Viewfinder | Review

The review code for Viewfinder was provided by Thunderful.

Viewfinder is an award-winning puzzle game where photos come to life, literally. Developed by Sand Owl Studios and published by Thunderful, Viewfinder asks that we look at the world through a different lens – the lens of a camera – and use our new found perspective to platform through several puzzling rooms, all while listening to a story about a team of scientists trying to save the world from climate change.

To be entirely honest, the story of Viewfinder did not really capture me at all. It serves as a way of contextualising the events of the game, and with that in mind it does its job well enough. But I found myself struggling to care much about the protagonist’s mission and the events that lead to the falling out of the scientists who created the world we are working through. Most of it is optional, but the brief parts that are not are definitely the games weakest points.

Thankfully, Viewfinder’s actual core gameplay mechanic is incredible and very well implemented. The goal of each level is to reach the teleporter. Sometimes, the teleporter is just out of reach, on an island floating in the sky, and the goal is to make it there. Other times, the teleporter is close by but lacking in power, so the goal is instead to find enough batteries to charge it up. And then other times, the teleporter is on the ceiling and figuring out how to get it right side up is the real challenge.

The answer to all of these puzzles comes down to perspective, and the most common way of solving it is through cameras and photography. Viewfinder does a fantastic job of easing the player into its core gameplay loop, with early puzzles supplying the photos and perspectives needed to reach the teleporter, in some cases providing a photocopier to make back-ups just in-case. Eventually the camera is unlocked and now the solution needs to be discovered, the exact perspective and positioning of the photos contents left in the players hands.

It is a real brain-teaser at times, but at other times it can be quite simple to solve, almost to the point where I felt like I was cheesing the puzzle somehow, discovering a workaround that the developers didn’t intend for. That’s the risk you take when making a puzzle game that relies on player creativity to find the solution (the original Scribblenauts is an infamous example of this). 

Still, what Viewfinder is accomplishing through its use of perspectives and creating copies of the environment is incredibly impressive mechanically and can lead to some quite creative solutions to puzzles. In particular, I enjoyed a lot of the later puzzles that mess with the perspective without using the camera, having to line up objects in the actual environment itself and then watching them distort in real-time. It’s a really clever visual trick and left a strong impression on me. 

And I think that’s the best way of summarising Viewfinder. Its core gimmick leaves a very strong impression that carries the whole game. Messing with perspectives and spawning environments from photographs and other images is a cool concept and Viewfinder does a lot of neat things with it. However, outside of a few later puzzles I didn’t find many of the puzzles in the game that challenging and the narrative used to contextualise the game didn’t really grip me. Thankfully, it’s not too long a game and the optional puzzles can get quite difficult, when compared to the required puzzles, so it results in Viewfinder being a game that’s worth experiencing over an evening or two.