TOEM Preview: A Charming Expedition Through A Wild World

Announced during Summer Game Fest’s Day of the Devs, Something We Made’s TOEM is a monochromatic adventure filled with photography, puzzles, and community– and it’s delightful. Yesterday I got the chance to play the demo, which covers the first hour or so of the game, and I am glad to report TOEM is just as endearing as the trailer makes it seem.

Our story begins on the day our nameless, young protagonist has been dreaming about–the day they get to leave home to find and experience the magical phenomenon simply known as “TOEM.” After throwing on your backpack and exiting your bedroom, you’re met by your grandmother, Nana, who gifts you her old camera and eagerly sends you off to begin your rite of passage. Your journey then begins in the “town” of Homelandia, a small plot of land where you, your grandmother, a local farmer, and one very chipper cow live. However, while your hometown might be small, the world outside it is filled with vast wilderness and an entire cast of quirky characters ready to add charm to your travels.

You quickly learn you can travel to various locations by using the local buses, and can obtain tickets for said buses by presenting the station attendants with stamps. In order to collect stamps–and therefore open new locations–you must explore your current region, find folks in need of assistance, and offer them a helping hand. Fortunately, you only need to finish up about half of all the requests in an area to progress to the next, but all you completionists will be glad to know these jobs are fun enough that you’ll want to finish them all. Nearly all the available tasks, as well as the types of folks dishing them out, vary greatly. In the demo alone I encountered a horse ghost desperate to remember their former majestic form, a troop of scouts willing to induct me into their club if I took a few nature shots, a spy in a trash can who needed my help finding a mysterious villain on the run, and nearly a dozen other characters just as unusual as those three.

What’s even better is that while there are a few standard photography challenges, nearly all the community requests feel different from one another and keep you engaged. The missions never feel as simple as “snap a picture and run it back,” but rather introduce clever ways to keep things from feeling tedious. This cleverness shows in the way TOEM uses puzzles and perspective to make things a bit more challenging. If you can’t find a particular subject or reach a certain area, it generally takes either shifting your point of view or finishing another task to make sense of things and progress. At times, the game can feel a bit Where’s Waldo-ish, but in the absolute best way.

The current demo offers two areas to explore: Homelandia and Oaklaville. While Homelandia is a simple one-screen plot of farmland, Oaklaville is lush wilderness spread out around ten or so screens and has 15 possible stamps hidden throughout it. In addition to these two locations, there are four other areas on the map yet that are not yet available in the demo, though they appear to be a beach, a city, a valley, and the mountains. So, assuming there aren’t additional maps, this makes for a total of six areas to play through.

However, rather than focusing on quantity, I really want to express how quality the whole experience is thus far, and so much of this is because of TOEM‘s gorgeous art and music. If you’ve seen stills from the game, you know it’s something unique. Every bit of the game is beautifully hand-drawn, and somehow manages to feel full of color despite being devoid of it. All TOEM‘s critters and characters feel cartoonlike, and bring this comforting sense of nostalgia and childlike wonder to the world. The music, which your character starts up when they throw on their headphones, makes the world feel even more magical than it already is, providing you with twinkling, ambient waves of sound while you explore. As a whole, TOEM is abundant with the same artsy, quirky charm and love for wilderness that fans of Gravity Falls might appreciate and is soothing to play. I adored my time spent with the game and can’t wait to get back to it when TOEM hits PC and Mac later this year.

You can wishlist Toem on Steam now.