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I receive my bearings on a mountainside path dotted with spicy and shrubs. To the right is the Lago di Braies in the southern Italian Tyrol, the deep blue in the center but in rod on the green where the water touches the shore of pebbles. On my left are the limestone cliffs which slowly whiten the sun. I raise my camera on the slopes and I press the trigger.
The mountains are not real, and the camera is not either Sim of Luxules photographyA new game that recreates real locations around the world to capture. But the photo? Well, it's as real as any digital image, I suppose. The question is, what would encourage you to spend time taking photos in a virtual environment rather than a real?
“Although photography can be accessible, travel may not be easy depending on your situation,” said the game developer Matt Newell. “”LushfoilThe objective is not so much about taking photos, but on the locations and the atmosphere that it surrounds you. “Thousands of sacred red doors in the fussimi inari-taisha sanctuary from Japan to the misty plains of Mýrdalsandur in Iceland, these distant places are yours to explore for £ 11.99 or $ 14.99 rather than thousands of plane tickets.
More and more games choose to include modes of photography: in Assassin's Creed Shadowsplayers can take a break in the misdeeds and the murder at capture evocative scenes in feudal Japan. And paint games such as Summer have shown that it is possible to gamify creative activities with a charming effect. But Lushfoil is unique to make photography the only gameplay element.
The objectives of the game are light: there are pinned images to notice boards to recreate in order to unlock new locations, as well as hidden collectibles and Easter eggs that open or change your environment. But the emphasis is on the shooting for the pure joy of it, using the same parameters, objectives and filters that you expect to find on a real DSLR camera.
What is a professional in fact? Charlie Bibby, the chief photographer of the FT, offers his point of view. “I was quite surprised by the quality of graphic quality,” he says. “And the sound design has made a big difference – it helped you can hear your steps while you are walking, for example.”
The challenge, however, is to find the motivation to take photos of places with which you have no personal link, and Bibby finds himself reconciling the real and the virtual. “Part of the landscape photography exists in a space, including this space and the articulation in an image you create,” he says. “But where the landscape is artificial, the fundamental part of this is missing.”
Newell stresses that photography is not the first activity that games have recreated. THE Agricultural simulator The series has sold more than 40 million copies, and the genus has widened to include power washingsurgery and, strangely, Go goat. “I thought that taking photos would be a calm and satisfactory addition to this list,” said Newell. “But there again, why simulate anything? We should all go out, I suppose.”
However, I find myself returning to the virtual shores of Lago di Braies and to experiment LushfoilCamera in a way that I could not with a real one. There is a meditative quality in its clean landscapes and its piano soundtrack, and Bibby agrees that experience made it think of photography in a more conceptual way.
The ultimate test is whether the images have a value out of context. Do you want to hang a virtual photo on a wall? Record it in office background? Send it to a friend? More specifically, is the fact that the answer to all these questions is probably “no” because of an irrational fear of the new – or because a virtual photograph can never be as resonant as a single blow in the real world?
On PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X / S now
