• Price: $19.99 USD
• Developer/Publisher: Something We Made
• Release Date: September 17, 2021

“Picture” this: your nana tells you that it’s time for you to go out on your own and experience the “magical phenomenon” known as TOEM. She gives you a camera to document your experiences on the way there. In addition to your camera, you also have your Walkman cleverly named “Hikelady” to play some tunes as you go around taking pictures.

Although you use good old cassette tapes in your “Hikelady,” your camera is a bit more modern, giving you the option to put your camera in selfie mode! You can change your character’s expressions in this mode as you take selfies.

The game has a compendium that asks you to take pictures of specific creatures. I loved that I was able to take pictures of a cow, and I was also able to pet it! It was cute when it would trot around with its tail wagging like a dog! (One of the achievements is even to pet the dog, and it seems like the cow qualified! 😂 🐮)

Something I didn’t love was that the camera seemed to automatically rotate if I was idle. It was a bit disorienting for me. Thankfully, there is an option in settings to turn off the “auto rotate after X seconds” feature. It was just an odd function to have in the game, especially when it’s the default option to have it on.

In order to make your way to see TOEM, you’ll need to take the bus. (You can’t take a bus directly there, as that would defeat the purpose of the game.) You can earn a “free” bus ticket to the next stop by getting stamps for helping people in the community. I liked that we are able to quickly access the album, community card, and music with a quick press of the directional buttons. The Photo Challenger Guild will be around in each area you visit, and they issue some of the quests to earn stamps. For some of their stamp challenges, I became confused about which person gave me that task because there wasn’t a map indicating where each quest came from.

There were different people that gave out “Photo Challenge X” or “Photo Challenge #Y” in the same city. Each challenge consisted of multiple tasks. Because I couldn’t remember which person gave which challenge, I ended up backtracking a bit. I would have liked to have had a way to keep track of a quest giver’s location in each city. (I also wish that we could run, because walking felt pretty slow, which made the backtracking take longer. You get some cute clothing options as you progress through the game, and some shoes seemed to make you walk slower…?)

The art style and some character designs in TOEM reminded me a little bit of Spy vs. Spy, a comic strip created in 1961. Everything in the game is black and white, and while I usually prefer color, the black and white color scheme works well here. It might have been interesting for them to have “restored” color to each area upon the completion of that place’s part of the compendium. But I really like the look of this game.

I especially loved taking pictures in the rain and snow because they made it so you can see the water droplets or snowflakes in the photo due to the lens getting wet! If you don’t want to see those in your pictures, be sure to use your handy umbrella! It was a nice added touch incorporating the realistic impact of the weather into the photos!

I found it kind of oddly funny when I was asked to use my camera’s zoom function to help someone find ships out at sea during a storm. 😂 I also helped someone find what was wrong with a machine using my camera. It was weird but I was also like, okay!

A major issue I had was that I ended up filling up my album with the maximum amount of pictures (128) fairly quickly. I constantly had to delete some of the pictures I took in order for the new quest images to fit. I wanted to keep a lot of the images I took because I thought they were good pictures, and I found it strange to have an album limit that “small” in a game dedicated to photography.

The game took me about 6.5 hours to finish; some quests were too difficult for me to figure out by myself (many of the clues are clever but I couldn’t make some of the connections). Overall, I was still able to figure out enough of the quests to meet the minimum amount to move on to the next areas, but as someone that likes to 100% games if possible I needed some help with a few quests and photos.

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? TOEM is a cute and creative black & white photography game. Some of the quests were slightly confusing, and the limited album space was perplexing. The lack of color was an interesting choice that worked well. There was a real artistic quality to the game, and it was fun to take pictures as I explored the environment. TOEM isn’t “picture perfect,” but the photographic journey to see the mysterious TOEM phenomenon was well worth it in the end. 7/10