Over the years gaming has evolved beyond a divisive hobby and become rather mainstream. As a result, gaming has grown beyond simple experiences and core concepts. Things like Tohu use gaming as a medium to present the story in a fun and interactive way. While we’ve seen many games do this in the past, is this an experience everyone needs to see, or is it a journey that fulfills a purpose?
There really isn’t a whole lot to the world of Tohu, though it tries to use whimsy as a way to hook players. Instead of focusing on a villain causing havoc in an industrial setting, it’s a world of flying fish and the machinery on them. The minor change doesn’t do much to change the core experience, but it makes things so much more fun to explore. Each fish has its own look, quirks, and ecosystem that you can mess around with. But, to progress, you need to solve a variety of puzzles and fix a variety of problems.
Given that Tohu is a point-and-click adventure game, the overall experience is pretty straightforward. There are various background elements you can mess with, like a rat or bugs, ultimately with each section having a fairly obvious puzzle. The main goal is often to figure out what is being asked of you, so you might need to move a pipe or interact with a mechanism and that opens up new paths.
Where Tohu attempts to change things is by allowing players to swap between a robot and a boy to complete different tasks. Rarely are these more complicated than, big and heavy items require the robot and things with finesse the kid. It also somewhat helps that the areas are pretty small with only a handful of interactive items. Even blind trial and error can often solve the puzzle, though, for the intended demographic, that is more than enough.
While exploring, Tohu is an interesting world that has a storybook quality to it. Bright pastels and cartoonish images are inviting to younger players and soothing for adults. There is a certain charm that a lot of the characters have, be it quirky or just plain silly.
Tohu Review – Verdict
Ultimately, there really isn’t a whole lot to say about Tohu. It’s a cute point-and-click adventure game with a fairly basic story and simple gameplay. You can solve the puzzles through common sense like a weight is obviously needed on a hook or through looking at what you can interact with and just messing around with it. It might not appeal to most gamers, but you get a younger gamer just looking for a simple and fun adventure and there is certainly a place for it.
[Editor’s Note: Tohu was reviewed on PlayStation 5 and a copy was provided for review purposes.]
