TOEM 2: Super Charming Photography Jaunt With Feels 📸
The sequel to the super charming TOEM (2021) photography adventure game by Swedish indie team Something We Made. Five years to the month later and the sequel is here!
TOEM 2 offers an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it methodology, bringing more of the same loveliness back… now with added charm offensive! Seriously, it’s one of the most charming and uplifting games out there.
Take Some Ruddy Pictures in TOEM 2
The remarkable thing about TOEM 2 is the warm, lovely, fuzzy sense of charm overload kicks in after about 60 seconds of gameplay. It just ramps up from there, too, as you guide the protagonist on a photography adventure in a
... show moreTOEM 2: Super Charming Photography Jaunt With Feels 📸
The sequel to the super charming TOEM (2021) photography adventure game by Swedish indie team Something We Made. Five years to the month later and the sequel is here!
TOEM 2 offers an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it methodology, bringing more of the same loveliness back… now with added charm offensive! Seriously, it’s one of the most charming and uplifting games out there.
Take Some Ruddy Pictures in TOEM 2
The remarkable thing about TOEM 2 is the warm, lovely, fuzzy sense of charm overload kicks in after about 60 seconds of gameplay. It just ramps up from there, too, as you guide the protagonist on a photography adventure in a monochrome world.
Armed with a trusty camera, you head out and start snapping pictures of wildlife for your compendium. In and around that you meet oddball characters across various contained mini-stages, who you talk to and then they set you tasks.
Complete the tasks and you get a stamp for your notebook, which then opens up new levels to complete. Simple, addictive, and a joy to play. Behold the dev gameplay showcase!
Where it becomes so much fun is with the creative way you solve quests. You tend to stumble on solutions as you explore, so that’s rewarding. But then add into that the sense of humour with the general misfits you meet and their strange behaviour… it’s a win from us.
Then the lively, bustling little mini-areas your waltz through are teeming with life. See a bug? Take it’s picture! Add it to your compendium, but then you could also take that picture and add it into someone’s picture frame in a random home.
Such little touches grave TOEM 2 all over the place and the attention to detail beams out of the world and really draws you in.
And, yes, of course! After the fantabulous soundtrack to TOEM it’s only natural there’d be another lo-fi musical romp here. This time around, Launchable Socks and Jamal Green collaborate again for TOEM 2. It’s stuff like Bioluminescence and it’s all rather glorious.
There are about four hours of gameplay overall. We’ve seem some gamers online get snotty about that in their Steam reviews, but as we’ve stressed many times… this is an indie game! Indie games tend to be short, which is why they’re much cheaper than AAA games.
Frankly, the replayability of TOEM 2 is just so high anyway. Once we’d completed it, we wanted to jump right back in and give it another whirl (along with the 2021 original).
With the world in such a horrible place right now, for this thing to arrive and be so life-affirming is a glorious achievement. Even if you’re a non-gamer, it’s this type of thing you should be giving a whirl to restore some faith in humanity. TOEM 2 is glorious and we love it mighty much.
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Celebrating TOEM 2’s Totally Terrific Soundtrack 🎼
As another indie game year nears it’s end, here we have one of the best titles of the year. Something We Made’s super charming TOEM 2 just launched this week and also brings with it a fantabulous soundtrack.
Two composers worked on the music: Launchable Socks (real name Joost Kraaijenbrink) and Jamal Green. This collaboration makes for a lo-fi uplifting time of it, made all the better as the game is fabulous.
The Gorgeous Score to TOEM 2
There are 36 pieces in total here, most of them around two minutes in length. It’s quite a short game, with many different mini-areas to explore, but the music evolves and shifts around as you move from one bit to the next.
When the excellent TOEM launched in 2020, the soundtrack was an immediate joy and the dev team built gameplay mechanics in to bring it to the fore. You can swap cassettes out of the in-game cassette player to pick your favourite songs for any given area.
Jamal Green and Launchable Socks did the music there, too, and they’ve followed similar innovative ambience vibes here. Some of it is reflective (as with The Very Best Cup of Tea), others bouncy and uplifting (see further below).
This one here, with a Medieval vibe, Taletorp Quest 84. Important to note, as you listen, that it’s quite unusual to have two composers collaborate on a game soundtrack. We’ve been writing these reviews for over a decade and can only recall a few other examples, such as with the soundtrack for point-and-click game Norco (2022).
Launchable Socks specialists in tracks electronic sounds with guitars, and ukuleles. Jamal Green is a British composer who won a 2023 BAFTA for breakthrough artist with his ambient and neo-classical style.
If you’re wondering, the game is in black and white as the devs wanted to match the greyscale/monochrome look of classic photography. For such a vibrant game, it’s a unique artistic look.
Then you’ve got the multi-layered music playing over the top to bring it all to life.
Some tracks play into bleepy bloopy type game soundtracks of old, or least seem to be nodding at that, before taking on more complex looping soundscapes. Bioluminescence is a particular favourite.
It’s all very wholesome and uplifting, offering brief moments of refrain across each mini-area.
Stuff like Magic In Every Step open with a one-off hook and then pass into more introspective and quiet sections. It’s quite an unusual structure to pieces, but we love it.
36 tracks of it! And this is why we love video games. You get the fun and joy of TOEM 2, a wonderful little game, then these banging tunes over the top of it all. A glorious combination.
#ambience #composer #gaming #IndieGames #JamalGreen #LauncableSocks #Lifestyle #neoclassical #relaxing #TOEM2 #TOEM2Soundtrack #uplifting #videoGameMusic #worldMusic
