Viewfinder is a puzzle game with a unique mechanic – you can place photographs (and other, similar things, like paintings) into the environment and have the photograph become part of the environment. This is a really neat core mechanic, and much like how Portal got you “thinking with Portals”, Viewfinder gets you thinking with photographs.
In some levels, these images are present in the level already; in others, you have a camera you carry around that you can take pictures with, allowing you to transpose parts of the environment into other parts of it. The game has a few other puzzles here and there, where you have to do things like run through portals that contain filters, but mostly, it is the core mechanic, plus or minus some switch-flipping and battery (i.e. crate) dropping on plates, with some added ways to take photographs towards the end that put some added twists on what you were doing.
The game is reasonably clever, and the creators clearly had a set of ideas they wanted to explore with it. The fact that you can superimpose your photographs over key parts of the level means that you have to be careful about where you place them, though fortunately, the game is generous and includes a built-in “rewind” function so if you do make a mistake, you can undo/fix it. They keep on adding in new mechanics and new twists as you go forward through the game, keeping things fresh over the game’s roughly 8 hour run time to 100% it.
The actual story of the game is merely OK, though; after some future climate disaster, a group of people retreated to a virtual world to run experiments. You are someone who is coming along some time later, trying to find the results of said experiments to see if you can fix the world with them. Accompanying you on the journey is CAIT, an AI talking cat who is clearly lonely, having been abandoned in that virtual world by his creators. As you go through the game, you find journals and audio logs from the people who were there before, talking about their triumphs, failures, and interpersonal drama. Overall, it is an OK frame story, but it wasn’t anything really special in that regard, merely a serviceable excuse plot.
On the whole, this was a solid game that knew it had a finite amount of space to work in, filled that space up, then ended while it was still feeling fresh. While the final level was slightly frustrating, as unlike every other level in the game it is timed and if you run out of time, you have to start over (and the rewind function critically does NOT rewind that clock), which meant I had to run through it three times to actually complete it.
If you’re a fan of puzzle games, this is a game I’d recommend – the mechanic is unique and fun, and while it doesn’t go quite as far as I was hoping, it still manages to do a number of clever things.
4.0