Finished Viewfinder and have come away feeling kinda empty and grumpy. Recent puzzle game talk makes me wonder what I really value about these kinds of games. The mechanics are very solid and what they made is impressive, but I think I need a more holistic package to chew. The game never really gets that hard outside of optional challenges and its extremely short (around 3 hours). These aren’t really bad things since the same can be said of Portal. But I think the difference is two major things. Viewfinder’s mechanic of creating or finding photos and then placing them in the environment just takes a lot longer than shooting a portal gun. Take a picture, wait for it to develop, aim it, often needing some additional rotation or tweaking, place it, just never feels snappy enough. The rewind is great though. The pacing is a lot slower and messier since a lot of solutions just end up wrecking geometry which is cool, but I found the game lagged behind my ability to figure stuff out. Most puzzles are solved conceptually much quicker than their mechanical implementation takes. There’s not a lot of figuring things out on-the-fly or as much experimentation required.
The other point of difference is that Portal’s premise was more inherently interesting, released in a time when this trope of exploring mysteriously empty science labs wasn’t made mandatory by Quantum Conundrum or Superliminal, losing their teeth in the process of emulation. The characters and plot of Viewfinder are powerfully anodyne. Apart from one dramatic turn there is no real sense of threat, suspense, or intrigue. Photography-based puzzle simulations were apparently a way to solve climate change by creating a ‘bad weather’-destroying machine that turns out not to work anyway. Like, it’s nice that the game acknowledges that climate change is a complex problem that a single machine couldn’t solve but then undercuts this with its own ending as it turns out the simulation you were roaming around in can just manufacture plants from scratch.
The trophies seem more interesting challenges than the base puzzles but I’ve kinda lost interest since I feel like I’ve seen enough. There’s a nagging sense that the developers felt like they might not have had ‘enough game’ by putting so many minuscule post-it notes and collectables in the environment.