Virtual photography game is a window on the world

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I get my bearings on a mountainside path studded with spruces and shrubs. Down to the right is the Lago di Braies in Italy’s South Tyrol, deep blue in the centre but verging on green where the water touches the pebbled shore. To my left are limestone cliffs slowly bleaching in the sun. I raise my camera to the slopes and press the shutter button.

The mountains are not real, and nor is the camera — this is merely your window on the world in Lushfoil Photography Sim, a new game that recreates real locations across the globe for you to capture. But the photo? Well, it’s as real as any digital image, I suppose. The question is, what would induce you to spend time taking photographs in a virtual environment rather than a real one?

“While photography can be accessible, travel might not be easy depending on your situation,” says the game’s developer, Matt Newell. “Lushfoil’s focus isn’t so much on the photo-taking but the locations and atmosphere it surrounds you with.” From the thousands of sacred red gates at Japan’s Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine to the misty plains of Mýrdalssandur in Iceland, these far-flung places are yours to explore for £11.99 or $14.99 rather than thousands in plane tickets.

More and more games are opting to include photography modes: in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, players can take a break from mischief and murder to capture evocative scenes in feudal Japan. And painting games such as Été have shown that it is possible to gamify creative pursuits to charming effect. But Lushfoil is unique in making photography the only gameplay element.

The game’s objectives are light touch: there are images pinned to notice boards for you to recreate in order to unlock new locations, along with hidden collectibles and Easter eggs that open up or change your surroundings. But the emphasis is on shooting for the sheer joy of it, using the same settings, lenses and filters you’d expect to find on a real DSLR camera.

What does a professional make of it? Charlie Bibby, the FT’s chief photographer, offers his perspective. “I was quite surprised by how good it looked graphically,” he says. “And the sound design made a big difference — it helped that you could hear your footsteps as you walked, for example.”

The challenge, however, is finding the motivation to take photographs of places you have no personal connection to, and Bibby finds himself struggling to reconcile the real and the virtual. “Part of landscape photography is existing in a space, understanding that space and articulating it in an image you make,” he says. “But where the landscape is artificial, the fundamental part of that is missing.”

Newell points out that photography is hardly the first activity that games have recreated. The Farming Simulator series has sold more than 40mn copies, and the genre has expanded to include power-washing, surgery and, bizarrely, being a goat. “I figured photo-taking would be a calm, satisfying addition to this list,” says Newell. “But then again, why simulate anything? We should all just go outside, I guess.”

Still, I find myself returning to the virtual shores of Lago di Braies and experimenting with Lushfoil’s camera in a way I might not with a real one. There is a meditative quality to its uncluttered landscapes and piano soundtrack, and Bibby agrees that the experience got him thinking about photography in a more conceptual way.

The ultimate test is whether the images have any value out of context. Would you hang a virtual photograph on a wall? Save it as a desktop background? Send it to a friend? More to the point, is the fact that the answer to all of these questions is likely “no” due to an irrational fear of the new — or because a virtual photograph can never be as resonant as one shot in the real world?

On PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S now