Viewfinder

My mind is blown, being a beginner indi-developer and noticing all the little tricks this game does to your mind is really fun, this game is cool, Zen and if you carry on playing, about towards the middle you might be invested in the little story it offers. So far, ViewFinder for 2023 is my indie game of the year.
While simple, it uses a mechanic that is executed in such a creative way, while yes there aren’t really any action-packed scenes, this is a game that you play and unravel with your mind, solving and exploring perspective challenges.
If you haven’t played the demo first like me then it starts strong, for those that have, the rest of the game is good, with some challenging sections that required me to just sit in my chair and review what I can do.

Other than that The graphics are, well, Zen-like, it looks great. The devs put those extra visual details which add to the believability of the game, each hub world has something to offer to bend and twist your mind and perspective of reality. I am satisfied with this game, maybe sometimes a bit frustrated because of the challenges, I mean they are challenges so that is forgiven.
A game like this in an industry of RPG, microtransactions, and laziness, View Find is definitely a breath of fresh air.
Sometimes you just need to chill out and explore a world that messes around with your mind on each encounter.

As for the length, it’s really up to you how fast you finish and process puzzles, this isn’t a game for everyone, especially for those that don’t understand puzzle-based exploration, I mean if I gave this to my Cousin to play he will probably not be interested or let alone be able to finish a puzzle because there is simply no action involving killing, guns etc.
What is it with gaming these days, not everything has to be RPG, Looter Shooter.

Ratings:
Graphics & Visuals: 10/10, Very Nice, Zen-like.
Gameplay: 8/10, A bit lacking but enough for it to be interesting.
Puzzles: 9/10, Good USe of Puzzles, A sequel or expansion should blow this outta the water.
Characters: 7/10, You don’t really see any characters besides Alice in Wonderland Cat (CAIT, which yes you can pet (Kinda)). hmm, CAIT, I see the world Play here.
Dialogue: 7/10, Interesting enough.
Music: 7/10, Inner peace, Slight depression, but Peaceful, also the audio design is passable.

Now performance,
I am Running a PC Rig with a
– AMD Ryzen 5 3600
– Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 12G
– 16GB RAM
I ran this on HDD

It performed well at 1080p, and 1440p @ 60fps, with little to no FPs dips, But at 4K, the game can dip from 60fps to 30fps or worse, I would say that this game is not optimized for 4K 60fps gaming.
I experienced 0 Crashes, 0 Bugs, and I’m impressed. This is a simple game, so I don’t expect too much from it performance-wise.
Oh, it also has gamepad support which many games today don’t have, or utilized properly. I just connect my PS5 controller to Bluetooth and I was off. These days its opens Steam overlay because the devs didn’t bother to set Gamepad support for different controllers.

Anyway, this game is an 8/10 for me, I like this.
But why 8/10? If it did everything it could, shouldn’t it be higher, well…
It mainly has to do with some gameplay features.
let me name a few:
– Map (Didn’t notice one, there’s a small amount of backtracking sometimes when solving a puzzle or moving around a hub area)
– Some UI Icons (The hub area needed some Icons or something)
– A Run Button (Let me run free)
– How about some feet (In any FPS game I look for feet or something)
– VR mode (I’m surprised this doesn’t have a VR mode, then again I’ve developed with Unity in VR so It’s Understandable)

If I missed some Features or didn’t see them, that’s on me but don’t worry these are not huge problems, the game ultimately is well packaged in its presentation. (I’ll update this if I missed something).

I am a picky gamer that requires those things for 10/10, The game just needed some extra bloat that’s all. Besides things not being in the game, this is a welcome entry into Puzzle based gaming. Personally, I think that people should at least play the opening level right up to the levels with optical illusions, but the rest of the levels are well thought out and great too. It’s really up to you whether you’ll give this a shot like I did.

So View Finder is a game that screws with your mind with some playful mechanics, walking around while listening to music and Sometimes skipping Dialogue.
Yeah, it’s slow, calm and mind-blowing in some parts. The beginning though is a good intro into the possibilities that this type of perspective of creativity can do.

Alright, That’s my review, Devs did a good job with this one.