Viewfinder is a teetering pile of excellent concepts, falling simply shy of a coherent remaining expertise. This, as a lot as the rest, makes it fascinating to play.
In Viewfinder, you play as somebody seemingly investigating some form of archaic tech in a distant future, the place flat photographs of 3D areas—like images, drawings, work, and so forth.—may be positioned into the digital world, whereupon they arrive to life. Or in different phrases, you place {a photograph} within the view in entrance of you, and it turns into a actuality you may step into. Later, you’re aligning fragments of work and pictures by perspective to align manifesting home windows into different areas. If this sounds complicated, that’s as a result of it completely is. Fairly how successfully it delivers on these concepts is at all times up for grabs.
Within the first few ranges, Viewfinder appears like precise magic. It guides you thru the vanity by providing comparatively easy conditions, whereby plonking down {a photograph} of a location within the open sky earlier than you permits you to soar from the bottom you’re stood on and onto the tiled flooring you’ve now created. So that you may need this:
Develop into this:
Then, it somewhat shortly feels prefer it doesn’t know what to do with this superpower, and you find yourself stumbling by a couple of ranges of guesswork (making use of the sport’s time-rewinding function) earlier than it packs that in and begins with one other good thought. The brilliance of its personal concepts, and their precise sensible use as a sport, is definitely Viewfinder’s biggest energy and weak spot.
(Nicely, no, its biggest weak spot is the grimly fumbling try to imbue a set of mind-bending puzzles with a godawful storyline voiced by a nauseating particular person known as Jessie. Oh god, please simply shush and let me play the puzzles and depend on the environmental storytelling.)
Video games taking part in with 3D views is unquestionably not a brand new thought. Just lately, Hyperbolica messed with such concepts in 2022, Moncage and Maquette did it in 2021, and Superliminal to underrated impact in 2020. Again in 2013 we had the extraordinary Antichamber, and the eventual launch of Fez, each within the yr after gorgeous scholar sport Perspective. Heck, there was 2008’s Echochrome, and its religious granddaughter, Monument Valley. Which is all to say, it’s fairly one thing that Viewfinder manages to really feel unique inside this crowded area.
It actually is sort of one thing once you’re taking images of images you’ve positioned on the earth, with a view to duplicate an merchandise proven within the picture, then rotating the ensuing image with a view to {photograph} it one other time such {that a} teleporter pad is oriented the right approach round. Then once more, it’s infuriating that inserting that third picture may clip off the nook of an object because it turns into a part of the 3D area, however you received’t discover or have to have observed till a very good whereas later, when you must rewind your entire degree to do it once more with out that tiny unknown error.
That’s been my relationship with Viewfinder all through its first couple of hours. Considered one of being delighted, then pissed off, shocked, then irritated. It’s nearly an excessive amount of, too many levels of freedom, such that you simply each have an unlimited sense of satisfaction when one thing works, however too typically resentment when that breaks one thing else.
I’m undecided there’s a satisfying resolution to my gripes. Limiting the flexibility to put photographs wherever would render the puzzles too straightforward, the sport merely about clicking by the prescribed route. However as it’s, an excessive amount of is left to probability, with sheer guesswork required as to the place one thing within the background of a picture may seem on the earth, and particularly whether or not it will likely be doable to achieve. It’s fairly clear the sport has a rewind mechanic as a result of it is aware of simply how typically one thing will go mistaken.
I actually hope the fixed seesawing of those impressions conveys simply how I skilled the sport, alternately astonished by its creativity, and disheartened by its tough edges. Viewfinder intrigues me, and I need to preserve taking part in, besides I preserve watching a fancy degree and all its variables and questioning if I’ve the willpower.