Toem feels like the most colourful game of the year - no mean feat since the entire game is in black and white. The cutesy photography sim sees you wander around four minimalist and cuddly locations taking photographs and solving mysteries. These mysteries might include finding ghosts with your super cool specs, rescuing boats stranded at sea by aiming a foghorn at them, or just finding a missing sock. Toem has a lot of charm that makes up for the lack of colour in a genre so used to bursting with different hues, but that can only carry it so far. All the basic ingredients of a photography sim are there, but when's the last time you enjoyed a meal made of only the basic ingredients? Toem is a cheese toastie - it's warm, it's nice, but is it enough?
The idea of a wholesome game has been discoursed to death in games, to the point where discussing a wholesome game is possibly the least wholesome thing anybody can do. The issue with wholesome games is that the wrong games often seem to be bundled into the category - Bugsnax looks cute but is a body horror about addiction, while Boyfriend Dungeon is queer and inclusive but features a highly controversial stalking storyline. Toem has nothing like that. It's wholesome. It's four to five hours wandering around taking pictures. It just kind of is what it is. It makes no apologies for itself, and never tries to convince you it is anything other than exactly what it is, so maybe we should be celebrating a game that embraces the idea of what wholesome actually means. Still, it felt like the cheese toastie was missing some soup.
The locations in the game are gorgeous. Despite being presented in black and white, they never feel lacking in detail or aesthetic. They feel like mini dioramas, tiny moving snapshots of a slice of cartoon life, whether that be a secret disco in the woods or a shy hippo relaxing on the beach. The game is full of new pastures to wander around, but they aren't especially crammed with secrets. The positive here is the game never stays in the same place too long, constantly guiding you through smaller areas that you'll only ever come back to two or three times, just passing through. The downside is once you enter a new place, you know everything there is to know about it within a single glance.
It never takes advantage of being a photography game, either. Is the object you're snapping vaguely in the frame? Cool, that's a good photo. Done. There are a bunch of quests, and the optional task of snapping every animal in the game, but there's no filters, no photography tools, no scoring system, no... anything that makes it a photography sim. It's a screenshot sim, really. You can zoom in and out - which also zooms the overworld camera in or out once you stop shooting and try to explore again, but there's nothing else that makes you feel like you're actually holding a camera. It's a nice game in a nice world with some nice features. And that's all it’s selling itself as. But it feels like it could be something more. Still, there's nothing wrong with a cheese toastie.