Photographs is a moving short game about regret. and original blend of narrative and puzzles.

It's a series of short episodes, each telling a story about a tragedy, eventually tied up by a credits-epilogue sequence that might even make you cry. It's powerful narrative for such a short and seemingly simple game.

It has a very interesting and original concept, even if the execution is not always perfect. It's well worth experiencing.

The soundtrack, the pixel art and the voice acting (narrators) are all extraordinary.

The gaming format alternates between a short snippet of narration of around 5 seconds, followed by a short puzzle that should take a few seconds to solve.

The narrative is made rich by many details. A hint on what to photograph. A dollhouse-like background setting, which allows you to see what different people are up to. The puzzles also intermesh with the narration snippets by, in a certain way, representing the mental and physical challenges the character is going through. It's such a smart and subtle form of storytelling, it makes me lament the game didn't get more traction.

The game has some pacing issues, though. As the characters begin to face their big dilemma/turning point, the puzzles turn more complex. It should be fine in theory -- myself I'm a big fan of the puzzle genre -- yet in the execution, you end up spending 30 seconds, or a minute, or if you get stuck even several minutes, in order to get 5 seconds of story as a reward. The story slows to a crawl and the puzzles begin to feel like annoying obstacles. In every single story, I could feel getting gradually more distracted by the annoyance of wanting to rush through a puzzle too complex to be solved in a couple seconds. Clearly something went aloud amiss.

Luckily, the dev did allow for a workaround and you can turn on hints/skips in the settings. That made the experience much more enjoyable for me.

The game has multiple endings too, which is a nice touch. You also need to be aware of a "cheat code" embedded by the dev if you want to see the other endings without playing through the story again, though. But it's worth it.

All in all, the issues being addressed, Photographs feels like a little passion project by an indie dev who had a vision, which could use more tweaking, but it's also more than worth experiencing as is.

I truly hope the dev keeps making similar games in that same vein. With some tweaking and adjusting, better execution to the great concept, it could truly become something great.

A solid 7/10 but I'd suggest skipping some puzzles for better enjoyment.