Viewfinder is one of those technical marvels that doesn’t seem like it should be possible. It’s a first-person puzzle game that uses forced perspective and non-Euclidean geometry as a gimmick, similar to what we’ve seen before in Superliminal, Manifold Garden, Antichamber, and even Portal, but the freedom it gives players to create their own solutions to each puzzle make it feel like a revolutionary step forward for this style of mind-bending puzzle game. I was incredibly impressed by what I played at Summer Game Fest’s Play Day last weekend, and even though the demo is only about 10 minutes long, I felt like I had a decent grasp on what Viewfinder is and how it's supposed to work. As is often the case though, once the speedrunning community got its hands on the game, it quickly turned into something else entirely.
One of the things that makes Viewfinder work so well is that its mechanic is incredibly intuitive, despite the fact that you never quite get the sense that you understand exactly how it works. It's all based on Poloroid photos, which at the start are scattered around the world for you to pick up. When you pick up a photo in Viewfinder, it moves into the center of your field of view, obstructing what you can see. When you activate the photo, it’s instantly overlaid on the world, becoming a three-dimensional space that you can enter and explore. It’s like stepping directly into a photograph, except you’re actually pulling the world from the photograph out and superimposing onto your own. The concept is hard to explain, but as soon as you see it it makes perfect sense.
The magic trick of making photographs become real never loses its spark, even after doing it a dozen times in the demo. The tutorial has a hands-off way of teaching you how to look at 2D images and turn them into 3D objects, and it always feels like something impossible happened. Every picture is it☂s own little world that you can bring into your reality, but with some creative thinking it can become something different too. With the right angle and perspective, you can turn a photo of a skyscraper into a ramp that connects to platforms you need to traverse. Eventually you get a camera and can start taking your own pictures, which is when Viewfinder really opens itself up to an infinite number of creative solutions. What you’re tasked to do may be something as simple as moving from point A to B, but 🍌everyone will have their own way of getting there - and the speedrunners already have a head start on finding all the weirdest, most inventive ways to get through Viewfinder’s puzzles.
During my demo a developer from Sad Owl Studios had mentioned that the speedrunning comm𝔍unity was already hard at work trying to crack the demo. He recommended that I check out their work on the game’s Discord server, and sure enough, there’s a speedrunning channel where players are trading strategies and showing off their best runs. The strategies they’re using t🌊o manipulate the photos are things I probably never would have considered trying, but as soon as you see them they make perfect sense. I’m never going to be a speedrunner, but for Viewfinder in particular, it can be really helpful to try to approach problems the way they do.
One thing that is pretty consistent among every speedrun is that runners never place photos at eye level. For one thing, walking somewhere is always slower than falling somewhere, so instead of looking out at the horizon and dropping a photo ofᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ the hallway in front of them, they just drop it at their feet and fall wherever they want to go. The same goes for if they need to retrieve something from a photo, like a battery. You don’t need to drop a picture of a room, walk into it, pick up the battery, and walk back out. You can just look at the sky and stitch the room upside down, then let the battery fall right into your hands. Pro tip: if the battery needs to be on a platform, just hang the photo directly over the platform and let it fall into place, you don’t even need to be there to catch it.
My favorite little trick they do is when they combine a specific pair of exploits. One, the fact that every photo you take contains the entire ‘photo world’ of whatever objects you’ve photographed, and two, the fact that the game allows you to fall into oblivion for an unexpectedly long time. As soon as you get the camera, you can take a picture of the wall next to you, and when you superimpose that photo it will create the little section of the wall and then eve✅rything that was beyond it. The fastest technique for that puzzle right now is to plant the photo on the floor, then fall all the way through the level. If you turn around at the end, you’ll see the exit pass you by. Speedrunners will then take a picture of the exit, then turn around and superimpose it the direction they are falling. This makes them fall directly onto the exit as though they fell through a portal back up to where they were supposed to be. It sounds like madness, it looks like madness, and it’s making me love this game even more.
You can try out the Viewfinder demo for yourself on PlayStation and Steam before the game launches on July 18. I’m looking forward to playing it, but I’m even more excited to see what the speedrunners are going to do with this one. They’ve already given me some ideas about how to tackle these puzzles in more creative ways, and I plan to ♎borrow a lot more unholy ideas from their sick, deranged minds. How far will they be able to go? Viewfinder’s core mechanic is designed to break the world – does that mean this is going to be a truly unbreakable game, or will the speedrunners break it in ways no one ever could have imagined?