// KOTAKU — GAMING
TOEM 2: The Kotaku Review
In TOEM 2, a little detail I like is that if you’re walking on a stone pathway in the farm town of Cropton, or cronching through autumn leaves on the ground in Deltburg, your little guy will hold out his arms like an airplane and do a nice little skip. Tap tap tap on the stones, cronch cronch cronch through the leaves. This is so small. It’s pointless. There’s no reason for this animation to exist, except to make me happy when I see it. I try to walk on the paths, or through the leaves, every time I can, just because I like to smile at it.
I’ve written about TOEM before, at a previous job, and am now in the awkward position of not wanting to send everyone reading this to a totally different website to understand this new review, but also not wanting to retread the same ground a second time. Because TOEM 2 is an awful lot like TOEM. An extension. Part 2. You could snap the two games together, like puzzle pieces, and there would be almost no friction, no seams. Both are games in which you go on a black-and-white adventure with a camera through four major areas, searching for something called TOEM. In each area, you need to collect stamps to move to the next one, and stamps are obtained by helping people in town solve their problems, usually by doing something with your camera, like taking a picture of something they want to see and showing it to them. Areas are made up of a bunch of interconnected little dioramas full of goofy little characters and goofy little scenarios. They’re also all full of funny little creatures (like the game’s adorable mascot bird, which I love with all my heart, gosh it’s so cute) you can take photos of for an additional collect-a-thon, if you like, and funny costumes you can seek out to dress your little guy up.
What’s new in TOEM 2? Well, TOEM 2 looks a little better: the levels have a more 3D style to them, and are more vertical, because you can jump and climb now, which opens up more opportunities to hide creatures and outfits and stamp quest objectives. The camera has a focus lens now, which you occasionally have to use to spot out-of-the-ordinary things and reveal their secrets. There’s a new little gimmick for each area, too, all attached to the camera: in one you get a wrench to change the direction of water pipes, in another you’re using a hammer to break jars and hammer in nails. Nothing major. TOEM is still TOEM. Someone just heard that we all liked TOEM, and could have stood a bit more of it, and gave it to us. What a gift!
What I love about TOEM, and also love about TOEM 2, is its insistence that you be here purely because you want to be. There are checklists to complete, yes, but both TOEMs revel in offering the player dozens of tiny details worth photographing with your simple camera for the sheer pleasure of it. Everyone’s dialogue is rife with cute little jokes. Characters light up and smile, or sometimes grow shy and embarrassed, when you point a camera at them. Some creatures move quickly, or only pop out of hiding if you spot their unusual hiding place and do something to trigger their appearance.
I like the quest in Deltburg where a guy wants you to photograph five smelly things for his smell museum, which forces you to really examine the details of the city to find things that appear to be stinky in unexpected places high and low. Another in the same area subtly uses audio cues (TOEM 2‘s sound and music is, like the first game’s, superb, don’t play this on mute!) to help you track down a series of singing fish hiding around town. There’s a quest in Cropton where you have to find a giant chicken. There is no giant chicken. Technically. It’s all in how you look at it. And at the very, very end of the game, one of the “sights” you have to collect is…not explicitly spelled out to you. You just have to understand what the game is putting down, and it’s a little moving when you finally do. There are so many funny little interactions and animations, if you’re looking and listening, a