Toby: The Secret Mine

Toby: The Secret Mine has plenty of great ideas that could make it a great game, but it quickly plummets down a mineshaft thanks to a number of missteps. It generally succeeds as a puzzle game, but the heavy focus on platforming doesn't work well and hampers the overall experience. By following the basic visual style and gameplay from such a highly regarded game like Limbo, The Secret Mine sets itself a standard it's never able to reach.

What's frustrating about Toby: The Secret Mine is that it feels like it's actually trying to offer more than the sum of its parts, but just doesn't quite pull it off. It feels too bogged down in its inspirations to present any exciting ideas of its own, and while it's visually stunning at times, even this apes off superior titles that came before. Some challenging platforming and decent puzzles make it one to consider if you're looking to give your Wii U one last Nindie hurrah, but otherwise we'd recommend waiting on a digital sale before diving into this dark adventure.

The presentation and story are fun, but the rest really doesn't stand out much. All in all, there are better offerings out there that give you more consistent quality. The puzzle-platformer genre is deep, but Toby is nowhere close to that.

Although it does share a few good, similarities when compared to the inspiration, enjoyment is sadly not one of them, and if I wanted to play a Limbo-esque game I would just rather play Limbo instead.

Toby: The Secret Mine is inspired, to say the least. Its not its imitation of previous games that kills it, but its execution of those elements. It had potential, but you've seen this game before.

To be honest, the only redeeming factor of Toby: The Secret Mine is that it's not one of the many, so many, "roguelikes" or pseudo 8-bit platformers that are the norm these days from indie developers. It felt kind of refreshing to go back to 2014, even for a fleeting moment. The ideas in Toby are sound, the execution however is a lot to be desired.

Toby: The Secret Mine is basically a more colorful clone of Limbo. Same pros, same cons, with some puzzles that occasionally pushes too hard in the direction of the "trial and error".

Toby: The Secret Mine may look like another famous platformer, but it deserves to be recognised by its own merits. There's plenty of brain teasing going on as well as some tight platforming to keep you pushing towards the end. Don't bother getting invested in the non-verbal narrative, just enjoy the journey.

Toby: The Secret Mine lacks inspiration and original ideas: it's a puzzle-platform adventure inspired by masterpieces like Limbo and Inside, but it isn't able to rival with them.

Toby: The Secret Mine's performance is pretty good as a whole with only a couple of instances that caused me some frustration. The most prevalent of these took place near the end of the game while platforming on a series of turning buckets. After I had fallen a number of times, I soon found that after regenerating at the checkpoint, I couldn't even land properly on the first bucket, a previously simple endeavor. I first assumed that I was at fault, making some sort of micro adjustment to force Toby to slide off the bucket. However, after testing this at length, I found that Toby just wouldn't stick to it. I eventually had to reload the level to an earlier checkpoint, which resolved the issue but not after significantly testing my patience. For all of the inspiration that similar titles have leant to Toby: The Secret Mine, the game fails to do the most important thing: to establish itself and become its own. The end result is a mechanically sound puzzle-platformer heavily reminiscent of other games from the genre, but in a far more watered-down form. Additionally, at only about three hours in length with few reasons to replay save for a second ending (you can just play the last level again to get it) and only a few missing collectibles, Toby: The Secret Mine is not something worth playing before getting to one of the games it was born from.