You'll have to help out a handful of folk in each area through photo taking, fetch quests, or exploration in order to reach your eventual goal.
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Many of these little photographed stories are useful for moving forward, as community service is rewarded with free bus rides to the next area. They all have their own names – many named after pets belonging to the developers at Something We Made or others who contributed in different capacities. But throughout your journey you'll also encounter lots of different cats and dogs, and each individual is its own entry in the collection. TOEM's critter compendium is there for you to log every animal you encounter, from ladybugs to birds to a cute little frog. Most of TOEM's encounters happily marry the ordinary with either myth or absurdity, elevating day-to-day moments by asking you to look a little closer through a camera lens and appreciate the ways in which an army of ants might be just as delightful as a towering snow monster.
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There are longer stories, too, like the investigator you run into in each town who's after a shady character hiding in the scenery, or a series of ghosts tired of having to do everything for themselves. The busy-ness of one or two areas (specifically ones with intense weather) did start to noticeably cause the game to chug on the Switch, but this was limited to those locations and was only a brief, minor annoyance. Each map is stuffed with pleasant moments featuring characters like a grouchy newspaper boss who's rightfully proud of his mustache, a balloon family celebrating a birthday, or a DJ moose performing one heck of a set to an audience of glow stick-waving fans. Though its bookend areas are short by storytelling necessity, the rest are densely packed, intricate, and diorama-like in their design, giving the feel of playing around with an exceedingly well-made set of paper dolls or a 3D comic book. Good photos tell stories, and good photo-taking games tell many stories therefore, TOEM is a very good photo-taking game. Good photos tell stories, and good photo-taking games tell many stories. The cute, humorous scenarios TOEM rewarded my curiosity with were almost always satisfying enough without having to try and set up some perfect shot, and even without a quest or a reward to motivate me, I often found myself framing goofy selfies with characters and places I liked just because I wanted to. In a different kind of photo game, this simplicity might have been a disappointment, but for the most part I didn't miss it in TOEM. There's no photo scoring and no Pokemon Snap-like rarity system.
TOEM doesn't gamify its photography further than "take a photo of this" to solve a puzzle or progress forward. Beyond these, don't expect more elaborate photo editing tools from TOEM - but of course, just five minutes with it is enough to know that fancy camera functions would be utterly beside the point. Rain, snow, and mud can spatter your camera lens, though certain items or interactions will clear this problem up if you don't like it. Later, it gets a little bit deeper when you get a tripod that lets you set up specific shots, and a horn you can honk to elicit goofy reactions from your subjects. The initial camera functions are simple ones: you can zoom in and out, or flip it to take a selfie.
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After departing from their quiet hometown, they visit adorably diverse areas including a dense forest with a woodland hotel, a seaside town featuring both sunny beaches and stormswept coastline, a bustling city full of rushed business folk, and a snowy mountain peak, helping members of the community with their camera along the way. TOEM starts with smallness in premise: a young protagonist, equipped only with a camera given to them by their mother and a pair of clogs, is now old enough to journey through their little top-down, black-and-white world to see the sights, take photos, and finally witness TOEM's titular phenomenon: a spectacle described in the opening minutes with awe-struck vaguery. It's perfect for snuggling under a blanket on a quiet evening with a scented candle and a mug of cocoa to finish in one contented sitting. It's small in totality pristine, complete, and precise. But TOEM, a game about the joy of photography, is small in the way a snow-topped winter cabin is small, or a sleeping cat is small, or a plate of cube-shaped cheeses and nicely sliced meats is small. It's one thing to call a game "small," maybe referring to its length or something about its quaint aesthetics.
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