Lushfoil Photography Sim wants to make photographers out of us all

When you take away all the traffic, cities are silent. Refreshingly so, at first, but after the change settles this quiet becomes maddening. The echo and reverberation magnify every little movement. It’s out in nature, amid the ambient hum of insect and bird song, running river and crackling bark, the wind rustling millions of leaves and whistling through each individual blade of grass, that I find solitude in a quiet that conceals the tinnitus and eases my shoulders. 

Every place has a different static nature. I first learned the song along the Econlockhatchee River back home, when as a young adult I relearned how to spend hours alone in this quiet with my thoughts. Then up and down the valleys of the Hudson, where I now live. And again down by Lake Braies during summer, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment amid the dying gasps of winter playing Lushfoil Photography Sim. 

Published by Annapurna Interactive, developer Matt Newell realizes the simple premise of simulating a handful of unique, real world landscapes in Unreal Engine 5 to explore with a camera. That makes for a game that conjures both the emotional and experiential joys of solo hiking, as well as its anxieties.

As I descended toward the Pearl of the Alps, I passed through a sonic wall of wind, insects, and muted, sustained piano. There was no one in the famously crowded destination. I’m uncertain even of my own body. But somehow I pick up a camera left atop a small boulder down on the pebbled shore. A DSLR with every lens I could need. I’m guided by the UI how to operate the zooms lens and autofocus, beginning with the most basic point and shoot elements. I aim across the lake, bring the little chapel into the frame, press down the trigger halfway to bring it into focus. It’s intuitive a way Erin’s old D40 with the fussy zoom lens isn’t, and that’s why it’s sitting dusty on my desk with dead batteries and an empty SD card while I fill up my hard drive with photos of Castle Rock Beach’s mangroves and Fushimi Inari-taisha’s 10,000 red torii gates.

I’m the photographer Apple imagined in the early days of the iPhone, who was posting black and white filtered photos of Chicago’s gothic spires on Instagram’s chronological timeline. Who doesn’t know what apertures do or why I’d ever want to adjust my ISO. I love taking pictures, but it’s always for the framing, geometry, colors. The sheer number of unfamiliar terms and icons has always been an impenetrable barrier to learning more. But after playing Lushfoil around the world — Italy, France, Iceland, Japan — I might need to charge those EN-EL9s. Not because I suddenly want to adjust the white balance of my pictures but because I want to play with focus and zoom and even I can notice how desaturated my photos get every time I need to replace my old phone. 

The DSLR doesn’t feel quite so unfamiliar now. At Le Prarion in France I learned to adjust my aperture settings. In Kyoto I played with my shutter speed under the torii paths, trying to blend each gate into one solid wall of red. I really like what a background blur can do to a subject now.

I don’t often go out just to take pictures. I want to be outside, witness nature, walk, and, well, do nothing. I often recall Rebecca Solnit’s best writing advice: “Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.” It was reading Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost that spurred me into the swamps and forests of Central Florida. And playing Lushfoil certainly reminds me of my time spent hiking, but I don’t think I’d have stayed up so late or tried to squeeze so much of the simulation into my week if it wasn’t also a game, with collectibles hidden around the world that point to something delightfully video gamey about it’s virtual worlds and photos I am tasked with recreating like solving a first person puzzle game. I’m given no map, so I learn each area in my head. Recall the trails by memory. I can walk only slowly or briskly. I’m encouraged to take photos of every peculiarity so I can later fast travel to them –which is perhaps breaking some illusion, but when you’re walking at the pace of a human while sitting alone in a dark apartment, it’s nice. 

What urged me to find these photos and collectibles was the reward of new lighting scenarios that transform each location in surprising ways. Lake Braies is transformed into a winter wonderland, Le Prarion becomes a red sunset, Kyoto a dark, stormy day. I find an umbrella, open it up, and now I hear rain tapping on the clear plastic. The quality of light, sound, and atmosphere all transform. Fog will roll through valleys in the mornings. A blizzard through the mountains. And when I start to think it’s weird how still the sun and clouds are, I notice that the sun is indeed setting on the Indian Ocean in at least one setting. But the stars never come out. 

Playing Lushfoil was not doing nothing, then. Perhaps more appropriate is the words of Caspar David Friedrich, whose landscape paintings are the focus of a recent Met exhibit. “The artist’s task is not the faithful representation of air, water, rocks, and trees,” he wrote. “But rather his soul, his sensations should be reflected in them. The task of a work of art is to recognize the spirit of nature and, with one’s whole heart and intention, to saturate oneself with it and absorb it and give it back again in the form of a picture.” I can’t imagine he’d appreciate photography, or, in a world of cameras, photorealism.

But the stunning recreations of each area use photorealism to have an effect on me, not to show off my graphics card or justify why this game is better than another. Lushfoil feels at times like it is itself a work of romantic art, attempting to portray an encounter with the sublime through polygons rather than oils. It makes me feel a way video of the locations would not alone stir, though I cannot shake the sense that there is a contradiction in these images of images. Thoreau and Emerson forgive me, but I still want to play more.

Lushfoil Photography Sim launches on April 15 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.