Tohu is a 2D point and click puzzle game. You play as ‘the girl’ which I believe is the titular Tohu. You and the people around you are all living on these weird flying fish creatures called fish planets, each one of these fish is completely different and each seemingly only holds a few people. People visit other islands by using helicopters where the propellers are some sort of flying bugs that live on all of the fish planets. Someone has appeared on Tohu’s island and damaged it’s ‘sacred engine’, and Tohu is going about just trying to fix it and deal with the person destroying everything on the island.

Tohu isn’t the only controllable character, she also has a friend named Cubus, Cubus is a robot that can switch with Tohu at any time the player desires. Each character has some things only they can do however both of them can do most anything that needs to be done. Tohu can climb onto things since she’s a little girl and is lightweight, she can also climb through holes because, again, she’s tiny. Cubus however is a living metal machine. He can lift super heavy things and set them down elsewhere, that’s about his only special thing other than the few puzzles which require him, like an arm wrestling puzzle.

Many of the puzzles are observational, for instance the prior mentioned arm wrestling puzzle, there is a mirror and around it shows three icons, you have to obtain the items shown, the game doesn’t tell you that you need them, you just figure it out from trying to do the arm wrestling and then noticing the pictures. Another puzzle has you see some weird colored worm-like things where a few move around if you click on them, and you use that to figure out a puzzle not far from them. The puzzle is just a small field of rocks, I think, of the same color in the same order, and you simply click on the rocks, the ones you click on are based on the worm-like things that jumped. Things like that fill the game, if you just pay attention, you’ll figure it out pretty easily; it’s not like anything is super hidden or anything, it’s just connecting the dots for your small light-bulb moment.

There are effectively three acts to this game with the last two acts being a little more murky in where one ends and the other begins. The first act is Tohu trying to find the tools required to fix ‘sacred engine’. The second act is trying to deal with the little shit that destroyed the engine and is making weird machines to fuck with people, seemingly for the fun of it. The third act is trying to find another set of items to actually fix everything properly. What is effectively the epilogue has ‘the stranger’, which is the name of the little shit destroying things, explained finally as the narrator says oh yeah we didn’t tell you what happened with them which was amusing and then enlightening as it explains who the stranger is and why they were doing the stuff they were doing.

Overall, I rather enjoyed the game, but it is fairly short coming in at around four hours long on your first playthrough, after that it’s much faster, the longest part of it is all the unskippable cutscenes. Talking about the cutscenes, they’re the biggest issue because you can’t skip them, even after you’ve completed the game, this is fairly common with these kinds of games but still it’s an issue that drives me nuts. The only voice acting is the narrator who speaks on occasion, most of the rest of the time the conversations are pictures and sometimes a little bit of text between Tohu and the other characters.

Tohu was developed by Fireart Games.

Point of Sale: X1, PS4, Switch, Steam, GoG.

$15 everywhere

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A review copy of the game was provided by the publishers The Irregular Corporation.

darkmikasonfire awards Tohu the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.