TOEM: A Photo Adventure

TOEM is seemingly the result of a lab experiment to create the coziest cozy game that isn’t a life sim of some kind. It’s a chimera of genes taken from A Short Hike, Alba, Minit, and Captain Toad – a breezy, infinitely-charming odyssey through economical, monochrome dioramas, whose wacky inhabitants’ problems can all be solved with a camera. Photography gameplay has been moderately but not thoroughly explored before, so there’s a decent number of clever puzzles to be found here. Even at its most ingenious, it’s by no means a challenging game – many of the puzzles are functionally fetch quests – but its open-ended structure makes it feel less like performing a series of trivial tasks and more like constantly stumbling into the answers for questions you didn’t even know you had. Nevertheless, there’s still so much more that could have been done with these mechanics, not to mention the narrative. The overall plot meanders toward a mildly satisfying conclusion, but there are hints of greater significance in some quests, which are invariably resolved anticlimactically as an intentional joke or otherwise.