The shooter is one of the three main archetypes of games, alongside RPG and the newly emerged Strand genre. Unfortunately, most in the genre provide the player with a gun to do the shooting with, leaving a bit of mess in their wake. Photography games give you all the satisfaction of a well-timed and perfectly aimed headshot, but instead of deleting something from existence, you get a copy of it to pin on your fridge or post on Twitter. Make you think, huh?
In celebration of the triumph of photography games over their first-person counterparts, here are some of the best camera games to hone your shutterfinger.
New Pokemon Snap
Fresh out of the gate this weekend, and putting our minds back on track of the best photography games we've played, it's New Pokemon Snap. A straight upgrade of one of the best rail shooters of all time on the N64, the new version adds even more Pokemon and interactions in their environments, plus you can put STICKERS all over your photos. Technology has really advanced.
NUTS
This is a great spin on the point-and-click genre, as you set up wildlife camera traps to catch the secret life of squirrels – and end up on the tail of a bona fide mystery. Figure out what's really going on in this forest, all with a delightfully colorful aesthetic and smart puzzle-like gameplay to solve your camera trap problems.
Alba
A lovely outdoor adventure for you to wander around at your leisure. Alongside NUTS, Alba is available on Apple Arcade, which gives you the perfect medium to play through a game where you take smartphone photos of birds and creatures to identify them. Perfect for if the weather outside isn't that nice but you want to go on a nature hike anyway.
Dead Rising
Not strictly a camera-only game, but it does feature Frank West, famed photojournalist who has covered warzones, don't you know? In fact, given the game's helicopter cinematic introduces you to the camera gameplay before any other mechanic means it's surely just a photography game with a zombie survival action RPG tacked on? The camera bits of Dead Rising were some of the game's most delightfully daft moments, giving you extra points if you manage to capture zombies in the act of something particularly scary, funny or....raunchy? You could even find magazines that increased your score, just like in real life!
Umurangi Generation
A year old and soon to release on Nintendo Switch, this indie shooter drops you into a dystopian future which is thankfully full of color. Unlock more lenses and equipment as you get better at your craft and then go back to the lab to develop your color grade. Also notable for being one of the only games to feature Māori sci-fi settings. Very stylish.
Shashingo
Here's a little video of the game's features so far!
— Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography (@ShashingoGame) February 11, 2021
Hopefully, you can all learn some new Japanese words from this video too!#indiedev #gamedev #UE4 pic.twitter.com/5Bkke3JFVS
Though not technically out yet we can't wait for this one. Learn Japanese by taking photos of everyday objects and street furniture and adding them to an album alongside their associated words and kanji. Surely a format that can be transferred to other languages too, right? We'd love to wander around a Parisian street learning about les voitures and poubelles.
Got a photography game that you love? Let us know about it in the comments and we'll snap up a chance to check it out.
