In the early 1800s, Nicéphore Niépce didn’t know what a gold mine he was about to stumble upon. Inventing photography, he managed to create a tool that manages to preserve time itself. Photos have captured beautiful moments, tragedies, and the rise and fall of empires. They also have the power to capture souls, reveal things otherwise left hidden, and immortalise the human spirit. Also, you can take a photo of a flower to show its relatives. At least in Toem 2 you can.
It all starts with you waking up and meeting up with your nana in the living room. Looks like there’s a pretty significant event about to get underway, and your nana gives you a camera to go get a photo of it. However, getting there is going to be a bit harder than just hopping on the bus, and will require helping some folks out with their problems. These range from a missing cat to helping someone become an apprentice, and seemingly everything in between.
You are tasked with finding items and taking photos to solve those problems. It might seem odd that in a game where photography is the focal point (pun intended), not every task is solved with a camera. However, it manages to still keep with the game’s spirit of camaraderie and togetherness, meaning the tasks don’t feel disconnected at all.
Along with the camera, each area has a special attachment that helps spice up the act of photography, but these aren’t necessarily all as good as one another. The attachments are all tools players could have easily had without the camera, like scissors, and while it does play into the idea of the camera being central to the plot, the act of using them is kind of a pain. You can’t move around while you have the camera prime, which means having to pull a tool out to use it, lower the camera to move around, then pull it back up to use it again, which can be a bit frustrating.
An example is the first tool, the scissors. Players will use these to cut buds off of plants, but buds are at odd angles, and you can’t always hit them from one position. Therefore, you have to pull out the camera, cut the buds, drop it, move around the plant so you can see the next bud, and then cut it, and so on. This never feels as intuitive as it should, at least as far as the tools are concerned.
Fortunately, using the tools does have some fun applications (like a sculpting class) and the vast majority of the problems players will be solving, tools or not, are actually fairly inventive. Taking photos is fun and thoroughly falls into the “how do they do that?” portion of game design magic. The whole world feels very alive and exciting thanks to this work, and it’s impressive how little of the game falls into “fetch quest” territory. Instead, the tasks are varied and smart, using some clever ideas to their most impactful limits.
The art is perfect for this game, and comes with some neat surprises as well. One of the cooler uses for the camera is taking what is essentially a 2.5D world and turning it fully 3D. This has some excellent applications, like letting you see under porches while in the viewfinder, meaning you have to use the camera to spot missing or otherwise sought-after items. It’s a cool and simple trick that allows for another layer of puzzle solving.
Unfortunately, Toem 2 is a little too short. Just as the flow starts to come together and the confidence that only comes with really understanding a game sets in, it ends. Now, it’s hardly the worst thing in the world that one major complaint is that you just want more, and it’s really a testament to how fun the game is throughout. The act of finding a place, exploring it, helping NPCs, and moving on is addictive. It’s even better that there are a ton of animals to take photos of and wardrobe items to locate, some of which are very cleverly hidden as well.
