I have this strange obsession with putting off playing, you know, proper beefy, what some would call “real games,” to play these weird little cute time-wasters instead. There is something nice about how it scratches a certain section of your brain to easily achieve things quite quickly in succession.
I have actually 100% achieved everything in Toem, and when my wife asked if I enjoyed it, all I could say was… I think so? Maybe? As a gaming experience, not a lot of it has actually stuck in my mind, it just kind of was, and now it is no longer.
There’s no real challenge to Toem; nothing gave me a headache for long (except that one guy under the stairs who can absolutely go fuck himself, really).
Toem is quite a basic game, really. You take photos of anything and everything, from the banal, like a pile of sand, all the way to the fantastical, like a fish wearing a crown or a man that looks like a giant sock. It’s also about helping people, dressing up your little dude (I don’t know his name – I’m not even sure he has one) in different outfits, and listening to some jams on a tape player.
There’s no real challenge to Toem; nothing gave me a headache for long (except that one guy under the stairs who can absolutely go fuck himself, really), it’s just a very nice chilled-out experience where you have quite forgettable conversations with a whole cast of ghosts and pirates and fuzzy yetis, take a whole host of rubbish photos, and try to remember why you took them and who wanted them in the first place.
I’ve played quite a few of these indie puzzle-lite games, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. Toem is not a bad game, but it is also not a good game. In fact, I’m reticent to even call it a game, really. Toem and its ilk are at their very core experiences to turn your brain down to minimal effort and half-arsedly achieve a lot of achievements.
Format / Steam Deck
Release Date / 17 Sep 2021
Played / 30 Jun 2024 – 04 Jul 2024
Played Time / 5 hours
Achievements / 48 of 48
