Scottish developer Sad Owl Studios seem to be rightfully concerned about the end of the world – not a The Last of Us or Fallout-style apocalypse, but a simpler ending that strikes much closer to home. In the studio’s first game, Viewfinder, the climate crisis has reached its final, seemingly insurmountable stages. Without a miracle, humanity isn’t equipped to turn back the worldwide drought. It sounds like a bleak, horrifying world to live in.
The player wouldn’t know it, however: that final stage eco-collapse compromises none of the game’s whimsical and surreal environments, and none of mechanics of gameplay revolve around terraforming or biosphere-ing. Instead, the player takes on a series of mind-bending perspective puzzles. They listen to audio logs as they warp their spaces with photographs and dive into paintings. They ride a tram with a talking cat.
There is no shortage of congenial-seeming first-puzzle puzzlers that slowly reveal sinister and alarming bureaucratic tragedy. It’s a niche genre of games sprung, one might think, from Myst but perfected by Portal and Portal 2. These are games that take place in liminal spaces, the remainder of some long-gone industry: super laboratories, hotels, ruins, and (in one very important case) emptied corporate offices.
On its surface, Viewfinder doesn’t seem to break that mold. It carries the hallmarks of the genre boldly. There’s a quirky, retro-futuristic visual aesthetic, the clutter of a space once populated and now abandoned. Those audio logs tell us the story, as the booming voice of Cave Johnson or a variety of narrators might. There are glitched spaces, reality broken and warped in a way that only digital spaces can be; all of these things might be seen in other games.
The implication of the game’s environment is what really matters in Viewfinder – and, of course, the myriad and delightful ways the player interacts with it. The world sets the game apart and solidifies it as a unique, powerful game. Even the retro-futuristic space tells more of a story than it’s letting on: a visual aesthetic ran to its natural conclusions. However surreal and impossible the setting might be, the habitat feels constructed of maximally economized repeated forms, a prefab concrete coziness. Even what seems to be an impossible space indicates a humanity grasping for ecological and economic efficiency.
All philosophical considerations aside, Viewfinder’s most important aspect is the effectiveness of its puzzles, which find every way they can to truly wow the player. The opening set of levels gives the player access to found photographs which, when applied, can be entered to find the ends of levels, or to create bridges to new places. Later, a Polaroid is provided so the player can take their own photos to manipulate the world around them. That each delightful puzzle demands the player to alter that space is telling: one must enact change to be effective. To escape the end of the world, society must reimagine the world around them.
Each new puzzle-solving novelty (which I’ll avoid spoiling here) arrives and is applied in ways that make the player excited at the possibility. These novelties, like the addition of new Portal-gun components, are delivered just as the player gets too comfortable with the types of puzzles they’ve been completing, creating a perfectly paced learning curve. Simple puzzles delight in their clever application of new tools, and though there are few puzzles that feel like brain-breaking barricades, they never frustrate. Rather than being devious, each level provides a feeling of extreme satisfaction upon completion – an “I rule” feeling instead of an “I’m struggling” feeling. A game filled with suggested anxiety, Viewfinder’s puzzles never escalate the player’s anxiety.
As a whole, the game implements its novelties seamlessly. There are no points in which the player struggles against arbitrary boundaries or mechanics that restrict the freedom of their reality manipulation. Every step into an impossible place feels substantial, which in turn makes each puzzle feel worthy of the effort made to solve it. Drawings sometimes have more depth and dimension to them than they appear to, so when the player steps inside there’s a sense of complexity working underneath the surface. This, in turn, makes the impossibility of the reality more believable, as if the complexity lies just under the surface of each small level.
That inner complexity sadly doesn’t extend to the game’s underlying narrative — that bleak and barren post-apocalyptic reality outside the levels. Our characters are glimpsed only in optional voiceover segments, and our protagonist is intentionally made flat and faceless. Even an avid explorer would be hard-pressed to piece together anything larger than the skeleton of a plot, which in turn makes those disembodied voices feel meager, much less substantial than the world they’ve left behind.
Despite its lack of a essential plot, Viewfinder is a compelling, wholly unique style of puzzler that features so much more depth beyond its surface similarities to a glut of lesser games. Its puzzles and style are unique and memorable, and at its heart lies a sadness that will linger with the player.
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