Viewfinder starts out with a simple concept and develops it as you play. Reminding me of Echochrome in a lot of ways, you're tasked with picking up pictures and placing them in the world, with the picture becoming a part of your reality. At the start of the game it's a simple case of looking through the environment, finding your stock of pictures, and figuring out where they need to go. There's a gap you can't cross and a picture of a bridge on hand? Line it up and walk across your new bridge. If there's one thing the game handles well, it's its escalation of difficulty, and the first few levels may well deceive you. This is a puzzle game to be reckoned with, and by the time you realise it, you'll already be hooked.

Environments in the game are simple at a glance and do a good job in allowing you to take in your options quickly. It's rare to run into a situation where you don't know the problem you're wanting to tackle, and from there it's a fun challenge of working backwards to figure out which of your available tools you need to fall back onto. This kind of thinking is more obvious early on where you have a set selection of images to place, or find yourself with a stationary camera to take a picture with. You have this thing, now how are you going to use it? What needs to change to get to where you want to be? As the game progresses your options increase, and with that, so too does the puzzle complexity. As mentioned you start with pictures that are found around levels, as well as frames that are lined up with parts of a scene to build a full image. From there you'll get stationary cameras that look at a fixed point with a limited number of pictures to print. It's around this point you'll start finding more interactable objects that you might need to manipulate and photograph. All of this culminates around halfway through the game with you getting your own camera to carry with you. And this freedom is something that had me concerned at first.

Giving the player too many options in a game like this can turn what is a fun puzzle into a laborious cycle of trial and error. Viewfinder circumvents this by keeping each level both compact and concise, while still allowing you to use your freedom to come up with interesting solutions. It does a great job of guiding without holding a sign towards the solution, and in doing so ends up with a gameplay loop that'll leave you wanting more.

A particularly good decision was to make the most challenging and obscure puzzles optional. While the vast majority of levels do need to be finished, and come with a really pleasant narration (mostly from a talking cat that you can, in fact, pet), the real trials for me were the optional levels that open up after clearing the rest of an area. These puzzles aren't entirely out of the blue either, often using mechanics you've recently seen in new and interesting ways. The first optional level as an example only has pictures in the level with no ability to take more, but tasks you with solving a maze where a wrong turn will give you another copy of the picture you just came through. You keep looping until you figure out which path to take, how the pictures should be oriented; it's all just brilliantly creative. And the same can be said for the larger game.

Viewfinder is one of those games that really doesn't crop up frequently, and it is truly a magical experience from start to end. It has an idea that's incredibly simple on paper, but the seamless nature of its execution is a marvel to behold. This seamlessness goes beyond the game mechanics and into how the game feels through its controls. It's intuitive with both a keyboard and controller, and I was surprised at how quickly I picked it up using even something as odd as the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard's trackpoint module (not that I expect many people to play this way). The one thing I was disappointed to see missing was motion controls, and though it might be surprising to some, I really did miss them. On a PC game I can somewhat understand a lack of motion controls, with these not being an option in the dominant Xbox controller, but it does feel a missed opportunity for the PS5 release where the controller is a little more interesting. It does at least support the adaptive triggers, though to what extent I'm not certain having the PC version on hand to review.

I'd also be really interested to see this as a VR title. The surreal but somewhat simple environments Viewfinder offers are exactly the kind that would do well in a VR setting. I can imagine it being a fairly intensive VR experience, but the idea of walking through the ever-shifting landscapes and taking it in first-hand is something I haven't been able to shake since first picking the game up.

Outside of the lack of motion controls, the only point I can find fault in is the game's length. You're looking at somewhere between three and five hours of gameplay from start to end, and for some people that just won't be enough to justify the £20 price tag. This is a game ripe for additional levels in content updates and DLC, but there's nothing to suggest either of these are in the works. Is it worth it as it is now? Yes. Absolutely so. I can't deny I want more, but the experience from start to end was put together in a way where I can certainly say I'm satisfied with what I played. It's a game that very much could have outstayed its welcome but, in part due to its short nature, managed to stay original and interesting. Put simply, it's one worth checking out.