12/12/2023 0 Comments Superliminal exit door puzzleAt one point I was delighted to suddenly descend through the bitmapped depths of a DOS-era dungeon crawler, while at another I found myself stumbling through a pencil-sketched vista that seemed straight out of the rotoscoped music video for ‘80s pop classic, Take On Me. It’s not just the images you capture yourself that can be used to manipulate the world – everything from iconic paintings to desktop screenshots can be collected in certain levels, then blown up and brought to life wherever you see fit. Viewfinder rarely relies on the same optical trickery for long, and this healthy puzzle variety kept me glued to each task and eying each puzzle arena from every possible angle. Often there’s no photography required whatsoever instead, identifying the way forward involves overcoming clever forced-perspective tricks disguising hidden tunnels or bridges that are right under your nose, like the leap of faith sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. A photocopier allows you to duplicate images and therefore any of the items in frame, which is handy for cloning the batteries used to power electrical circuits, while mounted cameras with timers can be used to snap a selfie, the result of which can then be employed to teleport yourself across gaps or through caged walls. Viewfinder’s early puzzles are mostly concerned with repurposing simple things like walls and doors in your surroundings in order to construct a path to the goal, but new elements are introduced at a steady clip in order to present increasingly complicated conundrums to the use of each composition. It basically allows you to instantly hop back through your movements in each level like you’re CTRL+Z-ing your way back down through the added layers of a Photoshop document. Otherwise you effectively have free reign to experiment with layering your shots on the world at any angle, and this freedom is only further reinforced by the fact that any mistakes you do make are easily undone thanks to a snappy rewind function. There are some important restrictions in place the sense of challenge is preserved by limiting the amount of photos you can capture to the number of sheets of film paper in your camera, and you’re forbidden to place any pictures that will destroy the level’s teleporter exit and thus prevent you from completing it. I never came up against an obtrusive ‘out of bounds’ message, and nor were any of my scenery-shattering shots ever implemented in a noticeably glitchy way. What’s really remarkable is how liberating and seamless the landscape-fracturing photography feels, for the most part. Escher fumbling with his phone in an attempt to open Google Maps. In one late-game level I managed to reach the exit by crafting a collage of inverted staircases so seemingly impossible to navigate that it would have sent M.C. It’s a canny piece of map manipulation that seems simple early on but soon scales wonderfully in complexity, and it’s one of those games where you’re never sure if what you’ve come up with is the solution or just a solution that you invented. You might take a photo of an open door and slap it onto a wall so that you can then pass through to the other side in classic Looney Tunes fashion, or tilt a side-on picture of a bridge towards the edge of an out-of-reach rooftop in order to produce a handy ramp. You can take a photo of virtually anything you can see in each level’s floating island landscape, hold up that 2D image in front of another part of your surroundings, then magically superimpose the shot in full-scale 3D and thus seismically alter the space behind it. Viewfinder’s unique method of using trick photography to transform its topography is so brilliant that I can barely even understand how it exists, much less fully explain it.
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