There is beauty in the world everywhere we look, but it’s not often we can really slow down and appreciate it. There’s always deadlines looming, or some other important business to attend to. You can look at nature later, when you have more time, perhaps. Lushfoil Photography Sim, a new game from Australian developer Matt Newell, rejects that nonchalance.
What if there’s no time later? What if this is all the time we have, and all we’ll ever have? If that’s the case, it’s important we focus on nature now. That we see the sights we’ve always wanted to see. That we make time to smell the roses, to walk freely, and to photograph the trees. In Lushfoil Photography Sim, players are tasked with exactly that: wandering various wildernesses, taking photographs, and generally absorbing the beauty of a virtual world, as representative of a real-world space.
While there are loose objectives to guide gameplay, and player goals, including finding better camera and traversal equipment to journey further and take more photographs, the very nature of the game is about being.
A love for photography
Per Newell, Lushfoil was inspired by a love for photography that began in high school, and continued throughout his engineering studies in university. As an adjacent side hobby, Newell learned how to work in Unreal Engine, building natural scenes from scratch – and swiftly, he realised this was an extension of his photographic habits.
In a virtual environment, you could create and appreciate a natural world, one free of limiting weather restrictions or travel needs. You could change the lighting, or add fog, to enhance the natural environment. You could also recreate real-life camera features, and emulate the nature of photography in a controlled environment with time to sit and analyse aperture, shutter speed, and exposure.
Eventually, this rumination became a professional endeavour, creating virtual environments for clients, and then it branched again, into Lushfoil. At first, the game was a “bare bones” concept. As a solo developer, work on the game was made difficult by Newell’s ambitions.
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“It was way too huge for me to handle at once,” Newell admitted. So he chose to take a more segmented path, at first. Each environment in Lushfoil Photography Sim was once a vignette – a careful, handcrafted environment with a siloed focus. As the idea for the game grew, Newell chose to collate and compile his work, building up to a game of bigger ideas, with bigger natural environments, and plenty more places to roam.
“It’s kind of a compilation of all the stuff I’ve done,” Newell said.
While the environments built were initially quite disparate, they became a more cohesive, linked whole by a core photography mechanic, and also by their ability to allow a quiet appreciation of nature.
“I used to really idealise the travels that I used to do back in 2018, 2019. I did a bunch of trips to Japan and Europe and other places that were totally different from Australia,” Newell said. “Once I set foot there, it was just really cool, really inspiring, lots of cool colours. Being a photographer, I would take lots of photos, and have lots of memories to look back on.”
Newell also grew up with really “outdoorsy” parents and would go on a lot of hikes as a child, solidifying a love for natural environments and beauty. Now, he wants to share that love with a new audience.
“I inspired most of [the game’s environments] off travels that I did – I went to a lot of these places and took photos. While I was travelling, I would think to myself, ‘Oh, this would be cool to try and recreate digitally,'” Newell said. “I also wanted to have a big variety, in terms of colours and weather and lighting – it’s why I wanted to include an Australian environment (Southwest Australia), because I haven’t seen it represented in a lot of games.”
“Australia has unique colours in its ocean, in dry bush land.”
The beauty of silence
Beyond his own experiences as a photographer, Lushfoil Photography Sim was also inspired by Newell’s love for contextless games – titles that give players the space and scope to impart a piece of themselves, rather than giving them the full picture right away. Playdead’s Inside was noted as being a key inspiration, for its focus on atmosphere and showing, over telling.
In this particular game, players must provide their own context, and fill in gaps about the nature of its world and story. Newell hopes players will bring a sense of openness to Lushfoil that allows the game to achieve a similar impact, all without a sharply-guided narrative.
As players walk through the game, they will only be accompanied by a musical soundtrack and diegetic sound, leaving plenty of room for their own thoughts, and for the appreciation of a vast array of landscapes.
As Newell explained, many of the game’s locations are inspired by his own travels, and by his memories, although there are terrains that are also brought to life through research, and a more general fascination with worldly beauty. Where possible, Newell “took tons of photos” of all sorts of things, to ensure a quiet, realistic and natural feel for his environments, and used them as a basis for his worlds.
“It was mostly to do with photos, and then I would try to remember my experience. I would also try to remember sounds and things that I would hear,” Newell said. “I was mostly basing it off a memory of a place … it’s kind of like a memory recreation. I think some people are going to think, ‘oh, that wasn’t the proper distance between here and there,’ but for me, it’s how I remembered it.”
Players have a chance to recreate these travels with the game’s camera, which features a range of professional settings, as well as a point-and-shoot mode designed for people of all experience levels. With this camera in hand, the world of Lushfoil is your oyster. You can follow the beaten path, or wander freely. You can complete photo objectives, which ask you to recreate certain shots, or find certain sights. You can also spend time making your own fun, simply indulging in a virtual world where you have freedom to travel as you wish.
“People can take it exactly how they want to take it,” Newell said. “I’ve seen people do a lot of sprinting and objective-focussed playthroughs, which is fine. Then there are people who just see an objective and want to ignore it completely.”
“I hope people get distracted. I hope people play it in their own way, and do exactly what they want to do at any given moment. I hope that they’re intrigued by the different things they find.”
After years working solo on the game, with later help from publisher Annapurna Interactive, Newell is excited for it to finally release, and to see how players react. At the end of the road, what he’s most proud of is the detail and beauty he’s been able to explore in each of the game’s environments – and he hopes players are able to appreciate this beauty with their own eyes.
“I really wanted to make a project for people to experience all these places,” he said. “Not to make [Lushfoil Photography Sim] a replacement for travel, but hopefully to inspire people to go visit them on their own accord.”
For those looking for a virtual escape, and opportunity to smell the roses, Lushfoil Photography Sim officially launches on 15 April 2025.
