I would like every game to ask me to take The Photo Of God

The Photo Of God is not an especially brilliant game, but it is a game I keep thinking about. It's a spooky, throwaway interactive epistle from the evidently self-deprecating Serious Daniel, in which you play a photographer standing on a rooftop in a flooded city, under a low, funereal sun. The photographer decides he is going to snap a picture of God. To do this, he must first take pictures of birds that form a breadcrumb trail around the rooftop and through an abandoned building, lit by blazing oil drums.

It's not clear whether the abandoned building is the same one you start on. There appear to be several floors but, perhaps due to the fade-outs when you enter the stairs, it feels more like you're repeatedly traversing one hallway, with objects shuffling around behind your back. It makes sense that a horror game about the joy and hubris of photographing a deity would complicate the notion of ascending or descending, that it would feel innately purgatorial. For every photograph you take, the photographer rambles to himself a little about beauty and divinity.

The birds, meanwhile, spawn one after the other, each cycling the same animation of cocking its head and pecking at the lurid, featureless environment. They appear indifferent to your presence until you snap a photo, using right-click to aim through the lens. Then, there's another fade-to-black and the sound of flapping wings and when the blackness lifts, the bird has vanished. You could call the inability to watch it fly away evidence of limited technical expertise or resources, but again, these crude ruptures feel appropriate. Cameras cut the world to pieces, whereas godhood is (going by the Judeo-Christian concepts I grew up with) continuous, all-pervading. Even when not seeking deliberately to visualise the deity, snapping a photograph is chopping God's body apart.

The game lasts a handful of minutes. You will probably guess at the rough nature of conclusion. If you can't, there's a picture of it right there on the Itch.io page. The Photo Of God is no extended philosophical treatise, but a whimsical modelling of feelings of cosmic dread and presumption that are already perfectly encapsulated by the title alone. There may be a lot more to it or not much at all - I leave that for you to determine. It's free to download.

I keep thinking about the game because you could take the concept and apply it to any vaguely agnostic game with camera mechanics, and it'd be transformative. Imagine if, say, Ubisoft updated callous Clancy fest Ghost Recon: Wildlands with a bonus Steam achievement labelled "take a photo of God", with no guidance about what is meant here by God, no actual unlock parameters, and no other changes to the game. Just throw that one out there for the completionists to anguish over, while they're synching headshots.

I'm not religious, as you may guess, but I would spend many enchanted hours in such a game attempting to conceive and envisage godhood through drone feeds, sniper scopes, and the game's own Photo Mode. I would also enjoy reading threads of other people striving to do likewise, according to their own modellings of divinity. We don't need to wait for that Steam achievement. We can start the ball rolling here.