It must’ve been 2021 when I saw a gameplay video from an aspiring developer go viral on social media. The clip shows a Polaroid camera taking a snapshot of a 3D level. Then the player used the photograph to place a perspective shifting copy of the photo into the world. It captured my imagination and I wasn’t the only one. After this prototype went viral, Matt Stark got to work on making the game a full experience, now dubbed Viewfinder. While Viewfinder has genuine moments of astonishment, the story feels more like a hindrance than an extension of the impressive gameplay. There’s some great ideas at play here, even if the final delivery left me feeling a bit mixed on the whole.

Based on the trailer or gameplay you may be taken aback that Viewfinder has such an explicit story. In the far future, you and your companion have stumbled upon a simulator, once used by a group of renowned scientific and creative experts. The goal is simple, finding a machine that is capable of restoring the climate and making the real world hospitable again. As you try to find clues about the whereabouts of the machine, you are assisted by an AI programmed by one of the scientists. There’s a lot of audio logs, diaries and notes scattered around the levels to help you learn more about the creators of this world. But quite frankly, they all felt a little bit hollow and forced to me. While it is nice that there’s an overarching reason and story for the player to justify the exploration, the tale just isn’t told that well. The twists can be seen coming a mile away and the characters themselves are never shown, making their journey feel very distant. Unlike a game such as Portal, where the fact that you are being isolated is the point of worldbuilding and the story, here you are being bombarded with lore that didn’t intrigue or interest me.

Thankfully there’s the gameplay and that is truly where the game shines. The idea of playing with perspective has been done before in games, but Viewfinder makes this mechanic all its own. Every time you find or snap a photo, the perspective is retained. Platforms are constructed out of pillars, and you can rotate any picture to use a column as a bridge, or make items drop down on the ground. It’s a mechanic that I found easy to understand, but always challenging enough to implement. The game is very generous with mistakes, allowing you to go back in time to the point when the photo was taken or when it was placed. This gives room for experimentation. Sometimes I’d drop myself from an edge into a photo I’d just taken to get my bearings and explore possibilities for how to use it to power a teleporter and reach the exit. Each stage adds or combines new elements, often feeling fresh and challenging. You may find a copier, allowing you to make copies of an already taken photo. Or needing to snap a picture of yourself in order to teleport to where you used to stand in relation to the camera. The game is flexible in a way that allows you to find your own solutions to problems, the best quality of any puzzle game in my opinion.

Yet, the Switch version of Viewfinder feels a tad rough at times. Even while playing on Switch 2, numerous glitches occurred such as photos not loading in properly, or audio dropping out. The game only runs at 30 FPS and can stutter or fall below that when multiple photographs are linked together. I also had to adjust some settings in order to prevent some motion sickness, which is rare for me. My biggest gripe is that while the game introduces a lot of new elements to keep things fresh, the repetition sets in pretty quickly. Sometimes nothing more than shooting a single picture would be enough to solve a puzzle. Occasionally this happened five times in a row with several similar puzzles. In this pacing and outline I feel that Viewfinder wants the story to carry the player through, but that just wasn’t compelling enough for me. At those points I started to brute force my way through some of the game, which is a shame.

Viewfinder is a fun puzzle game bogged down by its ambitions. I loved the way in which the game uses the gameplay to speak for itself. At the same time, whenever the characters started speaking I was kind of turned off by the experience. The Nintendo Switch version runs fine enough, but can have a bit of a hard time with the framerate and loading of stages. For puzzle game die-hards, especially fans of Portal, The Talos Principle and Superliminal I’d recommend Viewfinder in a heartbeat. But if you’re hoping to find something beyond that incredible viral video, I’m afraid that Viewfinder will not be able to change that perspective.