Viewfinder

It was cool at first when Superliminal came out, but after Maquette and Viewfinder, I'm getting kind of tired of these first-person puzzlers that are effectively a single really cool tech demo stretched out over a few hours of really straightforward puzzles with boring/annoying/unnecessary narration

very obviously inspired by the games mentioned above but especially the cancelled Valve game F-Stop

i love cait

OK yeah actually playing it and not just watching someone go through the intro to see what it's about before sleeping I take back what I said, still don't think the script's amazing by any means (and having as many Whedonisms as it did in that first area, it's not just the one line that went viral, feels more baffling now since they get completely abandoned afterwards) but it's ok enough, even if I'm completely fine with just having it go in one ear and out the other just from being engrossed by fucking around to try to solve the puzzles lol

poor dialogue and writing across the board, at this rate you might as well not write anything at all. some of it was so bad i thought it was ai generated mush. puzzles dont get good until two hours in and at that point i was clocked out. mediocre.

Erring on the side of positivity here,, yeah the writing was annoying at worst and whatever at best,, but the gameplay while never truly difficult was engaging all the way through.. With the comparisons this is getting and will continue to get,, I would actually recommend someone this over Superliminal,, which has worse puzzles,, worse writing,, and half the playtime.. Just about the only things it does better are ludonarrative harmony ((ie why the hell is Viewfinder about climate change)) and the basic concept,, and the former is something only critics care about and the latter is something that I will praise over on RateYourConcept when it opens.. I guess the moral here is let people keep making games like this,, maybe well have a surreal perspective puzzle masterpiece by 2026