Review by Jon Donnis
Togges is advertised as "a game unlike anything you've ever seen!", and to be fair, it is pretty unique, whether that is a good thing or a bad thing you will have to read on to find out.
This is a 3D platformer, but you control what I can only describe as a robot vacuum of sorts. You can suck up and spread cubes, (Togges) which in turn will help you solve environmental puzzles. You are tasked with helping the King President to save the Universe from the threat of The Void.
Even though your vacuum (yes I am calling it that) can move around freely and even jump, to stack Togges you need to have a start point, this start point then allows you to spread cubes either horizontall or vertically. You have a set amount of Togges. Now why would you need to spread Togges? Well early on you are tasked with collecting fruit, but to collect fruit you need to place some Togges on the top of the fruit, so you need to spread a line of Togges to reach the fruit before you can collect it. And of course the fruit aren't going to be in an easy to find location, this is where the environmental puzzle element comes in.
Now after the first tutorial, you will start your first world of sorts. Now this game is rather heavy on the text dialog, too heavy, and because of that, you will find yourself skipping through things just so you can start to play the game, this is a problem, as you will inevitably miss an important instruction, as I did.
I assumed that to reach the next level, you would need to build some kind of bridge, or find a way to jump to it, since you can see it not too far away. But instead you needed to collect all 5 fruits which in turn opened a doorway that would warp you there. I assumed I had collected all of the fruits, but of the 5 I had only actually caught 4, so I then spent way too much time going round in circles, trying whatever I could to progress but without success. Eventually I resorted to a walkthrough on Youtube and I realised my mistake. While playing you will discover the ability to change the colour of the Togges, which in turn gives them different abilities, for example the red togges can only stack 5 high vertically, where as the yellow ones can stack 7, but each Togge costs double that of the red ones. And the final fruit could only be collected using a yellow Togges. Now I am sure this was in the seemingly endless instructions, and I missed them, but I just wanted to play!
So once I figured that out, I was able to progress and finally started to enjoy what was up unil them a rather frustrating game.
There are loads of levels/worlds to play through, the graphics are excellent, even on a small Nintendo Switch Lite screen. There are lots of things to collect, loads of places to explore and secrets to uncover. There are characters to interact with and stories to understand. And most importantly as you unlock new Togge varieties, lots of new skills and interactions to enjoy.
The Good
A beautiful game, with a new gameplay mechanic. Once you get used to the controls the game is fun to play and offers a decent challenge, both in a platforming manner but also in a puzzle sense.
The Bad
The game is way too complicated at first, too many instructions, too much dialog, and you are thrown into the deep end pretty much straight away, the learning curve is too steep, and the balance is off at first. Get past the first proper world and you will be flying though, so try not to let it put you off.
Overall
Despite the issues mentioned above, this is a fun game, it looks great and despite the at times fiddly controls, this offers up a really impressive amount of gameplay and challenge.
I score Togges on Nintendo Switch a solid 7.5/10
Out Now on Nintendo Switch
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