As trendy as it’s sort of become as a feature, photography modes in most games don’t interest me much. They’ve either got too much freedom, making the act of taking photos boring, or so many limitations it hardly feels like photography at all. Limitations are good! You can’t get good photos without them, I just prefer having an actual lens, even a digital one, to look through. So whenever a game that’s actually about photography, like Opus: Prism Peak (which is out today), rocks up, my curiosity will always be a little bit piqued.

Previously described as a “spiritual sibling” to Taiwanese developer Sigono’s previous game Opus: Echo of Starsong, Prism Peak ups the production values a bit. That self-designated Makoto Shinkai visual influence is still on display here, just now rendered in a 3D plane, one where you play as a “weary photographer” travelling with a girl suffering from amnesia.

There is a certain hokey quality to what’s put on display on the game’s trailers, the dialogue sounds like it could have done with another pass, and it does feel like it wants you to feel Big Emotions. Still, the thing is quite gorgeous is the issue, and rather than just being a straight up 3D visual novel, its use of an analog camera tugs on my film-loving heart all the same. Having to twist the shutter speed dial just to get the right shot? Now that’s a fiddly, debatably pointless mechanic I love to see.

You’ll definitely find some video gamey video game here – various shrines that look like the aperture of a camera lens can be fed photos for camera upgrades and other things like tickets. There’s a journal that can be filled with photographs you’ve taken and notes you’ve thunked up. But mostly I’m just in it for those magical realist vibes, the empty, tenderly lit land and townscapes with the occasional anthropomorphic animal. That’s enough for me to start with! How the story shapes up? Well, I’ll find out I suppose.

Opus: Prism Peak is out on Steam now.