Considering how few cameras you see in the wild nowadays (curse you, smartphones), it’s fascinating to see them have a resurgence in games. You’re not a AAA game without a Photo Mode nowadays, and there’s been a growing number of photography games in the ‘Cosy Games’ genre. We credit Pokemon Snap for jamming the flag into the ground, but in recent years we have had Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, Umurangi Generation, Beasts of Maravilla Island and more.
Now add TOEM to the pile, but keep it near the top. Because what we have here is one of the most polished, addictive and utterly relaxing examples of the genre. It’s a summer holiday with no time limits, no threats, and just a welcome little push out into the wilds.
There’s barely any story to speak of, which will either feel refreshing – chill, do what you want to do – or feel like a missed opportunity. We skew towards the latter: while it’s nice to have one, singular objective (to experience the ‘TOEM’, a natural phenomenon that you know very little about) it also feels like the world, how it connects, and your place in it could have added a dash of something. TOEM never quite coalesced into a ‘world’ for us.
Still, your mother is rather excited for you, so she kits you out with a camera and photobook to put everything in, and then kicks you out the door. Seeing the TOEM is something of a rite of passage, and you will come back with your very own photo, to be placed above the family fireplace.
The world of TOEM works in a curious way that would probably improve things in our world if we adopted it. To leave your little village of Homelandia, you need a bus ticket, and to get that ticket you need a certain number of stamps on a passport. Those stamps are gained by performing ‘good deeds’ for the people around you. Reach a certain threshold of stamps – you don’t need to gain all of them in an area – and you can hop on the bus and depart.
My nan would have loved it. A bartering system based on good deeds? Yeah, she’d have been all over that. And it makes for a pressure-free and completely engaging game structure. Exploring each region, gathering quests and slowly but surely ticking them off until – wahay – you have the threshold to move on is an addictive loop. It’s made all the better by a complete lack of demand on the player. You don’t need to complete all the quests. You barely even have to do half of them. And you can move on or stay for as long as you want.
Someone should set up a camera shop, as almost all of the problems facing the citizens of TOEM could be solved with a Nikon. A group sits around a campfire, telling ghost stories, and they want a photo of a scary tree to add as a backdrop. A skateboarder wants you to take a photo of their best trick. Graffiti artists are eager for you to catalogue their best works. They’re all solved by tapping on the Y button, whipping out your camera, and framing the best shot that you can.
TOEM isn’t particularly innovative in the photo-taking, as there’s nothing here that you won’t have done in those other games. You can apply filters and frames, name the photos, take selfies and plop the camera on a tripod and walk away. But it’s all about the cute touches. You can attach a horn to the camera to honk before taking a photo, getting a startled reaction as you do so. Monsters don’t like you being near them, so you have to dink down the tripod and hide behind a wall. And all of the photos and quests are rewarded with a stamp that you get to apply to your passport yourself.
It really is a completionist’s wonderland. The quests are just one way that you can play TOEM. If you’d like, you can take a zoologist route and catalogue all of the beasties that scuttle about the world. You can zero-in on achievements, and try to work out what unlocks them. There are photography challenges that act a little like riddles, cosmic blocks hidden in the environment that activate if you photograph them, and various costumes to collect which have their own properties. Heading to the top of the blustery mountain in Kiiruberg? You’ll need to wrap up, love.
It’s the muchness that had us hooked. In each little 3D diorama (TOEM is split into little scenes that are moved between by stepping onto arrows), you can guarantee that there will be at least one creature, one quest, and probably a handful of things to photograph that will contribute to future or past quests. It’s a dense little grotto, and we found ourselves photographing everything, just in case, like true tourists.
Quietly, TOEM is a technical marvel, backing all of this up. Every single photo you take is saved into a reasonably hefty photobook. We only hit its limit right at the end, as we were hoovering up the last of TOEM’s achievements. The photos are loved, framed and printed by the inhabitants of the world, so it’s entirely possible to come across a billboard or gallery that is suddenly filled with your best work. And the world itself is near-completely viewable with a satisfying tap on the trigger buttons. It’s a tactile, origami world that you can lift up and twist about.
There are minor infuriations, but they really are minor. It’s not possible to swing the camera around the entire playspace, as skyscrapers and mountains often get in the way. It would have been lovely to cut a hole through these blockages, so you could see potential secrets in alleyways and nooks. And there’s an argument that levels would have benefitted from taxi-like systems, similar to the one you find in LogCity.
But let’s toss them to the wind, because TOEM is one to treasure. It’s possibly the cosiest of all cosy games, a delicate ramble around villages and parks without anything that might worry you. All you have is a camera and a world that’s absolutely packed with the kooky and curious.
TOEM really has no barriers for anyone – kids all the way up to great-grandparents – to enjoy its relaxed take on photography.
