Snapshot
Developer: Kyle Pulver and Peter Jones
Platform: Windows PC (trailer available)
Nominations: Excellence in Design
Website
Description: Use a camera to pull objects out of the world, and use your photos to drop them back in at more convenient locations.

Adam’s Thoughts:
Remember that puzzle in the first level of Braid where you have to rearrange parts of a portrait so you can use them as platforms? No? Well, go play it. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

…so yeah, Snapshot is like that, but instead stretched out to a whole game. The mechanics are a bit different in that you can capture/release photos wherever you like and you only really trap a foreground object, but the idea is much the same.

Unfortunately, there’s no demo up yet, and there’s nothing in the trailer to indicate that this mechanic will amount to more than glorified drag-and-drop mousing. However leaving the evaluation at that cursory dismissal discounts the fact that the game is up for design excellence. It may yet prove that there is clever gameplay to be wrung from a game that uses a level editor as its primary play mechanic (sort of a Sim City meets Little Big Planet thing). We’ll let you know how it shapes up.

Katie’s Thoughts
Snapshot‘s website sure is cheery about the fact that no, they don’t have a release date and that no, they don’t have a demo you can play, either. They do have a some snapshots of the game (sorry, couldn’t help it), as well as a video. The game appears to be a 2-D platformer, with the trick being that you progress through the stage and around obstacles using your highly scientific magical camera (I’m not making that up). You take reference photos of things that you will then drop out of the photos and into the real world to solve puzzles.

Games like Pokémon Snap, Fatal Frame, and to a lesser extent, Bioshock have all used photography as a game mechanic. Snapshot is certainly a different take on the idea of using a camera in a game, and it will be interesting to see where this idea takes us.

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Tags:   Excellence in Design · GDC · IGFNo Comments

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