Interesting puzzle games are always a treat, but with so many brilliant entries in the genre, it can be difficult to find a way to stand out. This means that creating a mechanic that feels fresh and interesting is nearly essential. Luckily, Viewfinder is a game that boasts one such mechanic, describing itself as a mind-bending experience where you need to reshape reality by placing objects in the world.

The game revolves around using photos, paintings, and postcards to change the world around you. Doing so makes it easier to traverse the landscape or solve puzzles. It’s certainly a concept that sounds interesting, and I couldn’t help being immediately drawn to the game after seeing glimpses of the art style and mention of a deeper story.

Viewfinder does a great job at slowly introducing and then tutorialising new elements. When you first start playing, you walk around a small opening area and quickly take a tumble when a bridge collapses under your feet. Luckily you quickly learn that you are able to rewind time, returning yourself back to the upper level. This is a key mechanic for later in the game, as it is very easy to place objects in places that make traversal impossible and rewinding is the only way to undo your mistakes. Time travel is not often used for actual puzzle solving, but it is a neat way to allow players the freedom of options without penalty.

Once the main mechanic of Viewfinder becomes familiar, the game gives you a Polaroid camera of your own that you can then use to take photos of the environment before placing them as before. At first, this seems like it makes many of the puzzles too easy, but each level has a curated number of photos that you can take before your camera runs out of film, forcing you to figure out ways to duplicate several items at once, or how to best utilise the environment for traversal.

One of the most interesting ways that the game shakes things up is when some later levels introduce a type of environment that cannot be photographed. This sometimes even includes objects in the area like batteries. This was where I started finding some real difficulties in the game, as all of my usual methods of solving puzzles were suddenly out the window. This is just one of the interesting challenges that are introduced in the back half of Viewfinder, and it becomes even more varied when other mechanics introduced in levels previous are layered on top of it.

Despite the challenges staying fresh as the game goes on, it rarely feels incredibly difficult. I was able to beat the main game in about four hours, and then it took me another hour to finish the optional levels. However, I wouldn’t call this a dealbreaker, as Viewfinder is definitely still engaging enough to keep your attention through its entire runtime, even if the difficulty is never nail-biting.

Viewfinder has a really appealing art style. The objects in the world are very soft, with rounded edges and blocky shapes, and the gentle lighting works perfectly with this. The whole game feels very relaxed and comfy to explore. The photos that are placed into the world also have their own colour palette. When you first start, they are just black and white, but you unlock more palettes as you play. This is really cool because it makes it very easy to distinguish between the normal layout of the world and any new architecture added by the player.

I was pretty immediately grabbed by the story of Viewfinder. The game very quickly establishes that the world you are exploring is entirely virtual and that it was once inhabited by a group of scientists who are seemingly no longer around. At first, there isn’t an obvious reason why you have entered the simulation, or what the scientists were doing here before you arrived, but the answers do come pretty quickly. Maybe even too quickly.

The answering of questions and the overabundance of dialogue all tie into a related issue. I found that the characters are all far too keen to tell me exactly what is going on at any given moment. I think the world of Viewfinder is profoundly interesting, but I wish I had the chance to explore it and uncover its mysteries with far less direct guidance from others.