Toem (PS5)

Toem is a collect-a-thon by way of a camera. Like most collect-a-thons, you’re using your abilities to clear goals and earn the necessary items to unlock new areas with their own set of goals, but in Toem, it’s your camera’s picture taking options that lead to your progress, this cozy photography game providing a leisurely adventure where you get the satisfaction of taking nice pictures and completing a meaningful checklist in tandem.

 

Toem, also known as TOEM: A Photo Adventure, stars a nameless little character with a conical face whose Nana tells them of a magnificent and unforgettable sight known as the Toem. To see it requires scaling a tall mountain, but even reaching that mountain in the first place will require traveling a fair distance. Thankfully, the little towns along the way have established a mutually beneficial system, where if you help the locals with their problems, you can earn stamps on a collection card. Once you have enough stamps, a free bus ride to the next area becomes available, each region having more tasks than necessary so your little journey won’t get held up if you can’t figure out a specific puzzle. Your only real tool for assisting people though is your camera, but the frequent need to find things of interest to photograph leads to a constant desire to discover what could be hiding in the next area.

At their most basic, tasks in Toem can be a straightforward as finding the right object to photograph, although even fairly early on the game will try to at least make the request for a photo’s subject be a little less clear than a direct request. Being told to take a picture of five living things requires you to figure out where you can fit them all in frame, a person looking to see pictures of shy monsters requires you to figure out ways to photograph them without noticing you, and sometimes you might need to first help someone out in a different way before the scene is properly set for a good snapshot. Toem doesn’t really ever get too complicated, a good deal of tasks involve walking around until you find an object to deliver or something to take a picture of, but at the same time, Toem’s greyscale world does have you looking closely because of all the small rewards an attentive eye will bring you.

 

There is a compendium that tracks all the animals you spot across the game’s six major areas and the bonus island added in an update, but even noticing objects placed in interesting ways will help you potentially get ahead on work if you take the time to snap a picture. Since whipping out your camera and taking a shot is simple and straightforward, it’s not hard to indulge yourself and just take snapshots for fun as well, there being a good deal of curiously posed objects to pique your interest. With far more album space than you’d likely need, you can easily mix goal-oriented action with personal play, although while Toem’s cartoony world is cute, it can feel a bit like it’s not meant to be photographed too closely. You get a range of filters and the like to alter your photography, but before you’ve even zoomed in too close, the outlines on objects get blurry, and the lack of colors beyond grey, black, and white also can make some simpler areas feel a bit plain or drab if they’re not littered with interesting objects or characters.

Toem is a cute adventure filled with silly characters you briefly interact with in your quest for stamps. Whether you’re in a bustling city, calm forest, or scaling that icy mountain near where the Toem lies, everyone seems fairly relaxed while coming in all stripes. There are some humans walking about, but there are also ghosts, living balloons, talking animals, and what can only really be called shapes with faces that make for a wide range of unique people to meet and possibly photograph. Many of them will grant you special clothing as a reward on top of a stamp, and some outfit pieces do grant you new options like the scuba diving helmet opening up the chance for some underwater photography. Your camera’s main tools for solving their problems expands in small ways, initially most tasks just requiring you to either take a picture or look at something long enough through your lens for your attention to get noticed and trigger a reaction. You will later get a horn to honk at things to provoke a greater reaction and a tripod to take pictures that can feature you in them or catch something flighty, but usually interactions are puzzles rather than requiring you to be quick on the draw with your shutter. The free update’s island does add the option to hurl water balloons as well as some carnival games that do require better aim and reflexes than other parts of the adventure, but most of the time, what’s being tested is a good eye for finding things and a good head for figuring out clues that don’t always come out and say what’s directly needed to succeed.

 

Toem’s intentional simplicity does mean a lot of your activities are quickly completed and moved on from after, but there are a few that can at least gradually build up some intrigue so they’re not so quickly forgotten. You’re asked in most areas to photograph a mysterious figure in a trenchcoat so trying to learn their identity motivates you to find them in each place, an explorer in the mountains gradually puts together the mystery of various ancient paintings you find, and a guard blocks you from entering a private area until you’re dressed to impress with a fun payoff to that extra work put into completing the more involved goal. Not every activity will pay off with something that impressive, a quick smile or short joke a much more common payoff than some sort of small story being wrapped up in an interesting way, and there are a few payoffs that feel outright underwhelming like when you gain access to the hotel restaurant. Toem doesn’t often dwell on anything long, and save one strange case where music is used as a puzzle solving tool it all feels pretty intuitive and breezy so you can keep up a constant feed of nice little sights and small puzzles. There’s even a helpful option that will highlight objects of interest with a corner border so you won’t have to fiddle with shot composition much when trying to capture a subject accurately enough to earn credit, the adventure definitely built so you can quickly complete tasks if you so wish even if the lack of pressure means you can also take your time and look for things that are interesting purely on their simple visual merits.

THE VERDICT: Toem is pleasant photography adventure that keeps giving you new fun things to look at and snap pictures of. The goals aren’t often complex, making it easy to keep ticking off boxes on the local checklist while also interacting with cute and silly characters along the way. The limited forms of interaction do mean many tasks can boil down to the same activities just with new subjects, but the fun in finding out what new sights await on the next screen over keeps your interest fairly well and there are just enough puzzly elements to differentiate stamp tasks and ensure you’ll be pleased with the variety in this breezy photographic collect-a-thon.

 

And so, I give Toem for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. There are certainly little things in Toem’s design that threatened the experience, the small scope in what you can actually do to complete tasks and the greyscale world seeming like they’d drag things down, but Toem does a pretty good job building around them without straining them. The black and white environments let you zoom your view in and out and generally have important objects contrast well with the environment without making them too obvious if you’re meant to hunt around for them. The camera’s range of tools is small but some creative uses of actions as simple as just looking at a thing give you a good range of problem solving tasks beyond the breezy photography that doesn’t ask much of you. It does feel like Toem could have sharpened its cartoony visuals a bit more so that close-ups didn’t tend to blur the subject, but your abilities never come up short when out collecting stamps thanks to smart recontextualization and funny set-ups for actions that might otherwise be pretty basic in execution. Not getting too caught up on filters or composition allows the collection aspect to remain in focus instead of photography being a crucial skill to hone, although adding the water balloon in the free update’s island does feel like a bit of a sign that Toem was starting to feel the boundaries of its design. Toem could keep expanding its ideas with more cryptic clues or multi-phase tasks to keep growing the concept before it needs to throw in new abilities, but for a cozy and quickly completed adventure, its restraint also makes it a relaxing and sweet little checklist to complete that only aims to poke your brain enough to keep you engaged rather than straining to keep up.

 

Toem does a delightful job of realizing its central idea. It’s a photography game where you want to see what’s next, which is obviously fitting when it comes to getting nice snapshots while encouraging the kind of curiosity required to figure out the photo puzzles. It may not go too deep with most of its ideas, but that also makes it feel like a bit of a tourist’s adventure, a quick trip through the fun sights of a location before you get your stamps and ride the bus elsewhere. The collect-a-thon structure works well for making you feel like you’re being productive even when doing something as simple as getting a shot of a mossy rock, that constant sense of forward progress while being able to take your time and not stress on what needs to be done being the key to Toem’s success.