Step into the pictures! (Viewfinder demo thoughts)

     Have you ever looked at an old photograph and wished that you could step inside and visit where you were viewing? Thanks to Viewfinder, a new game by Sad Owl Games, you can do just that. I've been interested in this game for a long time, so I'm excited to say that it's coming out in just a few days, July 18! I played the demo a few weeks ago and I think now is an excellent time to talk about it. Let's step into a picture of the demo so I can tell you a little bit about how what we may set foot in the memories of some interesting inventors.

Now you're thinking with pictures!

    Obviously I can't talk much about the story of this game, since I've only played the demo, which mainly serves to show how the game works in terms of the puzzles. These are clearly the star of the show, and for good reason! If you're not already familiar, the main puzzle mechanic is that you can hold up a picture with the left trigger (Or L2) and then when you press the right trigger (or R2), the picture becomes real, and it's all based on your perspective. it's hard to understand, but this makes it possible to step into the picture, and the spaces are distorted to the way that you were looking at the situation. The goal of each puzzle is to get to a teleporter which may have to be powered up with a few batteries before you can move on. The puzzles in the demo start out pretty simple, just demonstrating the main concept, before throwing in a few more steps and surprises. They introduce a camera, which makes it a breeze to duplicate a setting, my favorite being whenever there's a teleporter that needs three batteries to work, but there are only two in the level, so you have to take a picture of one of them, and retrieve the battery from the picture to make three. Another level has an overhang over a long gap, but no floor, so you have to take a picture, rotate it, and then set it down to turn that ceiling into a floor. It's little quirks like this that really make this game seem special, reminiscent of some of the best puzzle games like Portal or The Witness. There are of course, more types of puzzle that will be here, and those are what make the game even more special.

    One of the levels in the demo gives you pictures in several different styles, which makes me the most excited of all of the levels! Most of the levels have black and white pictures, which give an old-vintage vibe to them, but one level features a postcard that looks like it could have come from a gift shop in a desert somewhere, then there's a child's drawing of a house, which brings the house off the page in a really cool way, from there, there's what looks to be a screenshot from an old game like Doom or Elder Scrolls Arena, and it just goes on from there. I'm sure there are a lot of secrets hidden in the demo, and the phonographs left around by two inventors (who may be programmers for the game in a meta play for the ages) give a good hint at what the story may be like. As I said, the puzzles will no doubt be the highlight of the experience, but I think there's something to be said about interesting stories that play into the world of the gameplay. There's also another puzzle where there are two game screenshots on a table, one of which looks to be from Tetris, and one looks more like Metroid, and it gives you a jump upgrade, which actually works in the puzzle. It's a cool twist on the whole picture idea, and I hope we see more of this in the finished product. There are a lot of questions still in the air, but I am really excited to see what the full game holds, and I'm glad that we don't have to wait long (again, it's coming July 18)!

    Sorry I don't have much to say about this so far, friends, the game isn't out yet, but I just wanted to say that I'm blown away by what I've seen so far and I hope you'll all check out the demo that is out now, since this has the potential to be a fantastic puzzle game. It's times like these when we need to thank our lucky stars that Indie studios continue to take risks and work on wacky ideas like these! It's clear that the concept is something special, but it'll take the full product coming out to see what Sad Owl Studios can do. I for one am excited, how about you? Thanks so much for reading this very short look at the new game Viewfinder, and I hope you're interested by something that you've read or seen about this game. To learn a bit more, I highly recommend you check out the post written by Gwen Foster, the Co-Founder and Director of Sad Owl Studios on the Playstation Blog, which I'm posting here. It looks like an awesome time and I hope you'll check it out! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed Indie game enthusiast, and I'll talk to you all again soon.