By turns minimalist and luxurious, this is a thrilling exploration of the art of photography.
In Iceland, when the mists descend, perspective is scrambled. Robbed of context and references, the very small can be mistaken for the very large. A boulder becomes a mountain. A stream becomes a river. With a camera in hand, it’s a pleasant task to wander around the pitted black earth and hunt for these instances. Frame things just right, leaving out the tell-tale stakes of a fence or a tentative spreading of moss, and you can create your own Himalayas. The eye is eager to be tricked. The brain is eager to fill in any absences. Click.
This is the world of Lushfoil Photography Sim – or one of them anyway. By turns minimalist and luxurious, this luminous game sends you out into a series of rangy dioramas with a DSLR in your hand and a single objective: take some pictures. A lakeside in Italy where the white rocks could be mistaken for snow. A forest temple in Japan where grey wood and the humming beige of a distant city allows each bright red gate to ignite the air inside your viewfinder. The French Alps, an Australian beach. Little circuits of artful wilderness that provide the perfect impetus for picture-making without ever leading you too aggressively towards a single, best shot.
I’ve wandered for hours in even the smallest of these spaces, following paths, having strange encounters, with a passing hare in a forest, say, or a couple of vending machines standing guard by a padlocked gate in the woods. I tell myself that I am waiting for a moment – the moment! I am waiting for angles and light to come together and suggest a picture, something that only exists from a certain perspective, say, but from that certain perspective seems utterly unmissable.
That’s the plan. In truth, often I forget what I’m doing and become intoxicated by wandering. I circuit that Italian lake again and again, watching the way the skybox arcs around me, its paper mountains stretching and looping while never spoiling the illusion of reality. I move back and forth on the Australian beach, looking inland, to a muddle of trees and potential routes through them, trying to work out if I can see a twill of smoke rising in the air.
But then I spot something singular again and I’m reminded of the DSLR in my hand, a complex, often intimidating device, which here is offered up in layers. Raise it to your eye with a button, focus with a half-squeeze of the trigger and take a picture with a full squeeze. That can be enough if you want – you’ll still end up with great pictures. But then there’s a button to move from landscape to portrait, there’s a button to bring up the grid lines I like when I take pictures in the real world. There’s another button that introduces a whole world of dizzying photographic complexity: shutter speed, ISO, aperture stuff. Onwards and outwards. This kind of thing has kept thousands of people away from photography I think, but here you can dip in and out of it, meddle with this attribute and that one and see what they do. The spareness of the UI encourages you to tinker, even before you wander through the world and find a prompt that leads to a mini-tutorial.
All of which is to say Lushfoil’s a truly brilliant introduction to real-world photography, I think. And I say that as someone who likes to wander around with an old Yashica TLR, but has to have a cheat sheet of apertures and F numbers and what-does-this-do ready on my phone. In the real world I’m used to film, which is expensive and limited, and that’s another reason why Lushfoil feels so generous. It’s a digital game about digital photography and you can just take as many pictures as you want and immediately see if they’re any good or not.
Lushfoil’s at its best for me when it’s aimless wandering – a camera walk through a beautiful location. But there’s more here, too, and I think the more game-like stuff folds into the camera stuff in interesting ways. There are collectibles, like other forms of camera and paper aeroplanes to find and mess about with. And there are location specific collectibles and a board of suggested photos that help you open up new parts of the world to explore. I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting level-gating here, but I think it works. It’s fun to track down the suggested photos, and the system is loose enough to encourage you to take your own version of the image – that’s one really good way to learn about your own eye, your own photographic take on things. But beyond that, in the hunting for doodads and those suggested vistas, you’re learning the key thing about photography: you’re learning to pay attention, to sift the world around you for potential photos, to notice as much as you can.
Last night, the hunt for a specific view of that beach in Australia led me into entirely new territory. I turned around from the spawn point, and went in the opposite direction to the one I usually take. Over rocks. Through a sparse sort of forest. Right up to the point where I thought the game would turn me around and set me back on the correct path.
But I was already on the correct path. Over a boulder and round a few trees and there it was, a mini beach, a horseshoe of white sand overlooking its own little ocean. I raised my camera, and then I lowered it again. How best to capture this?
Code for Lushfoil Photography Sim was provided by the publisher.
