When eagerly booting up Toem 2, the standard series of game engine and studio names parade across the screen. “Something We Made,” the name of the studio behind the game, has a different weight to it than it did five years ago when they first released Toem. It was playful then, but now it feels deliberate. As a player, keeping up with authentic creativity in art is draining, and it’s contributing to a growing unease and mistrust for players who want to support projects that ethically support creators.
This set a particular tone for me as the title screen and menu appeared and I clicked in to play. Like the first game, the photography mechanics aren’t difficult. Jogging around each diorama location looking for specific objects hidden in each world is easy enough to settle into. The quest checklists in Toem 2 populate quickly, so the incentive to search for hidden objectives becomes present almost immediately. You’re gently placed into the game’s rhythm within minutes without much exposition or obstruction. Once in the game worlds, what struck me was why each NPC needed you to take photos for them. It reminded me of the cultural impact of photography around two centuries ago.
Photography’s rise to popularity in the 1800s coincided with technological improvements to the daguerreotype and industrial newspaper publishing. It accrued a reputation for factuality. Anecdotally, this association between photography and truth was rarely questioned, even as humanity entered the digital age—I’m old enough to remember when cellphones first got cameras, and folks would jeer, “Pix or it didn’t happen,” as a challenge to get proof for a claim.
In the three years since LLMs have gone public, images have lost centuries worth of credibility. Sure, Photoshop and deepfakes had been around a while before, but the confidence in any image, even those that look photographic, is nearly gone, or replaced by the assumption that it’s falsified or generated. This current landscape set an unusual backdrop for my three hours in Toem 2.
And it’s a shame that it felt unusual because it’s fiction. We’ve exited the non-fictional age of photography, and in Toem 2, we can return there. Each location in the game is brimming with beauty, community, and playfulness. There’s an optimism baked into the world that simmers with silliness. Each NPC you encounter is lively, a personified joke without being a caricature, and when they have requests, they earnestly believe that you, a photographer, will bring them truth. As you go about the game zooming in and tastefully framing scuttling creatures, or a shape in the clouds, or the location of a fallen tree, what you return to the quest giver is more than proof—it’s an exchange of kindness.
Kindness is paid with gratitude. One of the additions in Toem 2 is the mechanical ability to fix things. One such skill is the screwdriver, where you’ll go on a multi-step mini-adventure with one of the town’s locals and repair a bigger problem plaguing the whole community. Being able to do community repair with your camera and make a friend in the process amplifies this feeling of relationship building. When the journey nears its end in each locale, this cycle of kindness and gratitude results in a community, and memories are shared of your short adventures or exchanges from previous quests.
It’s a beautiful feeling woven into the cadence of the game. There’s an optimism that pulses through all the good deeds that you do as you happily bop through different alleyways, homes, and cities and meet dozens of new folks. The perpetual feeling of goodwill works because of the striking authenticity in each of your interactions. It feels good.
The shift across five years looks good too. While the general style retains the familiar black and white aesthetic, the new 3D assets are sharp, filling out spaces with the extra dimension. The overall atmosphere is lively with exaggerated animations and complemented with plenty of nooks where hidden objects are quietly tucked away. The music bounds along with Pep as you seek out objectives and snap photos for waiting NPCs.
Playing on Switch 2, the gyroscope motion controls are a joy. Being able to aim the console to get better angles served as a strong technique to keep myself engaged in the photographer’s mindset. The seek-and-find design of each 3D space expanded as I would stretch my wrists to capture just the right perspective, making me consider artistic flair when capturing subjects. This kind of play makes it difficult to reduce a game like Toem 2 down to a checklist. Levels are designed with intentionality in clever ways, making the player get creative in finding the right snapshots to both explore and advance the game.
As I kept progressing, however, the differences between Toem 2 and the first game were harder to come by. When reaching the ending, déjà vu crept up on me. Toem 2 feels more like a remake than a sequel. Gameplay improvements seemed sized more like tweaks, and while the menu system has more clarity, everything is just a bit reshuffled and feels largely similar to what Something We Made had done before.
It’s a tightrope walk to get from a strong debut to an evolving sequel. On the one hand, audiences want some things to change. On the other hand, there’s an expectation that the integrity of the original’s style remains identifiable in the next installment. Not just games, but many albums, films, and plays struggle to establish confidence and individual style when following up on previous success. Toem 2 plays well and will undoubtedly delight many players. It’s a great game. But it surprised me to discover that the experience here was all too familiar, and I had the feeling of playing a game from a time capsule, albeit with a shinier sheen.
However, innovation may not be what a game that will list among the best cozy or wholesome games from 2026 really needs. As much as I was hoping for more to shake up my play experience, Toem 2 provides a sense of peace and purpose in a time of uncertainties. But there’s more than just escapism here. The satisfaction of being able to contribute to something greater than myself made it easier to simply enjoy puttering around, snapping photos, and demystifying the pleasantly maze-like level design. This feeling is ingrained into the mechanics of Toem 2 and makes it one of the more enjoyable and subtly timely games of the year.
Now Something We Made, as a name, means more to me than an artistic ethic. After my experience with Toem 2, I’m thinking more about the subject “we.” One of the greatest strengths of the game is to emphasize what folks can do collaboratively, and that each individual bringing a skill, such as photography, to a community creates a sense of purpose and homeliness in togetherness. It may sound idealistic, but the comfort that comes from the kind of experience that Toem 2 offers is reassurance that good things are achievable, even through small contributions.
