Viewfinder Xbox Review — Framing Reality

XPN Network
Nov 3
5 min read

Stepping into the world of Viewfinder is like opening a portal to a place where art, photography, and science fiction collide in a mind-bending swirl of colour, perspective tricks, and heart-tinged mystery. After a celebrated debut on PlayStation and PC in 2023, Sad Owl Studios’ BAFTA-winning puzzle game finally came to Xbox Series XS in 2025. Its premise is mesmerizing in its simplicity: you reshape reality itself by placing photographs, drawings, and screenshots into the three-dimensional game world, turning 2D snapshots into explorable environments and wild puzzle solutions. It’s not only a technical miracle but also offers a playful, welcoming, and sometimes bittersweet adventure for puzzle game fans.

At its core, Viewfinder is a first-person puzzle game with a twist so immediately intriguing that it’s hard not to gasp the first time you see it in action. Players traverse a series of simulation environments meant to evoke both a dystopian Earth and quirky, impossible constructs, think Escher meets Monet by way of Instagram filters. The main hook is the "Polaroid Effect": you either find or take 2D images, then "place" them into the world. Instantly, that 2D image becomes 3D reality whilst obliterating whatever was behind it and allowing you to physically walk into the photo, explore inside, or use it to bridge gaps, solve logistical problems, or discover optional secrets.

The mechanics feel like magic, but soon become intuitive. Early puzzles involve simply using photographs that are already placed around the environment. Perhaps there’s a photo of a bridge on an easel; you pick it up, position it so it connects two platforms, and suddenly what was once impossible is now a pathway. Later, new twists appear: the ability to rotate pictures, clone them with in-world photocopiers, or even use different kinds of images like drawings, paintings, pixel art, or even surreal scribbles, with each interacting with the game world in subtly different ways. Eventually you’re equipped with a camera of your own, letting you take strategic photos of objects, layouts, or mechanisms for later use. This opens up immense creativity in puzzle solving, encouraging experimentation and lateral thinking.

The Rewind Mechanic also deserves praise. Like the time-reversing tools in Braid or Prince of Persia, hitting rewind unravels your recent actions, letting you quickly undo mistakes or try alternate placements without penalty. There’s no fall damage, no "game over," and the game actively invites playful searching as much as head-scratching problem solving.

The game offers five distinct worlds, each with unique visual motifs and a series of self-contained levels. Whether you’re unlocking teleporters by gathering batteries, building platforms, bridging chasms, or activating mechanical contraptions, almost every challenge requires using photos in surprising ways. There’s often more than one solution, rewarding experimentation and a willingness to think outside the literal (and figurative) box.

Difficulty gradually increases as new tools and concepts are layered in, with the addition of timed photos, duplicating objects, recursive image use, or manipulating the world with sound or light. Particularly notable are levels where paintings in different art styles affect the world around you: cartoon doodles create playful, flat landscapes; black and white sketches yield sombre, haunted spaces; pixel art transports you to a world that feels lifted from an 8-bit game. This not only keeps the visual palette fresh but also refreshes puzzle logic so you never feel like you’re solving the same scenario twice.

The Timed Final Level is probably the biggest change in pace through the whole game. It pushes you to use everything you’ve learned under time pressure, and while some enjoy the tension and culmination of mastery, others will probably find the abrupt spike in difficulty jarring. Fortunately, an accessibility option allows you to disable the timer, making this climactic challenge as relaxed (or intense) as you prefer.

Viewfinder’s story takes place in a near-future dystopian world where plant life has been wiped out, and the remnants of humanity struggle with an oxygen crisis. The player, an unnamed protagonist, enters a virtual simulation created by a cluster of departed scientists who once sought a solution. This simulation, filled with fragmented memories and impossible architecture, serves as both the stage for the puzzles and a subtle narrative device.

World-building happens indirectly, through audio logs scattered around, capturing the voices and frustrations of the researchers, text diaries and visual hints in the environments: O2 readouts, children’s drawings, or dinner tables set in abandoned laboratories and a cute, talkative AI feline named Cait, who both assists and provides gentle comic relief (and can be petted, naturally).

What makes Viewfinder immediately striking is its vivid, ever-changing visual style. From the get-go, the game’s environments burst with colour, surreal geometry, and painterly flourishes. Each "world" or hub is themed, ranging from lush, overgrown rooftops to stark monochrome studies, trippy neon spaces, retro gamescapes, and even hand-drawn pencil shadings.

Photographs you insert come with their own filters and effects, so a placed Polaroid not only creates 3D geometry but often shifts the colour grading, texture resolution, or art motif of the world. Players, for example, can step into landscapes in the style of kids' doodles, Monet paintings, or saturated Instagram shots, even pixel art or garish synthwave. This diversity in visual cues is not just an aesthetic treat but often a puzzle clue in itself.

Some special effects like a rainbow shimmer as the boundaries of a photo merge with reality, or the uncanny illusion of recursion when snapping photos inside other photos give Viewfinder a "wow" factor that never quite wears off.

Performance on Xbox further enhances the visual experience: On Series X, the game supports 4K HDR, butter-smooth framerates, and quick loading; on Series S, visual fidelity remains high albeit at a lower target resolution, with fluid performance throughout.

Pros

Inventive core idea that generates a wide range of satisfying puzzle scenarios.
Encourages creative problem solving with multiple valid approaches.
Clean presentation that keeps puzzles readable and fair.
Accessible learning curve that ramps into clever complexity.
Polished Xbox experience with good performance and achievements.

Cons

Short overall length for players seeking a lengthy experience.
Occasional placement precision can feel finicky in a few puzzles.
Narrative is thin and curious players may want deeper story threads.

Viewfinder on Xbox is a joyously original puzzle adventure. It offers wonder in every image placed, challenges both your lateral thinking and your creativity, and wraps it all in a vibrant, memorable art style. While its story falls short of being truly resonant and die-hard puzzle fans may be left wanting more in terms of raw difficulty, its welcoming attitude, inviting you to play with possibility rather than punish your errors is what puts it in a class of its own.

Viewfinder is simply one of the must-play indie highlights of the Xbox library and is destined to be remembered as both a proof-of-concept and a harbinger of more innovative twists to come.

Jump in, grab a snapshot, and see just what worlds you can create.

XPN Rating: 5 out of 5 (PLATINUM)