Man, anyone else just having a tough time this week? I know I shouldn’t complain about it too much. I am not in the direct line of fire of the most recent news in video games, nor in national politics. But I think it’s fine for us all to acknowledge that logging on daily is becoming a more and more miserable prospect with each new headline. I’m sad. It’s hard to focus. All the stories in my queue are major bummers.
So I’m going to set those stories aside for like, 30 minutes or so, and go take some photos of singing fish. Also, non-singing fish. And birds. Maybe a snake, or snail. Anyway. Apologies to my editors. This is for our own good.
I’m dabbling in the demo of TOEM 2, the sequel to a lovely little photography game that captured my heart in 2021. It’s one of those indies that you’d never expect to get a sequel in a million years, just because it was both very small and also a very complete thing from the jump. But here we are with TOEM 2, and you won’t hear me complaining.
Instead, you will hear the soothing sounds of Jamal Green and Launchable Socks, composers both returning from the first game to share some pleasant, perky tunes while you run around little diorama-like areas and take photos. In the first TOEM, you were on a rite of passage of sorts to take a photo of a mysterious phenomenon, visiting various towns and bergs along the way. I’m not sure what you’re up to specifically in TOEM 2, but I’m fine not knowing. The demo is short and sweet: you and your camera are unleashed in the hamlet of Deltburg, where the locals request that you take photos of things like stinky garbage for the local smell store and a bicycle for a robot that needs help with his comedy routine, and off you go.
I’ve seen TOEM before, and TOEM 2 is more of that. It’s got silly little fellas in it, it’s got a full serving of little secrets to find, and it’s got a camera that you can zoom, turn into a selfie stick, and do a few other assorted puzzle functions with such as (inexplicably) convert it into a screwdriver. The big new features in TOEM 2 are the ability to focus your lens, and the ability to jump, the latter of which mostly serves to help developer Something We Made hide more little bits and bobs vertically than before, like silly hats for your character. There’s some light platforming. I recommend a controller rather than a keyboard.
But mostly, in TOEM 2 as in TOEM, I recommend taking a lot of pictures. That’s really it. The game itself turns photography into a vehicle for quests, but I think one of TOEM 2‘s best attributes is being full of interesting little guys of which to take photos. TOEM had a lot of hidden interactions or poses you could prompt from various NPCs, and I’m hoping TOEM 2 has those too. In the demo, there’s an aquarium full of silly fish with silly faces ripe for photo taking, and there are also many little fish in Deltburg’s ponds and streams that are putting on little musical shows for you. There are also nice, round birds (borbs), and I like photographing them too. There’s a critter encyclopedia that tracks all the funny little fellas you find.
If you also want to take a break from doomscrolling and instead scroll your focus dial up and down on a nice, swoopy seagull, TOEM 2‘s free demo is still up on Steam, and the full game is planned for a Q3 2026 release. That’s not too far away. We can make it, everyone, one singing fish photo at a time.