Viewfinder

Viewfinder hands you an instant camera and a problem: a chasm, a missing platform, a power source on a ledge you can't reach. The camera's trick is that anything photographed can be printed and then placed back into the world as physical, walkable, climbable geometry. Photograph a bridge somewhere it exists, walk to where you need a bridge, place the photo, and the bridge becomes real where you put it.

The rules grow more interesting the further you go. You can photograph paintings and turn them into terrain. You can use sketches, postcards and screenshots in the same way. The world's perspective rules, scale rules and orientation rules are all open to manipulation through the right photograph placed in the right spot — the puzzles teach you the system one quiet trick at a time until you're routinely doing things that shouldn't be possible.

Multiple hub worlds are linked by cohesive themes but each layers in its own complications and twists on the core idea. Exploration doubles as learning: you discover both new uses for the camera and the larger fiction about why this world exists and who built it. The narrative is player-driven enough that newcomers can stay close to the puzzles, while players who want to dig in will find a substantial story underneath.

The whole experience is single-player and runs several hours longer than most one-mechanic puzzle games — Viewfinder keeps finding new corners of its central idea right up to the end, which is exactly what a game built on this premise needs to do.