TL;DR – Snapshot is a cute little puzzle platformer that unfortunately eschews Jerry Seinfeld’s advice to “keep them wanting more”. While I didn’t hate the game, I do wish it just had less levels to be honest as a lot of them are just a succession of gimmicks and many of them involved some weirdly precise platforming for a game that’s meant to be focused on puzzle solving. Speaking of which, the gameplay is generally fine albeit for some annoying character controls due to the way that momentum is implemented and the puzzles are often a little on the easy side. The story is minimal, but the soundtrack is nice enough and the art style is appropriately cutesy. Not a bad game by any means, but I have no idea why people kept recommending me this one. Especially as only around 1/50 people who own the game actually bothered to finish it.
Quick Note – Snapshot has two technical issues that you might want to be aware of ahead of time. Firstly the CHEEVOS do not stack, so if you want all of the completion achievements then you’ll need to either deal with downloading saves from the internet or only do the bare minimum before gradually re-watching the ending for each of the completion milestones. Also if you’re playing the game on PC and have a zoom level above 100%, then this will screw with the game and you’ll need to reset your display settings to have zoom at 100%.
Oh Snapshot, you little scamp thinking you could cower away behind all those games I didn’t get in a bundle over a decade ago. Thinking you could avoid the CRITICAL GAZE of my all mighty blog and it’s dedicated following of uhm… 5 people who don’t even read most of these “reviews”? Well you were wrong buddy, because after vaguely remembering a good friend’s recommendation I’ve finally decided to track you down and figure out why the hell he thought you were a good game. Which sounds harsh but honestly, while I enjoyed the first hour or so of the game I spent most of my 6 hours wondering why everyone seemed to be leaving nice reviews. After all, a mere 2% of players actually bothered finishing this game even though someone in a rush could easily bang it out in a couple of hours. Like any good flatterer, I’ll start with a positive and note that I really liked the central concept of the game which is a puzzle platformer where you can snapshot (GEDDIT???) various items within a stage to then place again somewhere else. This means that finding and getting items constitutes much of the level design, with many items often being blocked by “no photography” zones that prevent you from snapping a quick pic until you’ve done something – generally involving hitting a switch or putting a box on something. These little puzzles are never too hard, but most of the time offer a modest little teaser of challenge and for those who aren’t satisfied, each stage has both a bonus “objective” of sorts to snap a pic of, plus there are time trials for every stage which are genuinely pretty tough.
With all that being said, the fact that the puzzles are kinda easy is a tough sell for a game that bills itself as a puzzle game. After all, if you bought a book of crosswords or Sudoku puzzles and found out that they were all a piece of piss you’d probably feel smug for a couple minutes and then be a tad disappointed. While Snapshot has a couple of puzzles me and my COLOSSAL intellect found a bit challenging (they took MINUTES to solve I tell you), most are pretty basic to be honest. The game’s real challenge is instead not the puzzle part of this puzzle platformer, but the platformer part due to a combination of finicky controls with weird momentum mechanics and how annoying it can be to need to take a picture of something at the perfect moment for it to “solve” a puzzle. To give examples of both, our plucky protagonist can’t just step down from a ledge without flinging himself without gusto, meaning you need to jump for these small little gaps and frankly the jump momentum is also kinda screwed up especially once you start needing to bounce off various objects. As for the snapshotting, the principle is sound but sometimes (i.e. more often than you’d like) you’ll need to do something like place an object while you’re doing a jump so that you can bounce off it or not drown in lava like an absolute loser. Unfortunately this is harder than it sounds because your lovely little camera not only needs to capture pictures exactly, but remembers where things were within the boundaries of the photo, which will then occasionally cause it to refuse to place an object where you actually bloody wanted it. To add insult to injury, you can rotate objects but it controls like absolute arse and you may as well shove a tablet stylus up your bunghole and control it that way for how intuitive it feels. This becomes especially apparent when you need to rotate the objects your deploying, for them to actually be useful. Sometimes you need to remember the momentum of a falling object, so you can rotate it at an angle to use it to shoot upwards so that you can then knock something over. A task which should be easy but due to your pedantic camera rushing to let you place objects, and the pain in the butt rotation controls this can quickly become surprisingly annoying. When playing Snapshot I frequently knew the solution to a puzzle, but would still spend minutes trying to persuade the controls to let me just solve the damn thing and move on with my life.
As mentioned earlier, there is also an additional “objective” within each stage – namely to take a photo of a random object. These are fun to hunt for and generally require either a bit of exploration, but a bit of extra puzzle solving. There are two catches with them however. Firstly you need to hang on to that photo(!), so now you can only have 2 usable photos for capturing and placing objects at a time as opposed to the normal 3. Secondly the game doesn’t believe in checkpoints, I can only assume because the Berlin Wall had checkpoints and nothing related to that odious symbol of Stalinist tyranny can EVER be allowed to infest fun little indie games. As a consequence I quite often found myself 4 minutes into a level, after having spent most of those minutes pissing around persuading to do what I wanted, only to see the optional bonus objective area and scoff. No thanks buddy. I’m not braving insta-death spike walls for the off chance that I can get a picture of a dohickey that doesn’t do anything, in a game where the completion achievements are totally broken anyway. Other than these little bonus objectives, the game doesn’t really have any content outside of the stages of which there are 3 per level, with 9 levels per world and 4 worlds for a total of 108 stages. Which sounds good but honestly they could’ve culled the bottom third and been better off for it, fortunately you can skip around 4 levels (so 12 stages) per world without any consequences. With that being said, you must ALWAYS do the first level with it’s 3 stages otherwise you will be verboten from playing any of the others in that world and thus BANNED from getting the ending.
So why do I think that they could’ve just had less stages and ended up with a better game? Well the simple reason is that most levels follow the same pattern: Introduce gimmick in very short stage 1, implement gimmick in a fun way for stage 2, implement draw out level for stage 3 to prove MASTERY. Which in and of itself is fine, but when the gimmick sucks it means you just get fed up around the end of stage 2 because your character is just ever so slightly annoying to control and the gimmick isn’t fun and now you’ve slipped on some stupid jump so you have to do it all again and half the level is waiting for shit to happen and you already figured out the goddamn solution 5 minutes ago and ugh. My personal “favourite” examples would be any level from World 4 involving the magnetic push/pull because it’s imprecise as fuck and annoying because those levels are riddled with insta-kill spikes, in stages where the gimmick is that you have magnets messing with your momentum. They’re not all BAD but as a gimmick it just kinda sucks. Same with the cloud focused stages, which were fun-ish at first but man once you manage to fall between them it just feels like a slap in the face because it looks like there’s no gap there and then WHOOPS do it all go again lmao. Then sometimes you get a gimmick like the big bombs you can jump off that are just fun and kinda silly but before you know it, you’ve done that level and there are no more big bombs to play with, because we’re onto another shit gimmick at breathtaking speed. My point basically is that it feels the devs came up with like 80 ideas for some puzzles and threw them all in the game, instead of sticking with the best dozen or so. There are meditating monkeys that cause a platform to move between them for example and those levels were actually really fun, because you had to account for obstacles and the platform timing while being able to move those amiable apes around. Then they stopped being in the game 20 minutes later so we could have a bunch of shitty ass magnet levels. To each their own but this is the indie puzzle equivalent of sticking the whole pot of pasta at the wall to see what sticks.
Yet in spite of finding a lot of levels to just blow chunks, I’m not going to be too mean to an indie game that was very cheap like 10 years ago and honestly was done by people who just wanted to make a fun game. I think the fact that they have a thoroughly paltry 2% finish rate is indictment enough, but I don’t Snapshot. I don’t get who is earnestly recommending it either, considering that it’s a real hit or miss smorgasbord of an experience that has been forgotten by the gaming industry but you know, you could do much worse than Snapshot honestly. At least the graphics are nice, the game has a cutesy air and a very minimal plot that’s still enough to keep you semi-interested in carrying on. The levels are sometimes bad, sometimes good, sometimes bland but overall there’s enough good stages that it’s worth a quick bash for the curious. As for the soundtrack it’s just pretty good, so thumbs up to the music man. I wouldn’t listen to it outside of the game and it’s not OUTSTANDING or anything, but it’s pretty fitting and pleasant enough. As for the amount of content, well you get over a hundred stages which often have bonus objectives and the time trials are seriously difficult so if you wanted to be an obsessive, this game is actually damn good value for money. For the more casual player, you’ll just get bored before finishing it to be totally honest. You really have to be either PRO-INDIE GAMES YEAH INDIE DEVS RULE SCREW THE MAINSTREAM MANNNNNN or just love puzzle platformers to really care about this one. Yet like I said, I don’t hate and just wish they’d been more prudent about which levels they actually bothered to release. Hell they could’ve just said “here are the main stages, and here are the bonus stages” or something and it would’ve been fine. Sometimes less is more, like if I’d eaten less pies I’d probably be more attractive.
In conclusion then, Snapshot is a game I don’t really recommend despite not hating it and enjoying some of the levels. Unfortunately it’s just kind of a drag for many stages, and while the visuals, soundtrack and the like are charming they’re not enough to push me through a game with some annoying controls. Like WHY does my freaking camera cursor MOVE WITH ME (so now I can’t take a picture of the bounce jump I’ll need again once I land) and why does this then IMPACT MY MOMENTUM FOR JUMPS who the fuck thought that was a good idea???? In all seriousness though Snapshot is an OK/10 puzzle game from a bygone era when indie games were still kinda new and exciting and as a consequence I can forgive the bad levels in favour of the good ones. The developers had to put into making this game a reality because guess what, it’s not yet another goddamn UE5/Unity game. Which means I gave it the benefit of the doubt, played through it til the end with 51% overall completion and… honestly I don’t know if it was worth it. Therefore Snapshot does not get a recommendation, but I’m not gonna give it any particular hatred either. It’s just an OK game. No more, no less, if you got it in a bundle maybe take a look, otherwise meh don’t worry about it.