Viewfinder
It’s a rare feeling, as a gaming veteran, to see something you’ve never seen before. Video games have existed for over seventy years, and still, developers can find new ways to surprise us. This sense of unpredictability is what makes Viewfinder, the debut title from Sad Owl Studios, so memorable. This first-person puzzle platformer astounds with its slick narrative intro, timely sci-fi setting, and one mind-blowing gameplay mechanic. Though it does suffer from a touch of linearity, Viewfinder will challenge your ingenuity and grip your curiosity in much the same way Portal did seventeen years ago.
Staying true to its roots, the tutorial feels like taking part in a scientific experiment, testing one hypothesis after another. Players wake up in an art deco apartment in the sky, overlooking a bright blue abyss. A kind, disembodied voice greets you. It knows you, apparently, and asks that you walk around the space. As you explore the grounds you can see an easel beneath a garden trellis outside. On that easel, you see a single polaroid picture. The voice asks you to pick it up. Despite the odd circumstances, it all unfolds innocently, urging us to ask that fateful question: what's next?
This game feels like something undiscovered, a way of thinking not seen before. Viewfinder is built around playing with perspective just like an actual viewfinder is used on a polaroid camera. From your field of view, you can focus it where you’d like, and then snap: a moment is captured, sealing a picture just the way you saw it. But, what if it wasn’t sealed? What if you could release that moment from the polaroid you just took? Now, before I say more, if you’d rather experience this game’s puzzle phenomena for yourself, instead of reading about it first (which I highly recommend), stop here and go play…and then come back and finish reading, please.
Viewfinder’s primary gameplay revolves around reaching gateways using the images on polaroid pictures, which are either found within a level or captured using your own camera. With the press of a single button, players can hold up a photo, rotate it to any angle, and release its images into the world of the game. Sometimes the gateways are even in the pictures themselves. When you release a polaroid for the first time, get ready. It is truly sensational to experience as the game manipulates your perspective with optical illusions. Pictures don't burst forth in some extravagant animation. Instead, they simply appear, and seem two dimensional until you move towards them. This trick of the eye is astonishing and never gets old, like a sculpture that creates a two-dimensional image, but when you step to the side, its three-dimensional components reveal themselves. Try it once, and you'll be hooked. Sad Owl Studios knows this mechanic is the star of the show. They keep their initial stages laser-focused on exercising it, having players use pictures of buildings to make bridges or challenging them to rotate rooftops into walkways. They gently ramp up how to get creative with your Polaroids, and right when you’re hitting your stride, the narrative pulls the chair.
The majority of Viewfinder takes place in a simulation. After completing a few levels beyond the tutorial, this simulation crashes and sends players back out into the real world. Here we discover a hazy red mess of a planet you’d swear was Mars. But alas, it is far worse: our global warming nightmares have come true. In a desperate attempt to control the weather, a forgotten scientific development team created this virtual reality space, which allowed them to experiment beyond the normal laws of physics. Not entirely sure how creating all those dope polaroid picture puzzles helped this problem, but regardless of this absurdity, the story is a deliciously deep serving of sci-fi. The background beyond the premise is unsettling and believable, all of which is told through old phonograph recordings and journal entries found within the simulation. Things do get a tad loose when it comes to your own involvement, though.
We have no real backstory as a player, which isn’t inherently bad. Stepping out from the simulation even once does more than enough to answer why we’re there in the first place. But with a setting this intricate, losing how we got here feels like a missed opportunity. How did this dev team disappear? How did we gain access to their research facility? How are we able to traverse it so effectively? If you were hoping for a rewarding payoff to these questions, you will inevitably be disappointed after the game’s eight-hour run-time.
While reaching the end of the game is satisfying, in addition to leaving certain questions unanswered, its conclusion may suffer further from lost context. With the majority of the story being told through found objects, players will inevitably miss out on details if some of those objects are left unfound. Viewfinder does offer the ability to go back and track down the missing pieces, but much like a punchline you’ve already heard, it’s just not that fun to solve a puzzle twice when you already know the answer. It would have been nice to see Sad Owl Studios go a little further in challenging players to find these phonographs and journal entries. They could’ve given levels a harder, more absurd, secondary puzzle to entice players and reward them with another morsel of background story. Instead, they ask us to simply look around for where these items were arbitrarily placed. This gets old fast, so don’t be surprised if you end up forgoing these often fruitless searches in favor of progressing through the game's more meaningful challenges.
Other elements also wear a bit thin as things play out. The most apparent being that a large chunk of how this polaroid picture function gets used, is making absurd bridges in order to cross absurd gaps in space. That’s not to say there aren’t other puzzles; it is quite the opposite. This game gets very creative with how to tease our brains, and the last level was sure to sequence all those elements into a worthy climax. There’s just a few too many bridges to build along the way.
Though some of its obstacles may be simpler than they appear, this game is anything but shallow. Viewfinder is a spectacle you should not miss. Its story, though piecemeal, is poignant, while its reality-shifting perplexities do more than enough to satiate players’ wits. It's biggest achievement, however, has to be its sensation of genuine surprise. Cynicism doesn’t stand a chance against this game's creativity, and if you’re just returning to this review after playing, feel free to pick your jaw up off the floor.
VERDICT: Must Play
