Toothless Smile

Toothless Smile is a horror slot released through Yggdrasil and built by studio partner Slightly Edgy, whose name turns out to be a fair description of the tone. The action unfolds outside a crumbling asylum window, a stone gargoyle keeping watch from the ledge, with hand-drawn ghouls and grinning patients filling the reels and scattered teeth littering the sill below.

The artwork is the reason to look at this rather than any other horror slot. It is drawn rather than rendered – visible ink lines, sickly greens and pinks, faces with too many teeth – and the style is closer to an underground comic than to the polished 3D that fills most of the genre. It will not appeal to everyone, which is plainly the intention.

The layout is a 5x5 grid with 40 paylines. Five rows is deeper than the standard three, giving twenty-five positions on the board, and forty lines running through them means most spins have several near-misses visible at once.

The base game runs on wilds, scatters and random multipliers, with wilds arriving carrying multiplier tags of up to x5 that apply to the lines they complete. On a forty-line grid a tagged wild is rarely idle, which keeps the base game from being purely a waiting room.

There are two separate bonus rounds here rather than one, and they are reached by different symbols. Three or more tooth symbols open the Pick a Prize bonus; the nurse scatter triggers the free spins. Having two independent routes into a feature is unusual, and it means a session has two things to watch for rather than one.

The Pick a Prize round is staged in a cellar, on a shelf of jars marked TEETH. Every pick reveals a cash prize, a multiplier or an extra pick – and some jars take a pick away instead, so the round can end faster than it started. It closes with a grinning collector displaying her tooth necklace alongside the total, which is exactly the sort of flourish the artwork was built for.

That mix of adding and subtracting picks is what gives the round its tension. A pick-me bonus where every choice is positive is simply a slow reveal of a predetermined number; one where a jar can cost you a turn makes each selection a genuine event, and the round can swing from promising to over in two clicks.

The free spins work differently again. Symbol multipliers stick to the grid and stack across the round rather than resetting each spin, and additional free spins can be won along the way. That combination compounds: a long round accumulates multipliers on the board, so the later spins are worth substantially more than the early ones.

It is a well-judged pairing of features. The picks round is short, decisive and self-contained; the free spins are long, accumulating and dependent on how the round develops. Reaching one is a different experience from reaching the other, which is more variety than most slots manage with a single bonus.

A Golden Bet toggle raises the stake for better bonus chances, and the Buy Bonus menu is unusually detailed. Rather than one price it offers five tickets side by side, each with its own Buy button and a bet selector above them: 10 free spins for 80x or 20 free spins for 160x, and 5, 10 or 15 picks for 50x, 100x and 150x the stake.

Being able to buy either feature, at three or two different sizes, is a genuine level of control. It also makes the pricing legible in a way most buy menus are not: twice the spins costs exactly twice as much, and the picks scale linearly too, so the studio is not charging a premium for the larger packages.

That linearity is worth thinking about before buying. If ten picks cost twice five picks, and picks can award extra picks, then the larger package is not simply twice the content – it has more chances to extend itself. The same logic applies to the twenty-spin option against the ten, given that multipliers stack across a round.

The numbers are balanced. The RTP is 96%, exactly on the standard, the volatility is medium to high, and the hit frequency is around 23.6% – roughly one paying spin in four, which on forty lines means the wins are small and regular rather than rare and large.

Stakes run from 0.10 to 10 per spin, which is a narrow ceiling by current standards and effectively rules out heavy play. Combined with buy prices of up to 160x, the maximum a single purchase can cost is bounded – a design decision that keeps the game in casual territory whatever the player intends.

The maximum win is 9,621x the stake, another oddly precise figure of the kind that comes from a simulated ceiling rather than a round marketing number. It needs a long free spins round with the stacked multipliers compounding, which is the only mechanism here capable of reaching it.

In play, the shape of a session is set by having two triggers. There is always something to watch for – teeth or the nurse – and because the two rounds feel completely different, the game does not develop the repetitive rhythm that single-feature slots fall into after an hour.

The 5x5 grid deserves more attention than it usually gets in a specification list, because five rows is genuinely unusual and it changes how the forty lines behave. On a standard 5x3 board there are fifteen positions and the lines have limited room to diverge; add two more rows and the same forty lines can take far more varied paths through twenty-five positions. The practical effect is that near-misses are constant and visually obvious – you can see three matching ghouls sitting one row apart on adjacent reels, not quite on a line together – which is a large part of why a game with a 23.6% hit rate does not feel as sparse as that number suggests.

The two-trigger structure has a consequence worth understanding for anyone deciding whether to buy. Because teeth and the nurse are separate symbols opening separate rounds, the two features do not compete for the same trigger – a session can produce several picks rounds without a single free spins round, or the reverse. That is different from a slot where one scatter opens one bonus, and it means the buy menu is not simply a shortcut past waiting; it is a way of choosing which of the two games you want to play next.

The stacking multipliers in the free spins are the mechanic most likely to produce a memorable result, and they work in a specific way worth being clear about. Multipliers attach to the grid and remain for the rest of the round rather than resetting each spin, so a twenty-spin round is not twice as good as a ten-spin round – it is considerably better than twice, because the later spins are played on a board carrying everything the earlier ones deposited. That is the argument for the 160x ticket over the 80x one, and it is the calculation the buy menu is quietly asking you to make.

The picks round rewards a different kind of thinking. With jars that can add a pick, subtract a pick or pay outright, the number of selections you actually get is not the number you bought – it is a random walk that can run long or end abruptly. Buying fifteen picks at 150x therefore buys a starting position rather than a guaranteed round length, and the variance around that starting position is substantial. It is the more volatile of the two purchases despite looking like the more controlled one.

The Slightly Edgy partnership is worth a note for context. Yggdrasil operates a publishing programme that carries smaller studios into regulated markets they could not reach alone, and the results tend to be games with more personality and rougher edges than the parent studio produces in-house. Toothless Smile is a clear example: the hand-drawn asylum art, the tooth jars and the collector with her necklace are choices no large studio’s brand team would sign off on, and they are precisely what makes the game worth opening.

It suits players who want a horror slot with genuine visual character rather than another generic haunted theme, and who like having a choice of features to buy into. Anyone put off by the deliberately unpleasant artwork should look elsewhere, and high-stakes players will find the 10.00 ceiling restrictive.

It is worth spinning the free demo on the left to get a feel for the game before committing real money.

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