![]() One set of levels introduces sound-powered teleporters, which has me taking photos of noisy radios and placing them next to the sensor. Like any good puzzle game, extra mechanical twists keep chambers engaging up to the end of a compact, four-hour experience. No puzzle is too difficult to solve thanks to how easy it is to place photos and rewind time to test another hypothesis without penalty. ![]() A more complex variation has me taking that shot next to an extra roll of film for my camera, making sure that I can take an unlimited number of shots. ![]() One puzzle has me trying to clone a battery by taking a photo of it, dragging the battery within that shot next to the other, and taking a picture of both to create four. The basic idea mutates in several clever ways throughout the adventure, usually calling for a unique solution. That’s either accomplished by using specific photos lying around the level or by using a Polaroid camera that has limited shots. The gist of just about every puzzle is that players need to find a teleporter to proceed, which often needs to be powered up with a few batteries. Viewfinder finds several ways to twist that idea and create a wide range of puzzles that play with perspective. You need to try it yourself to truly believe it. With not so much as a frame drop, that flat image instantly becomes part of the world, creating a new platform I can walk across.Įxplaining it in writing, or even watching it in a video, doesn’t do it justice. I position myself just right so that it neatly fits between the two platforms and place it with the press of my DualSense’s right trigger. After rummaging around, I find a photo of a bridge. One straightforward early puzzle, for instance, has me trying to figure out how to cross a gap between platforms that’s too long to jump over. The first time that you recreate that trick in one of several puzzle chambers feels genuinely magical. Be rest assured, it does with ease.Ī game full of surprises that always left me wondering what else was possible. It was attention-grabbing enough to earn over 200,000 views, but the jury was out on whether or not that idea could transcend gimmick in a full game. The video shows him taking Polaroid photos of a room in first-person and placing them, instantly turning them into 3D environments. The project sprung out of a viral tweet in 2020, in which developer Matt Stark shared a work-in-progress prototype of its unique puzzle system. A true magic trickĮven if you haven’t heard the name Viewfinder, there’s a chance you’ve actually seen it. Though its self-serious narrative can feel entirely disconnected from that playful system at times, it’s the kind of ingenious puzzle game that encourages players to stay curious and always tackle every problem from every perspective they can find before giving up. Like Portal, Viewfinder is the kind of game that immediately wows thanks to an astonishing central hook that works without a hitch. It’s an impossible problem in search of an impossible solution - one that not even a reality-bending magic trick can solve. When I stop gleefully playing around with photos and start reading the stacks of sticky notes and research logs scattered around me, I discover the story of a scientist desperate to find the one answer that’ll fix it all. Decimated by the effects of climate change, the planet is awash in a hazy red veil that makes it look more like Mars than Earth. Just outside the walls of its sunny test chambers, overflowing with colorful flora, the real world is a wasteland. That rewarding gameplay loop makes Viewfinder’s story all the more tragic.
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