Plenty of people love puzzle games, as they like the challenge of being thrown into a world that “needs to be solved,” and yet the challenges they’ll face at first are unclear. But as time went on, many developers faced the challenge of making the puzzles better, more unique, and more tied to the world than ever before. Enter the team at SOS, a group that wanted to “warp reality” in a fun way within a video game. Their passion and desire for this created Viewfinder, a title that is out today on PlayStation and Steam, but on the PlayStation Blog, one of the team leads broke the game down further.
One of the things that Director Gwen Foster noted in the blog was that they knew they had to use the camera mechanic in various ways, and that led to many ideas:
“We knew we had to design things around the camera during the early development. Expanding on this reality-reshaping experience, there were eventually photocopiers, perspective, and rewind. How much more can we push this strange mechanic? The more fun we had with the mechanic, the more questions we had on how do we actually make this into a game.”
In Viewfinder, you’ll be part of a mysterious world that can be added to and warped based on pictures you make or find. For example, you can have a picture of a piece of a bridge, then place it perfectly in a gap between two places and suddenly have a place to cross. Or you can take a picture of an item and then literally drop the “camera version” of the item into the world so you can use it in various ways:
With the freedom of this mechanic, the team came up with grander ideas but eventually pulled them back so they could focus on making a unique world built around four different philosophies and loves. That became the basis of the “Founders,” whose four domains you’ll go through in this world. You’ll learn about them via what you see and how you interact with the puzzles, which was exciting for the team:
“How does one view realities from different perspectives? How does one solve the fragility of creation? Can it even be solved? In the same way, we wanted to give players the agency to experience Viewfinder the way they wanted it, we wanted to see ourselves in the context of the world.”
So if this puzzle game sounds like one you’d be interested in, it’s available now!
