Viewfinder (PS5): COMPLETED!

This is one of those puzzle games that makes you feel very clever. Not quite as clever as The Witness, perhaps, or Superliminal, which this feels a bit like.

The premise is that in a future where climate change has broken everything, you’ve been put in a VR machine within which some clever people in the past supposedly found a fix for the planet but it was never put in place. You have to find out what it is. It’s sort of like wandering round a shared Mind Palace or something.

What it actually is, because that’s just the framing gimmick, is a series of first person levels where the aim is to reach a device that lets you move on to the next bit. Only it’s always out of reach or needs power or is behind a wall or has a missing cable or is sound activated but the sound-making-device is too far away.

You solve these puzzles initially by making use of photographs you find. These 2D pictures create a 3D object of the photo when used, so for example, you have to get from one platform to another but there’s a big gap. If you stand in the right place, and hold up the photo of a bridge you found nearby in just the right way that it looks like the bridge fills the gap, then magically it does fill the gap.

Later on, you get a camera with which to make your own photos, and various other things – like batteries, a photocopier, pieces of pictures you have to line up, and walls of a certain colour that can’t be photographed (or “printed over” with a photograph) complicate things.

It’s not especially long, but it has plenty of clever ideas along the way. I also appreciated some of the trophies. They reward for trying to do stupid things. For example, there’s a bit where you need three batteries to power an exit, but you only have one battery. Naturally, you take a photo of the battery and then that photo gives you a second battery. My mind then thought… wait. I’ve more shots left on this camera. Took a photo of both batteries, then all four batteries and so on. Got to 32 or 64 batteries and a trophy popped. Amazing.