Three Gorgeous, Unreleased Games We Just Played That Should Have Your Attention

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A screenshot from Viewfinder featuring multiple different art styles in picture frames.

Viewfinder is an upcoming single-player puzzle game from Sad Owl Studios that will challenge you to see its shifting realities from different angles and viewpoints. You can use pictures of locations as means of changing reality, like holding up a shot of a bridge and literally pasting it into your world as a means of traversing a large gap, or turning a photo of a building on its side and using that wall as a ramp.

A screenshot from Viewfinder featuring some black and white and some color elements.

Viewfinder is set in a simulation built years ago by a group of friends, so there’s a retrofuturistic vibe to much of its art direction. You can also rewind time in Viewfinder, so if you fall off a crumbling bridge (as I do early on in my demo) you can scoot back to before you were a bumbling dolt and move forward as if nothing happened. Developer Matt Stark tells me the team doesn’t want Viewfinder to be too difficult or punishing, but more of an exercise in perspective.

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Though I couldn’t get a firm answer on how long Viewfinder is, Stark confirmed that it’s “longer than Portal, but shorter than The Witness.” You can check out a demo of it on PS5 right now.

A Beastieball screenshot showing off some Pokemon-like beasts playing volleyball.

What if a game of volleyball met Pokémon? Beastieball, an upcoming game from the studio behind Chicory: A Colorful Tale, answers that question. The turn-based volleyball RPG puts you in the shoes of an up-and-coming Beastieball coach. You don’t play the game, but the cutie beasts do, and you need to help teach them how to get even better at volleyball.

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Just moments into my first Beastieball match, I break out in hysterical laughter. After the other team returns my beastie’s serve, I send the ball back over the net and it absolute beams one of the dudes in the face, comically smushing his neck and head like a Looney Tunes cartoon. This is where it feels like Pokémon, as you go back-and-forth picking moves and hoping that they best the other squad’s.

A Beastieball selection screen at the start of the game that asks you to pick between three beasts.

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