Now this BAFTA-winning game is on Game Pass, you have no excuse not to play it

“It is an illusion that the photos are taken with the camera… they are taken with the eye, the heart and the head”. So says Henri Cartier-Bresson, the pioneer of French photography. Cartier-Bresson had a knack for capturing the most intimate moments: he had an eye for sincerity and a mechanical sense of time that he came to define. He understood that by capturing moments, you were capturing entire stories.

It’s hard not to think of Cartier-Bresson when you play totem. The BAFTA-winning debut title from independent Swedish studio Something We Made, the game is all about these little moments. And how you, as a young photographer driven to climb a mountain to capture the Toem phenomenon of the same name, weave a story through snapshots.

It’s something of a love letter to photography, in its own way, showing you the world from different perspectives. Whether he’s looking over the shoulder of his unnamed protagonist as he guides him through nature and encounters a weird and wonderful array of animals, or seeing exactly what they see through his camera lens, Toem is a wonderful exercise to be in the moment, and learn to put yourself in the shoes of others.

Like the casually boisterous lives he wants you to observe, Toem is a fun challenge. Solving a variety of puzzles with nothing more than your camera lens has more gameplay than you might think, and the tactile, diorama-like way in which you must interact with the environment means there’s always something hiding in there. Just out of frame. However, it’s up to you and where you focus to determine what comes into view, and therein lies its charm.

Toem is so moving and attention-grabbing because there’s very little, really, to feel affected or compelled by: it’s just little moments. Lots and lots of little moments, serving as links in the fence that guide you up, always up, toward your goal. It’s not making big statements or injecting a dour Scandinavian philosophy right into your crust, no. It’s giving you space to do it yourself.

Toem is the kind of game that will make you revisit your own Camera Roll on your phone (or on your digital device, or through old negatives, if you’re lucky enough to have one) and make you piece the pieces together in your own head. . It gives you the tools to write a narrative, discern the storyboards of your life into something greater. More interesting.

With his penchant for being cryptic and friendly-poking fun at the way you think you should be doing things, then giving way to a straightforward “go here, do this” puzzler, Toem gleefully satirizes the genre. It is a very modern puzzle game; A monochrome, signature playground for anyone who loves taking pictures as much as they love finding answers.

Even if you only turn it on for a few moments, it’s clear that Toem wasn’t made with monitors, keyboards, and software, but, as Cartier-Bresson would attest, with “the eye, the heart, and the head.”

Toem is available now on Xbox Game Pass and is also available on Switch, PC, and PS5.