I always get excited when a new first-person puzzle game lands in my lap, and admittedly a lot of that is because of Portal. I still remember bringing this gem home as part of Valve’s The Orange Box as a teenager, and being blown away by the magic of the titular portals and the clever ways they were used. Not all similar puzzle games are created equal though, and it’s fair to say nothing has come close to grabbing Aperture Science’s crown since 2007. Viewfinder might be the closest yet though, and it’s been many years since a game made me audibly gasp at how brilliant it is quite as much as this.
The premise of Viewfinder is very simple, you need to reach a goal in each of its stages but doing so is impossible without using photos. The photos you obtain will often just be of incredibly normal bits of building, but by rotating them at just the right angle and then spawning them into the world you’ll create the perfect platform to get you where you need to go. To say this feels like magic is an understatement, especially because the 3D objects always seem to appear exactly how you want them to. This is only the beginning of your picture puzzling adventure too, and it just gets better from here.
You see, as well as creating platforms with photos you can also destroy environments with them. By grabbing a photo of a blank sky and placing it onto a barred gate you’ll create a hole that you can pass through, but the destruction doesn’t stop there. You actually have to be careful where you place a picture because of their ability to blink environments out of existence, because you can easily wipe away important platforms or even the goal itself if you aren’t paying attention. Thankfully there’s a handy rewind function that means you won’t actually be punished for this, and this encourages all sorts of fun experimentation.
After a couple of hub worlds full of stages introducing the basics of Viewfinder, you’ll finally be presented with an instant camera of your own to take photos with. This opens up all sorts of wild ways to solve the puzzles blocking the way to the exit of a level, and however you manage to make it there is totally valid. Sometimes you can use your limited film to create sneaky platforms around the intended route, sometimes you’ll find you can carve around your problems, and sometimes you’ll stop being a smart ass and actually beat a level as intended.
It would be easy for a game as clever as Viewfinder to rest on its delightful core photo mechanics, but as you progress you’ll be presented with all sorts of new ideas at a rapid pace. Powering exits with batteries becomes a common goal, and you can even photograph them to create more if needed. A later portion of the game even features environments that won’t appear in photos, and the mind bending problems you’ll need to solve involving this new element are pretty wild. With so many exciting ideas constantly fed to you from start to finish, Viewfinder is a seriously hard game to put down for the night.
Just as impressive as the photo mechanics and environmental puzzles you need to solve though are the visuals, which absolutely took my breath away. Different photos you spawn into the world will have different visual styles (such as different filters or even lower fidelity thanks to a janky photocopier) and this creates some serious visual spectacles. Placing black and white photos onto vibrant levels always creates a wonderful visual dissonance, and some stages even feature watercolour pictures or video game screens to jump into.
To talk more about the magical moments of Viewfinder would spoil it, but there’s a laundry list of them to discover. There are a couple of aspects of the game that detracted from the experience for me though, like the story. It’s told in a very vague way, and is about a group of scientists using this simulated world to solve climate change (I think). It is at least entirely ignorable if you just want to focus on the puzzles, but I didn’t realise this until it was too late.
My only other small complaint is that there’s no guidance if you get stuck, and especially in some later more complex stages a nudge in the right direction would go a long way. Thankfully as the game has been available on other platforms for a while now there’s no shortage of guides to watch if you need them, but it doesn’t feel great to have to resort to this.
I had an incredible time with Viewfinder, and never wanted its magic to end. The sheer amount of times I felt the need to show off the cool moments to my husband is testament to how truly special this game is. Much like games like Portal and Blue Prince before it, Viewfinder is a puzzle masterpiece that is appointment gaming for absolutely everyone, and I’m not going to shut up about it for a very long time.
