It’s cold outside, at least in my neck of the woods. Frigid temps, wind chill, and a couple of feet of snow on the ground have kept me from getting out and taking photos for the past few weeks, and let me tell you, the winter blues are real. I’ve been playing a lot of video games to get me through the season, but after finishing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and logging more hours than I’d like to admit in my umpteenth Skyrim playthrough, I decided to turn back to a cozy game I first tried out last spring, Lushfoil.
Lushfoil’s Icelandic landscape recreates the beauty of the country’s natural landscape (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Lushfoil: A Walking Simulator, With Cameras
Lushfoil is, at its heart, a walking simulator. This type of game puts you in a virtual world and lets you walk around. There’s no danger of running into monsters or getting a Game Over screen with this type of game. Some walking games have a narrative arc or puzzles (like Myst), Lushfoil has a scavenger hunt angle, you’ll need to find certain scenes and items in the world to progress and open up new areas. But its main thrust is taking in the scenery and snapping pictures with an in-game camera.
A new age soundtrack spins in the background to help set the mood. My wife described it as “day spa music,” and that seems as good a description as any for the score and the game in general. It’s meant to help you wind down, take it easy, and enjoy some mental health self-care.
You’ll pick up new cameras along the way, including the 2000s digital compact I used for this snap (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
The game drops you right into the world. You start off on a wooded path with a shimmering blue lake nearby and snow-capped mountains in the distance, a version of Lago di Braies in South Tyrol, Italy. After a little wandering, I stumbled on a camera, a DSLR with a full kit of lenses (from fisheye to 100mm, plus a wide to telephoto zoom).
This is pretty much the first thing you see when you start the game (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Tips pop up and provide instructions on how to use the camera, plus a help menu is available if you get stuck. Shutterbugs won’t have a problem navigating the control panel—it has mode, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, EV compensation, contrast, and white balance settings, plus an array of filters that change color tone. If you don’t know your way around a camera, the game provides tips and tutorial assignments to teach you more about photography.
The camera interface shows a viewfinder with focus points and a control panel with exposure and filter options (Credit: Annapurna Interactive)
I ended up using the black-and-white option quite a bit, and also experimented mixing the color filters with white balance adjustments, which can give landscapes a surreal, alien look. I noticed that while the SLR’s interface shows focus points like you see in an optical viewfinder, the viewfinder image itself shows color filters and exposure adjustments, so in that way it’s more like a mirrorless camera.
The SLR comes with a full set of lenses, including fish-eye (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Virtual Environments Rife for Exploration
I spent a few hours exploring the Lago di Braies area, learning the ins and outs of the camera system. Shortly after discovering the camera, I came across a board of photos, which introduces the scavenger hunt aspect of the game. In order to open up new areas, you need to discover stuff. Taking your own version of each of these picturesque scenes is one way to progress, but you can also find tchotchkes and additional cameras along the way. The more you find, the more areas unlock, and you can also open up different lighting scenarios. I’ve been playing on and off since the game launched last spring and am still working on opening up two maps.
Find the photo board in each area to get your assignments (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
It wasn’t too long before I had found enough snapshots and extras to unlock a new area. The game includes two to start: Lago di Braies and Castle Rock Beach in Western Australia, plus lets you unlock more for a total of nine locations spread across three continents. You can also open up different lighting situations by finishing your scavenger hunt—for instance Castle Rock Beach starts out with midday light, but if you find all the photo ops you can explore it again at sunrise.
There’s a 1990s camcorder in the game, but it only takes stills, not video (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
The first to unlock is Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, Japan. It’s the level that made me really fall in love with the game. This forested mountain environment drops you into a walkway lined with vibrant red gates and includes a small village and temples, too.
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The gated pathways in the Kyoto environment gave me a real ‘I want to go to there’ feeling (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Fushimi is also the first section of the game to break out of purely wild aesthetic, and I’ll admit it was a bit jarring to notice the lack of activity. The world of Lushfoil is beautifully rendered, but devoid of humanity. Occasionally, you’ll spot an animal—I noticed gulls and larger birds, a cow, some cats—but Lushfoil is about landscape photography. This is really hammered home at one point in Fushimi when you come across two sets of one-way walking paths to help control pedestrian flow. Of course, this means there’s no waiting for someone to move, so you can get the composition you envision. A lack of perfect realism comes with its benefits.
There’s not a lot of wildlife in Lushfoil, but you can find animals if you look for them (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Even without a population, I’m pretty happy with the variety of virtual areas available to explore. The game includes loads of scenery types, and with different lenses and cameras to play with, it’s possible to capture them with different looks, angles, and filters. The landscape settings encouraged me to take time with compositions, chase interesting light, and use moderate f-stops to ensure deep focus. I used shallow depth of field less often than in real life and took fewer close-ups in-game simply out of a lack of opportunity of subjects and the limitations of virtual worlds. Wide shots in Lushfoil are gorgeous, but textures aren’t clear enough for detailed macro images.
Sadly, I didn’t spot any kangaroos in the Australian setting (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Go On a Photographic Scavenger Hunt
I got a good handle on the gameplay mechanics as I progressed through the game—so far, I’ve played for around ten hours and still have two locations to unlock. Each area has its own character and lighting aesthetic, but for the most part, you walk around and take in the scenery, and break out the camera when you see an interesting scene. You may also come across tutorials and challenges that encourage you to experiment with camera settings; I stumbled across long exposure, color filters and white balance, and manual focus during my playtime.
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The contrasted light in the Kyoto village is perfect for black-and-white images (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Sometimes it takes a while to find the photo board and get your list of assignments, but that’s OK. On a couple of occasions, I took an assignment photo before finding the board. The previous efforts don’t count, but since your in-game photo album doubles as a fast travel mechanism, it’s just a matter of going back and capturing the scene again. A chime sounds when you’ve completed an assignment.
The glacier in the Iceland setting is otherworldly (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
After finishing up most of my assignments in Japan, I moved on to the next area, a rocky Icelandic landscape with a waterfall and glaciers. I was a little surprised to see dull, storm cloud lighting here, but pressed on to finish the photo assignments and collect items (gnome statues in this instance). Iceland was the first area in which I was able to complete all of my photo assignments, and it led to a nice surprise—a key that unlocks a path that takes you to another version of the world with golden magic hour lighting. It’s fun to explore the same pathways with vastly different light.
The game’s drone reminds me of the Parrot Bebop (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
The DSLR is available in every level, but I found other cameras lying around on benches or near pathways along the way. There’s a digital point-and-shoot, a 90s-style camcorder, a 35mm film cam, and more. I was especially giddy to find a drone when exploring the mountains of Nepal. Flying a quadcopter around and snapping photos from the air adds a new perspective to gameplay. The drone’s outline and slightly wobbly flight characteristics remind me of the old Parrot Bebop, which is a nice touch. One note, despite including a simulated camcorder, Lushfoil is all about stills, as there’s no video capture.
The mountains of Nepal are a perfect (virtual) location for drone photography (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
Where to Get Lushfoil
I’ve played Lushfoil on two different computers now, first with a Skytech Nebula with a Core i5-13400F processor, 8GB nVIDIA RTX 4060 graphics, and 32GB of memory, and more recently with an Asus ROG with a Core i7-265KF, 16GB nVIDIA RTX 5070 TI GPU, and 32GB of RAM. I ran into a few bugs with textures not loading when I first played Lushfoil last May, on the Skytech system, but it runs without a hitch now with the Asus computer. I suspect the beefier graphics card helps, but the game also received a bug squashing patch in July, and another in December that added some refinements and support for VR goggles. In addition to Windows (via the Steam store and Epic Games Store), Lushfoil is also available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S consoles.
If you work hard enough you can unlock new lighting for the environments, like this sunrise scene from the Castle Rock Beach area (Credit: Annapurna Interactive/PCMag)
I’ve had more than enough fun with Lushfoil to recommend it to photographers who game and gamers who like taking pictures. I appreciate its diverse environments, decent array of camera types, and chill, relaxing atmosphere. The price is also nice: At a time when games can cost as high as $80, Lushfoil is just $14.99.
About Our Expert
Jim Fisher
Principal Writer, Cameras
Experience
Images, and the devices that capture them, are my focus. I’ve covered cameras at PCMag for the past 14 years, which has given me a front row seat for the changeover from DSLRs to mirrorless cameras, the smartphone camera revolution, and the emergence of drones for aerial imaging. I have extensive experience with every major mirrorless and SLR system, and am also comfortable using point-and-shoot and action cameras. As a Part 107 Certified drone pilot, I’m licensed to fly unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for commercial and editorial purposes, and am knowledgeable about federal rules and regulations regarding drones.
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