Toem

In the game, the player assumes control of a young photographer who must ascend a mountain to witness a phenomenon known as "TOEM".[1] As the player character progresses, they will visit numerous Scandinavian towns and cities that are filled with non-playable characters, who will ask the players for help. Gameplay primarily revolves around helping the locals by solving various puzzles using the player character's camera. Players explore the game's world from a top-down perspective, though it will shift to first-person when the player is taking photos. Players earn stamps by helping other NPCs, and they can ride on a bus and progress to the next area once they have collected a sufficient number of stamps.[2] The player character's outfits can also be customized.[3]

TOEM is the debut project for Swedish independent game development studio Something We Made. The project was first conceptualized in 2018 by university students Lucas Gullbo and Niklas Mikkelsen. Both studied in the same university and were enrolled in courses about video game development. The two submitted an early prototype of TOEM to a local game competition named Game Concept Challenge, and won. They was awarded 50 000 SEK from the competition, and using this fund, they joined an incubation program and established their own company to further work on the game. While Gullbo and Mikkelsen were responsible for the game's development, the team collaborated with Rumsklang for the game's audio, and Jamal Green and Launchable Socks for the game's original soundtracks. Independent game publisher Popagenda also helped the team to market the game in order to reach a larger audience. The game had a budget of $183,000. The company subsequently signed with Humble Bundle, which partially financed the game's development. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and the impacts it had on currency conversion caused the studio to struggle financially.[4]

The game went through several significant design revisions throughout its four-year development process. Originally it was envisioned as a mobile point-and-click adventure game with some puzzle elements, but the team struggled a lot when they were designing the puzzles. Early versions of the game involved rotating bridges to form paths, and drawing electricity lines in order to activate objects in the game's world. Players often mislabeled the game as a proper puzzle game, and this prompted the team to redesign the game four times. Gullbo added that neither him nor Mikkelsen intended to develop a puzzle game since they were not familiar with designing a game for that genre, and they only "wanted to make a world to explore". Development was completely halted following Game Developer Conference 2019 as the team did not have a solid vision of the game's core gameplay mechanic. The core idea of TOEM only emerged late 2019. This version of the game had an emphasis on playfulness, and Gullbo sketched out many of the team's ideas in order to further solidify these gameplay concepts and scenarios. The game features a monochrome, hand-drawn artstyle, and it features a mix of 2D and 3D characters and objects. According to Gullbo, this artstyle was inspired by pop-up books.[5]

Toem was originally set to released in July 2021, though the team had to delay the game due to the slow development progress of the Switch version.[4] The game was released on September 17, 2021, for Windows, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.[6]

The game received generally positive reviews upon release according to review aggregator Metacritic.[7] Critics frequently compared the game's core concepts to A Short Hike, an adventure game released in 2018.[8][9] The team won in the Best Debut category at the 18th British Academy Games Awards.[10] It was also nominated in the Excellence in Audio category at the 2022 Independent Games Festival Awards, though it lost to Inscryption.[11]

• Official website