Viewfinder Review
Viewfinder Review
One of the easiest ways to measure the quality of a puzzle game is to count the number of times that your jaw drops. Bending space in Portal, reversing time with Braid, and discovering that the whole world is a grid in The Witness. It’s unique experiences like this that not only disrupt the genre moving forward, but constantly leave you with a feeling of awe.
It’s safe to add Viewfinder to the list of games that constantly leaves your jaw on the floor with its unequaled concept of shifting reality. Despite being influenced by the games that have come before, Viewfinder plays like nothing else. Showing and explaining doesn’t do Viewfinder justice as it’s one of the few games that you need to play to fully understand.
Shake it like a Polaroid
Viewfinder takes an amazing mechanic of looking at a picture, freezing that picture in the world and changing your perspective around it. Bending reality allows your to do simple tasks like making a door where there wasn’t one, create a bridge over a long gap or building a ramp to get to the top of a building and doing things that feel like breaking the game by the end.
One of the biggest downfalls of most puzzle games is that they overstay their welcome, which deflates the magical feeling they had at the beginning. Viewfinder has excellent pacing as it constantly is introducing you with new concepts and ramping up the difficulty before combining all the elements that you have learned by the end. When you combine these elements with a playtime of about 5-6 hours, depending on how long it takes you to arrive at the solution, Viewfinder keeps that magical feeling from beginning to end.
The music and voice acting also understands their role to accent the game as opposed to try to take the spotlight.
Underexposed
The big missed opportunity for me was the the story felt underdeveloped. In the first five minutes you get to peek behind the curtain, literally and despite hinting at some large ambitions very early on that got me very excited for whats to come, never fully made you feel like part of something bigger. By the end the plot does get wrapped up and you get some closure, but in a somewhat unsatisfying manner.
Frame Worthy
Viewfinder is a perfect game when you judge it strictly on its core concept, mechanics and length. It’s still a mystery how a game like this gets coded and doesn’t break with sheer possibilities that players will throw at it. Viewfinder belongs in the pantheon of great puzzlers like The Witness and Portal, as this is a game that truly needs to be experienced to understand its magic.