Toby: The Secret Mine starts when a quiet, peaceful village up in the mountains is thrown into disorder and a hellish-looking demon kidnaps many of its residents. Others try to rescue them but no one ever returns. Toby decides to put it to himself to finally get back his friends but never did he realize what he was getting himself into when he first enters the forest.
Since none of this is told to you, I guess I will because, yet again, another game tells you a story without telling you the story. Toby: The Secret Mine is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer where the emphasis is on the foreground. It’s a dark game in tone with some of the visuals which appear in titles like Inside and Limbo. Now it’s difficult to talk about this game without bringing up Limbo, which is clearly a source of inspiration here. Aside from the visuals, the gameplay is very similar as well. However, it falls short in comparison because of that.
Death can happen at any moment, be it standing on a platform that triggers a collection of spikes or a blade sawing you in half. Games like these are meant to give you somewhat noticeable visual queues. That’s not the case in Toby: The Secret Mine. Deaths sometimes feel completely random because there are no visual queues at all. If there are they aren’t obvious at all and I’ve played hundreds of platformers.
With games like these where the emphasis of the level is the foreground, sometimes its hard to distinguish what you can and cannot interact with. I’ve never been a fan of the trial-and-error approach and despite its positives, many of the puzzles had me doing that. Don’t get me wrong, Toby: The Secret Mine is a good game but each area either knocks it out of the park or fall complete flat. The peaks and falls are significant.
Speaking of peaks and falls, the difficulty at times feels like it just goes up and down randomly. This can be quite punishing and frustrating. Toby: The Secret Mine, for the most part, is a good platformer with some good puzzles. Throughout the two plus hours I played through this game, I enjoyed it quite a bit. You can find up to 26 of your fellow villagers during that time. There is variety when it comes to the levels with some taking place in a dark, damp industrial settings to an avalanche-ridden mountainside.
Summary
Toby: The Secret Mine is a gorgeous, fun and oddly challenging puzzle platformer that has some really large difficulty spikes at times. The playtime might also be too short given its price point. If you’re in the market for a game along the lines of Limbo, go for it.
Jamie was a community contributor to ICXM, writing 2 articles in 2017 covering game reviews, and Xbox news. ICXM operated as an independent Xbox and Windows gaming outlet through the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative, drawing from a rotating bench of editorial volunteers. They post on X as @JamieMoranUK.