Hold up a photo of a room. Let go. The room has popped into existence in front of you, a fully 3D space to walk into and explore. Playing Viewfinder for the first time feels like magic, and it’s a trick that never gets old.
Soon you discover it’s not just photos that can be conjured into solid existence: pictures can, too. Hold up a child’s drawing of a house, then open the crudely drawn front door to see what’s inside. Hold up a watercolour painting and step into the paint-washed landscape. Then the game reveals its superpower. Here’s a Polaroid camera. Take a photo of anything. Reshape the world as you see fit.
On each level, your goal is to find and activate a teleporter. Sometimes it needs a battery to power it, sometimes two or more. But what if there’s only one battery to be found? No problem, take a snapshot, now you have two. How can you reach this teleporter on the other side of a chasm? Photograph that wall, rotate the image 90 degrees. Now you have a bridge.
The puzzles begin as simply as this, and if anything are a little too easy in the early stages of the game. Viewfinder really steps up a gear in the latter half, throwing out puzzles that require you to shift your perspective, and sometimes to throw yourself into the air, plummeting downwards and landing on a photo you have placed into the ether beneath you.
The camera is such a powerful tool – able to obliterate whole swathes of the landscape and replace it with whatever you’ve captured – that Viewfinder has to constantly come up with ways to restrict its power. Your film is limited, sometimes to just one frame, and later you’ll encounter purple-coloured structures that cannot be photographed. It’s all too easy to erase something essential by mistake (like a teleporter), but mistakes are easily undone by holding down the rewind button and scrubbing backwards through time. Viewfinder is forgiving, playful. It encourages curiosity.
The best moments are when your curiosity is indulged. Finding a cubist painting and discovering that it becomes a huge, colourful maze when you place it down, with a secret hidden in one of the rooms. Entering a photo of a corridor only to discover there’s a room round the corner at the end, just out of sight. These moments are more like occasional treats, however. For the most part you’ll be flipping switches and manhandling batteries into place.
The camera is only part of Viewfinder’s toolbox. Other levels base puzzles around things like changing the visual filter of the landscape, lining up fragmented pictures or navigating trompe l’oeil illusions. New quirks and twists are constantly introduced, but nothing is quite as exciting as the wonder of the camera, taking a snapshot and then walking into the picture.
There’s a story behind all this, a plot about entering a computer simulation to discover the lost work of some brilliant scientists who might have found a solution to climate change. But it feels inessential, a piece of narrative sticky tape to connect otherwise abstract levels. However, the plot does give us Cait, a Lewis Carroll-esque Cheshire cat of the virtual kind, who provides some welcome company in otherwise lonely landscapes.
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Viewfinder is magical, then, but also short-lived. Even with the optional puzzles, you can easily finish the whole thing over two or three evenings, and it never quite capitalises on the promise of the camera, the promise of getting lost inside picture after picture after picture. Each level is bespoke, tiny; although the very final sequence, a timed dash through puzzle after puzzle, hints at a grander potential. I’m left dazzled by the possibilities, but ultimately wanting more.