TOEM 2 Launches Today as Small Swedish Studio Adds Jumping to Photo Adventure

Five years after a Swedish two-person team turned a camera-toting photography sim into one of the decade's cosiest indie hits, TOEM 2 is finally live. The sequel launched on Steam, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 on September 29, and it carries the original's monochrome charm into a bigger, fully three-dimensional world.

Developer Something We Made confirmed the launch window as 9:00am EDT, which lands at 6:00am PDT, 2:00pm BST and 9:00pm in the Philippines and other UTC+8 regions, so players in most time zones can jump in before or shortly after their workday starts.

A Cult Favorite Returns

The original TOEM launched in 2021 as a low-key sensation: a hand-drawn, black-and-white adventure about a young photographer documenting strange local phenomena called Toems for the people of a sleepy mountain town. It won over players with its warmth and lack of urgency rather than spectacle, and it built a devoted following that the studio has kept feeding with free content updates ever since, including a fifth-anniversary short released earlier this month.

According to co-founder and artist Lucas Gullbo, a sequel was not the plan immediately after the first game shipped. The team tried a handful of other prototypes first, and it was only after returning to TOEM for those quality-of-life patches that the idea of a proper follow-up started to feel obvious. TOEM 2 was formally announced in December 2024, and after slipping past its original "summer 2026" target for what the studio has called extra polish, it arrived today with the same protagonist, a more confident version of her, chasing new Toem phenomena in an unfamiliar region.

What's Different This Time

The biggest mechanical change is traversal. In the first TOEM, the player character was locked to a baked walking path and could never leave the ground, which the team says caused awkward moments on staircases and ruled out basic platforming. TOEM 2 adds jumping and climbing, letting players scale terrain and reach vantage points the original never allowed.

The camera itself has also grown into more of a multi-tool, doubling as an implement for interacting with the environment rather than only capturing it, and the new scrapbook system organizes every photo as both inventory and quest log. Visually, the world has moved from the original's flat, billboard-style sprites to fully 3D-modeled environments, while the characters keep their familiar illustrated, monochrome look. The studio also redesigned how the camera works indoors: a first-person view now renders walls and interior geometry that simply weren't there when the original game's top-down camera dipped inside a building.

None of it touches the series' core idea. Players still wander a small, curious community, talk to its residents, and photograph the odd, gentle mysteries that pop up around them, just with more room to climb into now.

The monochrome look itself was never up for debate internally, even though the jump to full 3D would have made color a natural excuse to change it. The team has said that suggestion comes up constantly from outsiders, but since the black-and-white palette is treated as part of the story's own logic around what a Toem actually is, adding color for its own sake never made sense to the people building the world.

Where and How to Play

TOEM 2 is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, and Something We Made has also shipped a free Steam demo for anyone who wants to try the new traversal and camera systems before buying. The Steam version is Deck Verified, so the whole photography loop, jumping included, is playable on the go as well as from a couch. To mark the launch, the original TOEM is also discounted on Steam and PlayStation 5 for anyone who never picked up where the story began.

A Small Team's Bet Paid Off Once Already

What makes the sequel notable beyond its new jump button is who made it: a studio that has stayed small by choice, expanding just enough to build proper 3D environments while keeping the same composers and much of the same crew that made the original feel so distinct. On the original TOEM, Gullbo was effectively the only artist, which is part of why that game leaned on flat, billboarded sprites instead of modeled 3D scenery. A bigger team this time around is what made the jump to fully modeled environments possible without losing the illustrated look that defined the first game.

That growth has stayed modest by design. Something We Made welcomed a handful of new collaborators for TOEM 2 rather than scaling into a large studio, and the founders have described the sequel's job as simple: keep what made the original resonate with players, and quietly fix the parts that didn't work as well as they could have.

“I think there was still an itch to keep making Toem stuff. We enjoyed the making of the game a lot, and we just settled on doing a sequel and seeing what would happen.”Lucas Gullbo, Co-Founder and Artist, Something We Made

Whether TOEM 2 can repeat the original's slow-burn success is now up to players rather than the studio, but the ingredients are largely the same ones that worked the first time: a small, patient team, a distinctive visual language, and a world built around curiosity instead of combat.