Viewfinder Review

It’s not often that a first-person puzzle-platformer comes along with a new mechanic that’s as brain-breaking as Portal, but Viewfinder deserves to be put on that same high shelf. This game gives an inventive new meaning to the term ‘point and click adventure’ by arming you with an old-school instant film camera that doesn’t just allow you to snap a photo of your surroundings, but physically bend and break them to your will in order to forge new paths towards each level’s goal. It’s an ingenious, perspective-based puzzle-solving tool that constantly evolves over the course of the six-hour journey, and one that kept me hooked all the way through, despite the fact its story never developed quite as sharply as one of its freshly shaken Polaroid pictures.

Viewfinder’s unique method of using trick photography to transform its topography is so brilliant that I can barely even understand how it exists, much less fully explain it. You can take a photo of virtually anything you can see in each level’s floating island landscape, hold up that 2D image in front of another part of your surroundings, then magically superimpose the shot in full-scale 3D and thus seismically alter the space behind it. You might take a photo of an open door and slap it onto a wall so that you can then pass through to the other side in classic Looney Tunes fashion, or tilt a side-on picture of a bridge towards the edge of an out-of-reach rooftop in order to produce a handy ramp. It’s a canny piece of map manipulation that seems simple early on but soon scales wonderfully in complexity, and it’s one of those games where you’re never sure if what you’ve come up with is the solution or just a solution that you invented. In one late-game level I managed to reach the exit by crafting a collage of inverted staircases so seemingly impossible to navigate that it would have sent M.C. Escher fumbling with his phone in an attempt to open Google Maps.

What’s really remarkable is how liberating and seamless the landscape-fracturing photography feels, for the most part. I never came up against an obtrusive ‘out of bounds’ message, and nor were any of my scenery-shattering shots ever implemented in a noticeably glitchy way. There are some important restrictions in place; the sense of challenge is preserved by limiting the amount of photos you can capture to the number of sheets of film paper in your camera, and you’re forbidden to place any pictures that will destroy the level’s teleporter exit and thus prevent you from completing it. Otherwise you effectively have free reign to experiment with layering your shots on the world at any angle, and this freedom is only further reinforced by the fact that any mistakes you do make are easily undone thanks to a snappy rewind function. It basically allows you to instantly hop back through your movements in each level like you’re CTRL+Z-ing your way back down through the added layers of a Photoshop document.

Viewfinder’s early puzzles are mostly concerned with repurposing simple things like walls and doors in your surroundings in order to construct a path to the goal, but new elements are introduced at a steady clip in order to present increasingly complicated conundrums to the use of each composition. A photocopier allows you to duplicate images and therefore any of the items in frame, which is handy for cloning the batteries used to power electrical circuits, while mounted cameras with timers can be used to snap a selfie, the result of which can then be employed to teleport yourself across gaps or through caged walls. Often there’s no photography required whatsoever; instead, identifying the way forward involves overcoming clever forced-perspective tricks disguising hidden tunnels or bridges that are right under your nose, like the leap of faith sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Viewfinder rarely relies on the same optical trickery for long, and this healthy puzzle variety kept me glued to each task and eying each puzzle arena from every possible angle.

Picture-in-Picture

It’s not just the images you capture yourself that can be used to manipulate the world – everything from iconic paintings to desktop screenshots can be collected in certain levels, then blown up and brought to life wherever you see fit. At one point I was delighted to suddenly descend through the bitmapped depths of a DOS-era dungeon crawler, while at another I found myself stumbling through a pencil-sketched vista that seemed straight out of the rotoscoped music video for ‘80s pop classic, Take On Me. (Not the sort of ‘a-ha moment’ in a puzzle-based adventure I had anticipated.) From asymmetrical, Mondrian-inspired art to crudely drawn houses crafted by a child’s crayons, the trip through Viewfinder can at times feel less like squinting through a camera lens and more like peering through an exciting and ever-changing kaleidoscope of creative ideas.

Some of these preconceived pictures seem like entertaining but entirely extraneous inclusions; I brought a Tetris screenshot to towering life purely to watch the life-sized Tetronimos tumble down to earth, and inflated a Tamagotchi-style toy to billboard-sized proportions just to briefly distract myself with the buttons to water the greyscale plant on its giant LCD screen. Yet elsewhere they can be used to directly solve problems, like the jump power-up that can be collected within a diorama of a Metroid-esque screenshot and then employed elsewhere in the level in order to leap to previously unreachable platforms. I felt consistently rewarded with almost every found image I transplanted onto the terrain, whether the result was practical or purely playful.

I felt considerably less of a pull towards investigating the plot of Viewfinder, however. The story is set in the future where climate change has reached its endgame, the planet is bathed in a Blade Runner 2049-esque orange hue, and natural vegetation is seemingly no more. The puzzle challenges you’re asked to complete are actually virtual reality constructs based on the research of a team of climate scientists, with a goal of discovering the design of a machine capable of reversing the Earth’s decline. It’s a premise that’s both intriguing and somewhat depressingly relevant, but the plot is a bit too nebulous because it’s effectively told via out-of-sequence audio logs and the odd diary page here and there, which didn’t give me a great deal to cling to. And thematically, nothing about this photography-themed game really resonates with the idea of a post-climate-apocalypse world.

There’s also the odd lighthearted interjection on comms from your research partner Jessie and the occasional word of encouragement from a Cheshire Cat-like feline friend that pops up as you explore deeper down the research rabbit hole, but neither are capable of conjuring the same sorts of laughs as GladOS, Wheatley, or even just the sentry turrets from the Portal series, and I ultimately tuned them out in favour of focussing on the next terrain-twisting task at hand.

Viewfinder’s plot may be underdone, but its puzzle solving is more than strong enough to shoulder that burden, and my enthusiasm for its mind-bending brain teasers never dipped, from its captivating opening moments all the way to the climactic timed-gauntlet run that serves as a frantically fun final exam for all the techniques you’ve mastered over the course of the journey. I even completed the handful of optional challenges, including one that was so perplexing it required about 30 minutes of attempts, plus a further hour or so of pondering while I washed the dishes and took my dog for a walk, before I finally coaxed the solution out of my subconscious. (In retrospect the answer was bleedingly obvious, as is so often the case.) Six hours is a relatively healthy runtime for a puzzle-based adventure of this type, but I would have gladly kept going if Viewfinder had featured even more quirky conundrums to complete.