Experience a brand new adventure game set amongst a world of weird and wonderful fish planets. Explore beautiful environments and solve intricate puzzles as a little girl, joined by her mechanical alter-ego, Cubus. Together they will discover the truth about themselves and the mysterious Sacred Engine that powers their world.
Explore vivid and atmospheric locations, meet intriguing characters, and solve elaborate puzzles - all on your quest to repair the Sacred Engine. As The Girl you are light and nimble, and so can reach areas of the world that others can't.
At any time you can transform into The Girl’s mechanical friend, Cubus. Need something heavy lifting? Need big strong arms to catch lightbulb flies as they pass by? Need to win an impromptu arm wrestle with an arcane and somehow tangible mirror image of yourself? Cubus has you covered.
Each fish planet in TOHU is brought to life through bewitchingly beautiful artwork and is packed with detail. Meet a cast of bizarre characters and uncover cute critters to collect!
You'll need your wits about you to solve TOHU’s unique and wacky conundrums. From a simple search for critters needed to power your expanse-traversing fly-ship, to learning how to operate a moustache-imbuing mole cannon.
TOHU also features a musical score by Christopher Larkin, the award winning composer responsible for the soundtrack of Hollow Knight.
Tohu honors a very specific adventure game lineage. No, we are not speaking of the SCUMM golden age—that flicker of time in the mid '90s where companies like LucasArts churned out indelible, Disney-like journeys through emerald desert islands and haunted mansions.
Tohu does not offer lyrical Schaferish dialogue, an intricate narrative, or a 30-hour playtime. Instead, it brings to mind the brief point-and-click revival of the early 2010s, where all of a sudden, indie developers started cranking out wonderful budget brainburners like Machinarium and Professor Layton like they never went out of style.
You play as an unnamed heroine, known as The Girl, who has the ability to transform into a hulking robot at any time, and you live a peaceful life on the back of a massive fish floating in the cosmos. (You read that right.)
Minutes into the game, you're informed that the MacGuffin keeping our homefish alive and well is on the fritz, and you'll spend the rest of your time in Tohu venturing to other interstellar fish environments to fetch the doodads that will save your humble, steampunk neighborhood. All the while, you are stalked by a figure in a black hood who is ambiguously trying to muck with your plans. That's pretty much all the plot Tohu is willing to offer!
There is no voiced dialogue in the game, save for a distant narrator who fills in the gap with storybook King's English. Some of the larger questions about this universe—particularly, why the hell are we all living on a fish—are hilariously left unanswered.
The game doesn't even explain why the girl has a robot alter ego; you are only asked to switch into his persona in order to lift heavy things that might be in the way. Instead, Tohu focuses all of its inventiveness on its puzzles—which is great news for a very distinct type of adventure gamer who always valued the cryptology in Broken Sword over the romantic plight of George and Nico.
And honestly? That's totally fine with me. It was refreshing to excise all of the ancillary non-relevant dialogue trees found in other adventure games and just get down to business with the Rube Goldberg contraptions in front of me.
Tohu doesn't really lose anything within that deemphasis, either. In fact, one of the game's best attributes is how it drips with character despite the lack of worldbuilding.
Whenever the girl made landfall on a new fish, I spent a good five minutes absorbing the tender love and care put into each of its backdrops. The art direction resists easy comparison, but the closest analogue I can place is the whimsical gothic deco of Don't Starve. I walked through frigid fjords, moonlit bacchanals, and greasy workshops, all delivered with a precise dose of twisted cuteness.
The lost souls you meet on this fish don't say much, but their precise silhouettes offer them more interiority than the roadside NPCs you'll meet in games that benefited from far more corporate resources.
Who could forget the greasy pawn broker with eight mechanical tentacles, each occupied with its own money-grubbing task? (Working an abacus, hoisting a martini.) We're not living through a profound shortness of beautiful indies, but Tohu still manages a unique appeal that evoked, at least for me, a few stunning moments.
