Tobla – Divine Path

Genre: First-Person Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in Hero Collection 3 in 1, along with Super Dungeon Maker and The Forgotten Land. It is also included in Legends Collection 6-in-1, along with all of the above games plus Castaway Paradise, Harvest Life, and Stranded Sails – Explorers of the Cursed Islands.)

Tobla is a First-Person Puzzle game released in 2024 on PC and Nintendo Switch that puts players in the role of a mortal dubbed “Mort” by the game’s titular goddess Tobla, who has either created or summoned you (it’s unclear which) to test out some puzzles she has designed, though it doesn’t take long to discover there’s more going on than there initially appears to be.

Much of this game’s charm comes from Tobla herself, whose presence through most of the game is felt mostly through her godly voice descending from on high. Tobla is well-acted, giving the impression of someone affecting a casual and personable tone hiding a fair amount of condescension with quite a lot of insecurity as well. She is at various times a helper and an antagonist, and while she never measures up to the high bar set by GLaDOS, she does a sufficient job serving in much the same role.

The rest of the presentation here is pretty good too, with colorful 3D visuals with a decent amount of detail and some nice shadows, with fairly low-key atmospheric music that feels suited to the otherworldly setting.

When it comes to the puzzles themselves, where the Portal series had its titular portals as its signature mechanic, and The Talos Principle had line-of-sight lasers, Tobla’s central mechanic is the ability to swap two objects within line of sight. This can’t work with scenery or decoration, but broadly speaking there’s a variety of cubes, spheres, blocks, and a few other things that you can swap places of, and you must use this to get past obstacles and power the gate leading out of each level.

In practice, this works… fine. I don’t think there’s anything here that will truly revolutionize the genre, but what’s here works quite well, and the game does a good job of exploring the implications of this mechanic with some clever level design. I do think this game could have used a tad more playtesting, though – it is too easy in parts to fiddle with things in a way that lets you cheat your way past puzzles rather than finding the intended solution.

However, overall I think that Tobla is a fine addition to the First-Person Puzzle genre, even if it’s not a truly groundbreaking one. And fans of this style of Puzzle game will find this a worthy addition to their collection.

tl;dr – Tobla is a First-Person Puzzle game that has players solving puzzle rooms for a goddess by using an ability to swap two objects within line-of-sight. The presentation here is good, with Tobla herself being an interesting character, and the puzzle design is mostly solid as well. This game isn’t going to revolutionize the genre, but fans of this style of game will find it to absolutely be worth a look.

Grade: B

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}