Viewfinder Review: Wordless Play

Surely you know almost collapsed photos of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Both the traveler with the outstretched hand and the photographer must stand in a very specific position in order to make the image look as if the person is supporting the tilted structure. At the same time, this is just a manipulation of perspective. It looks like a new Viewfinder puzzle game.

• Platform: PC, PlayStation 5 (revised version)
• Publication date: 18.07.2023
• Developer: Garden Owl Studios
• Publisher: Thunder Publishing
• Genre: first person puzzle game
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: No
• Data to download: 7.46 GB (PlayStation version)
• Game time: up to 8 hours
• Price: 659 CZK

The name itself says a lot – viewfinder is a camera viewfinder in English. This is exactly the task of your nameless mute hero, who finds himself in a world full of colors and stickers with cryptic messages. Walk and look for the right place. You find yourself in a computer simulation that you can only pass by bending and modifying the space around you.

You start out pretty simple. You will receive a photo of the bridge. Nothing superfluous, compositionally the picture is rather unmanageable. But it’s not about art. As soon as you stand in the right place, watching the abyss between two floating islands, and “unfold” the photo of the bridge in the air… two dimensions become three. The bridge is imprinted in your reality, projected instead of the abyss, and you comfortably cross from one side to the other.

Photos and optical illusions

Individual areas are grouped into multiple levels that use different tools to hack reality. For example, you get your own camera and pretend to be a tourist in Pisa – you need to find an object that will help you get further, photograph it at the right angle and position it accordingly. Or recognize the optical illusion that manipulates you with colors and shadows and move past it.

As I warned at the beginning, the viewfinder cannot be described in words, even screenshots are few. The video will tell you the most about the gameplay.

The game may resemble The Witness in its colors and visuals, but the difficulty is completely different. The Witness is in many ways a classic puzzle game, usually with a single solution, whose puzzles can be redrawn on paper at worst. The viewfinder has more solutions. Some are more elegant, others are “piggy”, but faster and faster. For example, you can take difficult photos and get three different batteries that will charge the teleporter needed to go to the next level. Or you take three shots of one battery and boom, after turning into a three-dimensional world, you have three new things.

I just got through most of the game. Due to the different sizes on paper, it will not work to draw anything, and this is not necessary. You will enjoy the viewfinder more like a relaxing game in which you enjoy a new and original idea to change the world around you.

Only at the penultimate level does the tipping point come, when mostly optional tasks suddenly become difficult. But the game is quite individual, and what did not suit me may seem simple to someone. In addition, it contains another element that greatly simplifies everything: if necessary, you can turn back the time, just like in a video player.

hopeful cat

As you will gradually discover, the levels of the game are divided according to the individual scientists whose job your hero is looking for. In a computer simulation, they were trying to find a solution to the climate crisis their real world was in. There are no melting glaciers or fires in Canada – think more about solar storms, dead vegetation. The earth became the red planet.

Each of these scientists has a home in the simulation that serves as a hub for you. Each one is thematically different and always seems to be playing slightly different, humming music from a distance. From there you enter colorful rooms, blooming gardens or cloud-filled terraces where you solve puzzles and progress further and further. Getting closer and closer to a device that was supposed to solve a global problem.

From the very beginning, you are assisted remotely by a colleague with an obnoxious voice and cheaply written monologues. But as soon as you get further, she will be replaced by CAIT, a gray programmed cat who will attract you with her curiosity. He will start commenting approvingly on solving puzzles, smiling at you and cheering you on. Perhaps you’ve been waiting your whole life for someone like CAIT.

If you remembered the legendary Portal while reading the review, be aware that the viewfinder has a few things in common with it. This, for example, is one of the mechanics used at the end of the game, which resembles a kind of teleportation – only the portals are replaced by a camera. Or a very pleasant game length. You can complete the viewfinder, including additional tasks, in a few hours. Or you can linger, loving the beautiful world and listening to the recordings of scientists who approximate everything they have had to deal with.

One day it’s childish scribbles, the other it’s a Doom-style hallway.

There will even be humor. I mean, I don’t mean the one behind the ordinary words. The above records that you will meet in the world are rather of a weaker nature. The playful humor and wit is mostly hidden in the mechanics and some scattered photos or pictures. What happens if you take a postcard with Stonehenge and put it in front of you? How to save a birthday card with inflated balloons? The highlight is an excerpt that was already in the demo. You quickly move from one reality to another – once children’s scribbles, another corridor like from Doom.

You will enjoy these moments the most. When the developers at the Scottish studio Sad Owl Studios use their original mechanics to their fullest, and you do something unprecedented, a little quirky, maybe even audacious. When you try, what happens when you translate Edvard Munch’s The Scream into the real world. As you go deeper and deeper into copies of other copies, testing the limits of the paradox. When you take a camera in your hands and go towards creativity.