Viewfinder is a puzzle game that invites creative solutions — review

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It is only natural that the opening seconds of Viewfinder should leave you feeling displaced. After no more introduction than a stylised loading bar, your faceless, voiceless, nameless protagonist finds themselves standing on a comfortable but otherworldly terrace, looking out over the clouds. “Great. We’re in,” says a distant voice, not your own. “Time to explore.”

As soon becomes clear, Viewfinder is all about putting things out of place. Its leafy pagodas and shady courtyards, suspended on concrete platforms, are improbably filled with easels, biscuits and rubber ducks. But also, crucially, photographs. When you pick these up and hold them up to the world around you, you can place them and immediately incorporate their contents into the level. An image of a bridge can be inserted to cross a divide; a column can be rotated to create a ramp; a battery can be duplicated. All of which serves to locate and power the teleporters you’ll need to transport you to the next level.

In aid of what? Well, your character can’t or won’t say. But when the pastel-hued simulation you start in crashes and dumps you back into the real world, you see the burning, apocalyptic smog enveloping the lab in which you and your (altogether more talkative) colleague are holed up. The levels you must complete, following a quick reboot, turn out to be the testing grounds of a group of scientists called The Founders, whose work may hold the key to reversing a climate catastrophe.

In order to do so, you must become a master of manipulation, inserting the photographs to navigate your surroundings. It is an impeccably implemented system. Seamless would be the wrong word because the point is to disrupt your environment — and for clarity’s sake, the images you insert are deliberately different in aesthetic — but it’s remarkably intuitive. You keep expecting the game to break horribly when you clumsily collide a flat image with a 3D landscape, but it works. And if you truly mess up, there’s nothing that can’t be undone via the game’s rewind mechanic.

Once you become more expert, and stop accidentally imprisoning yourself behind mounds of stucco, Viewfinder rewards you with a camera of your own, letting you decide what to insert into the levels. The game becomes about not just finding a solution to the puzzles, but doing so creatively. When each glimpse down the viewfinder presents such a neat picture, you want to do justice to the solution, and over the eight or so hours that the title takes to finish, you soon become an artist. Few puzzle games succeed in creating a concept original enough to be attention-grabbing and ingenious enough to carry you through the whole narrative. Fewer still succeed — as Scottish developer Sad Owl Studios has done here — on their first try.

A good puzzle game should make you feel clever, not stupid. Or perhaps stupid for several minutes and then utterly triumphant — but always as though you’ve stumbled on a brilliant solution that feels unique. And, in a game about seeing things differently, that’s all that really matters.

★★★★★

‘Viewfinder’ is available on PC and PlayStation 5 from July 18