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. 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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