The concept of Lushfoil Photography Sim is very appealing to me, a trained professional photographer who no longer has the required physical capabilities for nature photography. I can barely hold a DSLR anymore, and it breaks my heart. The game features detailed recreations of some extraordinarily beautiful international locations. You can thoroughly explore each environment. An eye for detail is handy for replicating the perspective of shown photographs and finding hidden secrets (like things hidden along the pathways). You are sometimes rewarded for your efforts. And to sum up my feelings on the game, I can say that Lushfoil Photography Sim is good, but not nearly as good as I expected.
This is not an open-world game, and I’m good with that. Staying on the path and not having to parkour up the side of mountains is what I would expect from a good walking sim. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be terribly life-like or walkable, would it? Looking at its genre of walking sim, the gameplay in Lushfoil Photography Sim is great. Wandering around these real-world locations, soaking up every rock, tree, or sunbeam you can… it is truly a zen experience. Each environment has a bulletin board containing photos. These are the ones I mentioned that you need to replicate. You begin with two locations, and unlock more by recreating those bulletin board photos (which isn’t difficult if you have a keen eye). This is the only hand-holding players receive, save for a few quick tutorials and brief tips in the field.
As a photography sim, though, I find myself torn. It has a phenomenal amount of camera controls that closely imitate the interface and options available with most DSLR cameras. My personal photography journey started with an old Pentax K1000 SLR and has moved through several Nikon cameras, but I also have extensive experience with Canon, Sony, and Fuji, thanks to a past job in a college’s photography equipment rental room. I know mid-level professional DSLRs and their controls. (I also have experience with old-school medium format cameras, the kind with bellows, a giant tripod, and a full-sided negative. I actually own one that functions.) I’m not trying to brag, I’m trying to say that I understand cameras. And I can definitively say that the camera mechanics in Lushfoil Photography Sim is essentially the same as what you find in contemporary, professional DSLR cameras.
However, I find the game lacks the same intuitive controls as the types of cameras it mimics. It always takes time to get used to a new camera, but I couldn’t get used to these controls regardless of whether I was playing with a mouse/keyboard combination or an Xbox controller. No matter how long I played, using the D-pad to change the options never became second nature. I want to change my aperture, shutter speed, and lens on the fly. The lenses aren’t individually selected, either, so sometimes I needed to choose a new camera from the non-intuitive camera menu. At least when you press Y (controller), a list of commands comes up.
You’ll find items in the camera menu that some people may ignore, including aspect ratio, landscape to portrait format, and photo size. But it is all so important: in life, you want the best-looking photo possible, even at large sizes. Something that I love about the camera-specific gameplay is that your photos are stored in a folder locally, and instead of looking for it, there’s a helpful link in-game. It’s a bit weird having to hit Quit to see it, but I’ll take it. The best part? The folder is named DCIM. (If you know, you know… but in case you don’t, it’s the name of the folder that digital cameras save to.)
Something that seems as simple as a walking sim can be anything but. What is the speed at which players should walk? Can they run? Can they jump? Are they limited to trails, or can they explore freely? Lushfoil Photography Sim made all the right decisions there. And then the right decisions end. The game goes horribly wrong for me when it comes to motion sickness. Someone playing a walking sim should not feel sick. Period. There should be a focus on accessibility and making a game open to as many people as possible.
Here, Lushfoil Photography Sim made many wrong decisions. It’s worth noting that I very rarely feel any motion sickness from games, and when I do, it is mild at best (often thanks to obvious accessibility options). First, I had no idea there were controls to help it until I came across a hint after playing for over half an hour. That’s way too long. Either label the menu options as “motion sickness” or display something at the beginning to tell players that they should be checking the visual clarity settings. So I changed all of the listed preferences and kept playing.
I can still only play for ten minutes at a time without terrible motion sickness setting in: to me, this is a bad headache plus severe nausea and dizziness. I had to keep playing in these smaller bursts (hence why this review is being posted two weeks post-launch). The time it got its absolute worst, I had been playing for about 30 minutes with the changed settings to test them out. I am not exaggerating when I say that I stood up slowly and still very nearly fainted. It took some time playing dead on the cold bathroom floor for the dizziness and accompanying nausea to subside. Out of the hundreds of first-person games I’ve played over the years, I have never reacted anywhere close to this before—and not after only half an hour!
It actually upsets me to write all of that, because the photographic premise of Lushfoil Photography Sim is so close to my heart. I want to spend hours wandering, getting lost in new worlds I would never see otherwise… but I couldn’t. Instead, I played in short bursts for the sake of this review and to give the title a fair shot. Unfortunately, the motion sickness isn’t something I can ignore.
I came into Lushfoil Photography Sim expecting to love it, and maybe that was a mistake. I do like it. I plan on returning to it for little escapes sometimes (emphasis on little). There is just something I love about taking a view that countless others have seen and putting your own twist on it; as it turns out, that feeling can also exist thanks to video games. Unfortunately, the camera controls never became intuitive, and accessibility around motion sickness is lacking. Lushfoil Photography Sim has a solid base, but I could never recommend it to someone without also pointing out the heavy negatives.
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