Now, I don’t remember where I was when I first saw the trailer for Sad Owl Studios puzzle platformer, Viewfinder, but I certainly remember how I felt when I saw it. Showcasing mechanics that looked like straight up witchcraft, I was blown away by the concept, but sadly had too much on the docket to get around to playing it when it launched on PC back in mid-2023. Thankfully, the Scottish beauties are finally bringing their award winning title to Nintendo Switch, and I couldn’t wait to see what the fuss was about.
Viewfinder takes place within a simulation, where you have to help a silent protagonist traverse a series of impossible arenas enroute to a deeply hidden secret that will help turn around the fortunes of the real world. The key to getting around and solving puzzles is the use of pictures, which have the incredible power to alter ‘reality’ and physically change the world around you. By holding a picture up in front of your face, you have the ability to imprint its contents onto your environment and bring whatever is in the picture to life! Using this amazing ability, you have to find the right pictures and manipulate them so that you can traverse huge gaps, create doorways, and reconnect machines, helping you make your way into the depths of the simulation and your ultimate goal. (And don’t worry if you make a mistake, it’s easy to rewind the simulation to undo your errors and try again until you get it right.)
You eventually get access to a polaroid camera, which allows you to take your own photos, and that’s when the fun really begins. You’re challenged with posing movable items in the right spots, along with accurately specific background elements to get everything you want in the frame – and even have the ability to take photos of photos, which pushes the envelope as to what you can achieve. That said, none of the levels gave me much of a problem. You rarely have to scour high and low for a solution – if it’s not in the first couple of cupboards you look in, it’s likely to be folded up and tucked down the side of the sofa. Basically, use the methods the game teaches you until it teaches you something else – everything tends to move on progressively without ever getting too mixed together or jumbled up.
I was in love with the gameplay mechanics in Viewfinder from the word ‘go’, all the way up until I crossed the final goal post. (Actually, if I’m being honest, I was probably in love with them from the moment I saw the trailer a few years ago.) The ability to pick up a photograph, imprint it on the world around you and then traverse through it feels like something out of a dream, particularly early on. I grinned from ear-to-ear throughout the first few levels – even once you’ve done it a few times and know exactly what to expect, seeing those photos come to life is truly magical. While others may argue, I enjoyed the mild difficulty curve that Viewfinder offers, and I left with the feeling that I was given the opportunity to just enjoy what I was doing, without ever getting stressed with overly technical puzzle solutions.
Perhaps the only downside to the mechanics is that, unlike a game like Portal 2, which continues to introduce and combine elements to make progressively more complex challenges, the puzzles in Viewfinder reach a glass ceiling pretty early on. Now don’t get me wrong, Sad Owl Studios throw in a few curve balls long after I thought they’d already squeezed every last ounce of juice from the crystal coconut (I said what I said), but this isn’t a mechanic with infinite offshoots and new applications. But it seems that the developers knew that – for me, they deserve plenty of credit for getting the most out of their overarching idea and not worrying about reinventing or padding for content.
The plot of Viewfinder is strung with the slender threads of some of my favourite sci-fi franchises, with delicate fibres of The Matrix (1999) and Inception (2010) being woven together to create something that feels original, but comfortably familiar. The game starts with a tone of playful wonder as you investigate the world, but slowly slips into a tale more sombre as you progress and begin to piece together what you’re searching for. You come to learn about the men and women who built the simulation as you move through it too, coming to understand their relationships with their art and with one another. Steering you on your travels are Jessie, an engineer who’s keeping an eye on the system and dials in to offer you snippets about your progression, and Cait, a computer program who’s designed to act as your guide and who’s modelled after the temporal Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. Cait disappears and reappears as he sees fit, offering his thoughts on how you’re doing and sharing his recollections of the various system designers and what the process had meant to them.
Much of the storytelling takes place through written journal entries and Post-it notes left by the designers, but there’s some voice work on offer too, coming in the form of audio logs and interactions between the NPCs. The voices of the designer characters did little to leave an impression on me either way (which is probably a negative, since they’re the grand focus), but there were a couple of performances that stood out for different reasons. While I thought Savy Des-Etages (Fallout: London – 2024) does a solid job delivering the voice of Jessie, I don’t think she had a ton to work with, as most of her lines come across as hammy and generic. On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Cait’s depiction throughout and thought that Paul Warren is wonderful as our digital assistant feline. Offering words of praise, encouragement, and contemplation in his silky Scottish tone, the character is perfectly pitched as a caring AI companion.
Overall, I feel like the story aims for a grandiose, artistic sentiment that matches the artistry in the gameplay themes, but I don’t think it ever really gets there. It’s nice to have an overarching narrative to help give you a reason to solve the puzzles and drive you onwards, but I didn’t feel enough poignant moments to elevate the story from window dressing into something requiring some philosophical ponderings.
Visually, while I think some concessions have had to be made for the Switch version, it’s nothing that Switch players haven’t come to accept at this point in the handheld’s life cycle. Like, everything looks fine. There’s certainly nothing horrible about it- but upon closer scrutiny, you can see that the overall level of quality has had to be watered down to accommodate the Switch’s lack of hardware oomph. For the understandable lack of polish, the otherworldliness of the environments does plenty to inspire feelings of awe, but some sharper textures and (particularly) shadows would have helped make Viewfinder look as good as the mechanics make you feel.
The way that more traditional art is used genuinely deserves praise through, as it really emphasises the unbridled imagination of the underpinning mechanics. Sometimes the pictures you use to navigate the world aren’t photographs, but paintings, sketches, or digitisations. Using a picture not only imprints the content onto the environment, but the style as well, and it’s absolutely joyful moving seamlessly between photorealistic areas across a bridge painted in Van Gogh-style oils, or walking through doorways and into the choppy pencil-sketched world beyond. The playful introduction of these different styles helps emphasise that the characters in the game are both artists and programmers, aiming for both beauty and effectiveness in their designs.
The soundtrack to Viewfinder is a chill low-fi affair that may not be especially memorable, but it is incredibly effective. The hub world themes have a little jazz influence, with mellow tones and breathy percussion that give a sense of vivacious life that’s always just hidden from view – something which is very much in keeping with the characters and storyline. The level music is very relaxed; slow and still. The drawn-out chords and placid volume level emphasises the ethereal nature of the games simulated spaces, giving the impression that you’re exploring a place that’s actually ‘nowhere’. The twinkling notes and soft, morphing synths instil a wonderfully warm, almost spiritual, feeling. It feels like lobby music to a higher plane of existence, in the most complimentary sense.
Viewfinder is a simple puzzle game that wows thanks to a tremendous underpinning mechanic that makes getting around feel like genuine sorcery. Both the story and the storytelling are a little hit and miss, but there’s enough there to keep you engaged (but not enthralled) until the credits roll. It doesn’t showcase the kind of multiplicity that some other puzzle titles do, and rarely gets your brain out of second gear as a result, but none of that dampens the enjoyment of the experience one bit. Why? Because making photos real and moving through them is really bloody cool.
Recommendation Score
In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.
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