Fans of great puzzle games like Portal and The Witness will be delighted to know that the upcoming Polaroid Viewfinder puzzle game takes direct inspiration from those titles, especially in how it approaches the marriage of story and narrative. – Game News spoke with the team at Sad Owl Studios during WASD 2023 and learned all about how Viewfinder could be your next puzzling obsession.
According to developers Jacob Keane and Matt Stark, Viewfinder draws inspiration from some of the industry’s top peers, “big inspirations being Portal, The Talos Principle, and The Witness,” according to Stark.
A game about challenging your perception both in and out of the game, Viewfinder lets you use a Polaroid-style camera to take photos and use them to reshape the world around you, among many other tricks of the game. interesting insights.
“Viewfinder is about utopia, finding solutions, friendships and sacrifices,” Stark tells us on WASD’s bustling showroom, adding that development of the puzzle game “tried to find new ways to linking narrative themes together”. make it cohesive, like the tone of the storytelling is consistent with the tone of the gameplay, because a lot of it is quite playful and lighthearted.
Stark adds that the team wants to be able to “explore these themes without feeling like there’s a stark contrast between what the player is doing and what’s happening in the game.”
Slated for release this year, you can wishlist Viewfinder on Steam right now to stay up to date on its full release.
In the meantime, you can find plenty of games similar to Viewfinder by checking out our top picks for the best adventure games and the best story games, as the two genres often have a lot in common with puzzles.
Interview by Nat Smith at WASD 2023.