Of all the numerous first person puzzle games that I’ve played ever since Portal made the genre extremely popular back in 2007, Viewfinder might be the one I’m most conflicted on. More often than not, games like this are simply unremarkable, sometimes they get boring or frustrating and rarest of all they get genuinely fun all the way through. The main mechanic of Viewfinder is anything but unremarkable and the developers find ways to create good puzzles around it, and yet… There are a couple of things that sour the experience.
So, what’s “the thing” in Viewfinder? The central mechanic of the game is the idea that 2D pictures, including ones you can make on your own, can be merged into the level itself, becoming 3D geometry and overwriting anything that existed in that space before. This alone is genuinely awesome and cool to experience from the first time you see it, until the end of the game. Occasionally, the developers get more playful with this, adding abstract pictures or paintings as optional (or required) parts, creating conflicting visual styles that overlap in impossible ways.
However, for a good third of the game, or even more, this isn’t utilized in an interesting way. Some of it is all about gradually teaching the rules to the players in a controlled manner. But after a while (and it will depend on the player how long it takes), it does start becoming boring. Luckily, the game turns things around after giving you a camera and starts building extremely varied and mostly exciting challenges to conquer. For me the game was on an easier side, but in a way that I found extremely satisfying and “just right”. But as always the case with puzzle titles, some will find the game too easy, some will find it impossibly hard – you can never know.
What seems to be an unquestionable issue for all players is the narrative aspect of the game. There are good examples of titles like this with strong narrative element to them, like the aforementioned Portal. There are also examples of narrative that never gets in the way of puzzle solving and is either good enough or genuinely good – as it was the case with The Talos Principle or The Turing Test. There are also bad examples, like the Q.U.B.E., a fantastic and swift narrative-free title that ruined its own pacing with every single re-release of the game and its sequel. But the situation with Viewfinder is different – I don’t know what the story of the game is, because I switched the voice and subtitles off about 20 minutes in. And apart from 2 moments where nothing was seemingly happening (a monologue was happening at that time) this didn’t influence the pace of the game whatsoever. That’s the good thing. The fact that the script is so infuriatingly obnoxious, and full of pointless exclamations and monologues about nothing, in the first place – this is the problem. A fixable one via the settings but one that could simply not exist in the first place.
First half hour with the game I constantly thought that the game was not much more than a cool tech demo for ideas that would be better served in other, superior games. But the game managed to win me over by the end (and then almost ruined it with its final puzzle room) and turned out to be much more interesting and creative than it felt at the beginning. Still, even ignoring the horrid writing, it left me conflicted as some parts of the title are genuinely boring and its best parts are not as exciting as they could be. It is among the better first person puzzle games I’ve played and for the gimmick alone it almost feels worth experiencing, but… I dunno, something about it just doesn’t quite work. Don’t ignore it, that’s for sure, but maybe wait for a discount or check a few videos of it being played.