TOEM 2 patches: what a month of fixes has changed

TOEM 2, Something We Made’s follow-up to its photo adventure, came out on 29 September on PC, PS5 and Switch. In the month since, the studio has posted five rounds of fixes on Steam, from launch day up to patch 1.0.8 on 7 October. Most of them deal with things that stopped players in their tracks: a puzzle that could no longer be solved, a game that froze when you picked a photo, and saves that didn’t carry over between devices. The notes posted on Steam don’t say whether the console versions are getting the same fixes.

At a glance

Five rounds of fixes for TOEM 2 since 29 September

Within hours of launch, a first fix went out. The Steam Deck and Linux versions of TOEM 2 were broken on release, and the studio repaired them the same day, along with a short apology. That evening, a second batch went after Deltburg, the town already playable in the demo: an escape room door that wouldn’t unlock for some players, a bench stuck in one of the aquarium’s staircases and a Meditation Goat that only responded to the Enter key.

At £15.99 on Steam, TOEM 2 runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Its simultaneous release on PS5, Switch and PC was announced on 6 August, as Gematsu reported when the date was set. The game shows a Metacritic score of 81 on its Steam page, and the studio passed 100,000 wishlists on 10 September, according to an announcement on that same page.

Patch 1.0.7 tackles photo freezes and fullscreen trouble

By 1 October, patch 1.0.7 for TOEM 2 had gone after the most annoying launch bug. The game could lock up while you were choosing a photo, which the notes link to an “infamous” bug involving a grandma. Another combination left you stuck as well: rotating the camera with the mouse while taking a shot.

PC players also ran into two problems in Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Alt-tabbing crashed the game, and the picture could turn very dark, both of which the same patch fixed. Something We Made also added an option to swap the Zoom and Pan buttons in the camera menu, at the request of a Steam user called aranol.

For Mac players, a hotfix followed that evening: photos weren’t being saved, didn’t load with a save file, and pictures placed in frames never carried over from one session to the next.

Patch 1.0.8 fixes cloud saves and a stuck puzzle

Six days later, the TOEM 2 patch 1.0.8 notes on Steam listed the fix that mattered most to anyone playing on more than one machine. Steam Cloud wasn’t syncing saves properly between systems. Dave Ozzy, for one, played the whole game on Steam Deck for his TheXboxHub review.

In the escape room, a light bulb could also vanish, leaving the puzzle impossible to solve. The studio says it tried its best to disable Unity Analytics too, following a player post it links in its notes. Everything else is quality of life: a music track added to your inventory once you visit the Whirlhill festival, the Compendium opening instead of the album when the Donkey Owner asks for a photo, and a typo fixed in Taletorp’s region description.

TOEM 2 on PS5 and Switch, without detailed patch notes

Every set of patch notes we read covers the Steam version. None of these announcements gives a date for fixes on PS5 or Switch, and Something We Made doesn’t say whether the same changes are heading to consoles. Several of these bugs, like the disappearing bulb or the photo freeze, sit in the game itself and could affect every version; nothing confirms that for now.

On Switch 2, TOEM 2 won over Jordan Biordi, who gave it 9 out of 10 in his TOEM 2 review for CGMagazine. He found that it “looks incredibly crisp on the Switch 2, both on and off the dock”. He also notes that the areas are smaller than in the first TOEM, released in 2021, but much more densely packed with detail.