fatal Labyrinth may have done the basic concept before, but the weird sense of humor, co-op play, and focus on real-time action made T&E a much more memorable game.