The Game Awards 2022 was full of game announcements as expected, but one of the most surprising new indie titles announced isViewfinder, a game by Scottish development company SOS Games. What makesViewfindersuch a surprising reveal is that it originated from a tech demo released by one of the game’s developers, Matt Stark. The game has gone far from the original tech demo by this point and appears to be aligning itself with other famous spatial puzzle games likeSuperliminalandThe Witness.
The Witnessmade a splashas legendary indie developer Jonathan Blow’s follow-up title after the breakout success of the time-traveling platformerBraid. The game focused on a combination of grid-based puzzle systems but made heavy use of perspective tricks and required elaborate environmental cues to expand its puzzle design to combine every aspect of the island players explore. In a similar vein,Superliminalrelied on optical illusions and perspective mechanics to allow players to navigate space and change the size of objects based on the player’s relative position to them.Viewfindersimilarly relies on careful attention to environmental detail to produce mind-bending results, but its development origins are far from similar.
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Matt Stark, as described by his personal website, is a 27-year-old Scottish developer who was studying Computer Game Technology at Abertay University until 2020. Stark posted a brief Twitter video on June 17, 2025, which showcased examples of the picture-taking technology that would become the core of the gameplay. It went viral from there, as the original tweet of his tech demo currently stands at over 200,000 likes and 66,000 retweets. The demand for a game using his technology was undeniable. From there Stark dropped out of school and dedicated himself to working on Viewfinder. Since then, based on development updates fromViewfinder’s Twitter account and this newly released trailer that SOS Games has taken the concept to very exciting places.
It is difficult to explain the technology behindViewfinder’s physics-defying mechanics, but in the words of its developer: “When the player takes a photo I duplicate the environment, make it grayscale and slice the meshes to remove anything outside the photo. When they place it into the world I slice the environment’s meshes to make a hole for the photo.” Much in the way thatSuperliminal’s object resizing mechanicrelies on taking information from the players' relative position to seamlessly modify the environment,Viewfinderis elegantly carving out slices of its world and remaking them to fit the exact perspective of photographs so that players can reshape the world effortlessly. The result is as fascinating as it is stunning.
Analyzing The Viewfinder Trailer From The Game Awards 2022
The trailer forViewfinderbegins with the player character walking into an image of the original tweet that led to the game’s development. From there, various applications of the perspective-bendingpicture-taking mechanicare showcased, including stationary cameras, handheld cameras, and the various ways the player will be able to hold photos against the landscape, rotate them, and then release them to produce entirely new environments to explore.
One especially compelling new feature in the trailer is the way that the color within photographs will impact the environment. In the trailer, when a black and white photo is applied to the world, the player is able to take objects from that environment and place them within their own full-color world to solve puzzles. The sharpclash of aesthetics and color palettesis executed elegantly, and when players are given the chance to experience the game themselves, it is almost certain to produce some beautiful screenshots.
The application of sound-based objects remains somewhat unclear, but the use of Edvard Munch’sThe Screamas a replicable sound source seems to be another exciting mechanic for players to experiment with. Unfortunately, there is currently no official date for when players will be able to get their hands on the exciting world ofViewfinder. If the success ofSuperliminalandThe Witnessare anything to go by, players will be ready when the game does release.
Viewfinderis in development and will be released for PC and PS5.
