Viewfinder Review (Special Agent Scooby)
This is a wonderful game, I deeply enjoyed it and honestly it was a nice soft fun. The story is compelling and interesting, the emotional beats are well crafted, the companions aren't annoying and all in all it was a nice experience with plenty of easy "aha!" moments that make you feel like the smartest person alive.
Do I recommend this game? Unfortunately, I just can't recommend it as a puzzler. At $32.85 AUD it is staggeringly overpriced for what you get, which is a game that's barely 3 hours long and fumbles the capacity to be truly brilliant as a puzzler. This reminds me more of a Naughty Dog game, where the actual gameplay is not challenging to better allow yourself to be immersed in the world and the story. That's totally fine for a linear story telling game, but when Viewfinder is tagged as a Puzzle game (and steam is comparing it to games such as Portal and Portal 2) you'd hope that the puzzles would be the forefront of the gameplay not the story.
The puzzles (even the optional "challenge" puzzles) are easy. Really easy. Your biggest puzzle sometimes is trying to figure out where the exit teleport is so you can actually do the simple step to reach it. This is really such a shame, because this game had everything going for it to be a challenging perspective warping puzzler and I just don't think it delivered aside from one or two levels which introduced fresh and exciting concepts but never expanded properly upon them. I feel like this is half a game, that I just finished learning all the mechanics and I'm right about to start applying them and then the game is over.