Snapshot preview: Can your camera do this?

A word of advice: if you’re going to attend an even like PAX East, wear comfortable shoes. Between waiting in lines that snake around booths and standing in front of suspended TVs, it’s a rare treat to get a few minutes to rest those barking dogs. I was thankful they were given a brief respite when I plopped into a seat ripped from a minivan and spent some time with Snapshot, a colorful puzzle-platformer about a robot named Pic.

Pic is a charming little rust-colored robot who has the rather unique ability to capture objects with its camera and store them for later use. The camera doesn’t merely duplicate objects, it actually removes them from the world entirely, and Pic can store up to three of pictures at once.

Before I basked in the relative comfort of that displaced car seat, Retro Affect’s Peter Jones explained that the game begins when Pic is activated inside a ransacked laboratory. The robot’s origins are a mystery to both the player and Pic, and the game chronicles its search for its creator and purpose.

The levels I played were a sampling from different parts of the game to demonstrate some of the ways the camera mechanic can be used. The first few levels were rather simple puzzles that introduced the photography mechanic. In addition to the standard platforming controls, the right stick moved a box around the level that represented what Pic was targeting for capture, and the bumpers flipped through the stored objects that Pic could deploy.

It seemed pretty straightforward at first; there were some ledges that were inaccessible, so I used the camera to transport a block from one area to the other in order to create a stepping stone. The brief levels concluded when I collected an enormous glowing orb. The photography mechanic seemed novel, but was really only a fancy way of sticking something in your inventory and bringing it to another place.

But later levels showed more promise and offered a glimpse into other possibilities for the system. Jones explained that the game is broken into five chapters, each representing a different theme for the puzzles. One of the themes is capturing objects in motion, so if an object is photographed while moving, it will maintain its momentum while stored in Pic’s camera. At one point I photographed a boulder as it tumbled toward me, and then later warped that boulder into the sky behind a tower that I needed to knock down. Jones also said later levels would even allow Pic to take photograph of himself, but the team wasn’t sure exactly how that was going to work at this point.

If Retro Affect can fulfill its promise of creating inventive applications for the camera, Snapshot could develop into an innovative game for fans of puzzle platformers. Snapshot should arrive this summer on PC, and Retro Affect is negotiating with publishers for a potential console release.

By Mike Wall at March 14, 2011.

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.