Preview: Snapshot by Retro Affect
Is it possible for a picture to be worth more than a thousand words? Photography in games has largely been used as a creative diversion. Pokémon Snap, the 1999 Nintendo 64 release, centered its concept around taking pictures and adding them to your collection. Dead Rising allowed for Frank West to take pictures of the unfolding carnage around him whenever he wasn’t busy dismembering zombies.
Retro Affect, creators of Depict1, now looks to take photography in games a step further, with Snapshot.
Snapshot takes photography and applies it to a platform setting. Players take control of Pic, a robot with a camera built into his body. Pic is placed in a world filled with hostile enemies and complex puzzles, and the only way for him to escape is to use his camera. The power of the camera is truly something to behold, as Pic can literally remove objects from the world with a single snapshot. It’s a literal case of cut and paste. This becomes the key to solving puzzles, as Pic can use objects taken from the world and reuse them whenever necessary.
The photography aspect of the game is made more remarkable thanks to a new physics engine. Using this engine, not only can Pic take pictures of objects, but he can also take those objects in their current state. If Pic captures an object in motion and pastes the picture in a different situation, the object will stay in motion. This allows players to solve certain puzzles, defeat enemies, and flip switches. With Pic able to capture nearly anything in the world and in various states, Snapshot offers multiple solutions to its mind-bending puzzles.
Retro Affect showed off the most recent Snapshot trailer at PAX East to much acclaim. The game has been in the works since 2009 and the PAX East trailer shows that the game has come a long way from its early concept art. The final version will offer five worlds of platforming adventure alongside a level editor. There is no timetable for a demo or a final release. Snapshot is coming soon to PC.
