Viewfinder Review
It’s not often that a first-person puzzle-platformer comes along with a new mechanic that’s as brain-breaking as Portal, but Viewfinder deserves to be put on that same high shelf. This game gives an inventive new meaning to the term ‘point and click adventure’ by arming you with an old-school instant film camera that doesn’t just allow you to snap a photo of your surroundings, but physically bend and break them to your will in order to forge new paths towards each level’s goal. It’s an ingenious, perspective-based puzzle-solving tool that constantly evolves over the course of the six-hour journey, and one that kept me hooked all the way through, despite the fact its story never developed quite as sharply as one of its freshly shaken Polaroid pictures.
Viewfinder’s unique method of using trick photography to transform its topography is so brilliant that I can barely even understand how it exists, much less fully explain it. You can take a photo of virtually anything you can see in each level’s floating island landscape, hold up that 2D image in front of another part of your surroundings, then magically superimpose the shot in full-scale 3D and thus seismically alter the space behind it. You might take a photo of an open door and slap it onto a wall so that you can then pass through to the other side in classic Looney Tunes fashion, or tilt a side-on picture of a bridge towards the edge of an out-of-reach rooftop in order to produce a handy ramp. It’s a canny piece of map manipulation that seems simple early on but soon scales wonderfully in complexity, and it’s one of those games where you’re never sure if what you’ve come up with is the solution or just a solution that you invented. In one late-game level I managed to
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