Perfect photography sim! I'm excited to sink a lot more hours into this.

Workshop support would be awesome for this game!

I don't think there's anything on the market that comes even close to it, the game is beautiful and the atmosphere without the stories is very reminiscent of Firewatch to me.

I want to start off with a small amount of context. I've always loved photography but sadly stopped taking photos about 6 years ago because I stopped travelling and my Nikon D800 has just been a dust collector ever since.

The premise of this game is simply to give you a big beautiful environment and a camera with full manual control and go take some photos around the place. In my first 30 minutes I had no direction, I was just enjoying myself and taking photos randomly like I would normally if I was on location. Shortly after I found out that you're required to take specific photos in certain locations in order to progress and unlock new locations to shoot.

I haven't gotten very far, only unlocking half the locations but it's relatively easy if you spend time looking around and vaguely remembering where you've tracked previously. It's almost like playing Slender-man where you need to collect 8 pages but here it's 8 photos and you can only really walk on a narrow foot path to each location.

The main reason why you'll even think about trying this game is the visual presentation. It's really the highlight which separates this actual photo sim from most games with a photo mode. I would say it beats every single other game with a photo mode with both picture quality and photo realism as well as ease of use.

Once you take photos of all the locations on the 'photo bounty board' you'll unlock new pathways in the map as well as a new lighting setting e.g daytime, golden hour etc. I've only unlocked this on two different zones but it was such a cool feeling because it changes the mood completely even though it's the same exact location.

The developer clearly wanted to get the feeling right when using a camera and I can say that the sound design is pretty good. The winding of the motor inside the lens as you autofocus, the sound of the shutter sounds pretty realistic. I can only speak for Western Australia since I live here but he really captured the sounds of what it's like being on location with all the birds chirping, waves crashing on the shore to even the horrible awful flies so thanks for that, Matt.

The technical performance is where I have my concerns for this game. I recently bought myself a brand new PC about 2 weeks ago running a RTX 5080 and 9800X3D. Whilst the experience for myself was smooth, I struggle to think how this game would perform on let's say a 1080 as they recommend. There's absolutely no way I could see myself wanting to play a game about photography with lowered graphical quality. That's the antithesis of what this experience is about. Furthermore, I found the far backgrounds to be very low quality. The render distance for mountains simply isn't far enough. It needs to have an option like Minencraft where you can render as far as the eye can see at the cost of performance. The city back drop such as the Japanese location is also bad to look at and also doesn't make sense visually because the light sources are coming from two different directions and it looks goofy, like if the sun hypothetically was coming from the West side, in the background the shadows are casted on the West side and it makes no sense. This specific issue I have is easy to ignore because you can just simply walk past and carry on taking photos normally but it's just something I observed, the game isn't perfect.


To finish off I do have a few suggestions but as I said earlier I haven't unlocked much in this space so if they are already in the game, apologies, haven't made it that far yet.

- The ability to use a medium format camera (I've never seen or experienced one before, it would be cool to try in a game like this.)
- Give the option to change the live view so it's like a DSLR where you have no idea how the photo will come out and all you can rely on the light meter to get accurate exposure. It's the best way to learn quickly how light works.
-Focus peaking like you would find on a mirrorless camera, it'll make the screenshots with manual focus significantly more sharp.
-RTX reflections at a minimum because screen space reflections losses a lot of detail when you're looking down at the water with a zoom camera.

Overall I think this will be a solid experience for those who enjoy photography or want to just try shoot outside in the comfort of their own home. I can't say for sure if this is a way to learn photography since I already know how a DSLR camera works but I don't see why it wouldn't help you get to grips with it.