September is a busy, busy month. Players who want to keep up with the zeitgeist will need to find time to juggle Onimusha: Way of the Sword, The Blood of Dawnwalker, Control Resonant, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave and more. Plenty of smaller games are bound to fall through the cracks, but there’s one gem that I implore you to find a few hours for: Toem 2.
Launching on Sept. 29 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC, Toem 2 is a sequel to 2021’s Toem: A Photo Adventure. That game was a breath of fresh air at the time, offering a delightful photography game in a memorable black-and-white art style. Toem 2 looks to iterate on that foundation rather than reinvent it, and that’s exciting news for anyone who simply wanted more of the short-and-sweet original.
In Toem, you play as a little critter with a camera. You bounce between scenic locales snapping pictures of the local wildlife, but the main goal is to use your camera to fulfill quests for the eccentric locals. It almost plays like a hidden object game, where you need to work out what exactly you’re supposed to snap pics of in diorama environments filled with photo opps. It’s always funny, surprising, and chilled out.
What especially helps it stand out is its eye-catching art style. Toem is entirely black-and-white, and features 2D characters shuffling around environments like characters in a Paper Mario game. You navigate from a top-down perspective, but the magic trick is that you can look through your camera at any time to see the world in first-person. That opens the door for some clever spatial reasoning puzzles as you try to work out the proper perspective you need to get a clean photo of something you can see easily at a top-down angle.
Toem 2 isn’t going to change any of that, at least not based on what I’ve demoed so far. All the same rules and photography systems apply, and they’re as pleasant as ever. The only thing the sequel adds to the mix is more 3D elements in environments. That fresh facelift is as good a reason as any to justify a full sequel over a too-late DLC.
As someone who has loved photography games ever since playing Pokémon Snap as a kid, I always welcome more “first-person shooters” that replace my pistol with a camera. Toem is one of the best games I’ve played in that niche subgenre, so I know that I’ll be carving out some time for it at the end of September. Silent Hill Townfall can wait, unless it gives me a camera so I can snap pics of all those grotesque monsters before they disembowel me.