Seclusa Review – Not This Time For Africa

As a massive fan of both Pokemon Snap and National Geographic, accompanied by my degree in Environmental Sciences, I had hoped Seclusa would be a home run for me. Studio Niente’s debut game is a lot less Pokemon Snap and a lot more of an actual camera simulator, recreating more closely what it might be like to be a wildlife photographer. Sadly, being a wildlife photographer is extraordinarily boring. This is not a safari adventure; Seclusa is at best a point-and-click game with photos instead of puzzles or characters.

Seclusa is, first and foremost, beautiful. While it’s mostly photorealistic, there’s an accent of stylization going on with the animals and landscapes that gives it just enough character to keep it from looking dull. I really admired how the artists balanced making the animals lifelike with making them look expressive, similar to Disney’s Jungle Book live-action remake. The animal behaviors look realistic to me, and since the animals don’t react to your first-person camera approaching and circling them, you can really get a close up look at behaviors that are hard to photograph in real life.

While the landscapes, animals, and even manmade areas like the lodge are beautiful, I don’t have much else positive to say about Seclusa. There’s not really any game to it, so to speak. You start in the first area of seven, the savanna, and are set into a still view of a landscape. I was shocked to discover you aren’t really even playing as a character and can’t move around the world at all. The only thing to do is to click on an animal to zoom in on it, and then hit Left Shift to jump to the next animal and take pictures of them. That’s it.

I really have had a hard time coming to grips with how very little there is to do in Seclusa. The entire progression system is based on coins, which are only obtained by completing quests and deleting duplicate photos. There will be daily quests like “water the plants at the lodge”, global quests such as “visit all seven areas”, and a repeating quest that is something like “submit a picture of a cheetah.” The main thing that halts any enjoyment in this game is that you begin with only one quest at a time, which is on a three minute real-time cooldown before giving you another quest.

Taking three to five pictures each of the four or so animals in each area when you arrive took me perhaps a minute. I’d then go to my album and delete the ones I didn’t like. About two out of three of my total playtime was staring at the screen, waiting for the timer to count down so I could submit a new picture, get 80 coins, and move a fraction closer to paying the several hundred coins it’d take to reach the next level. Eventually, I realized that you could delete pictures for five coins apiece, so I began spamming pictures of a rhino, deleting them, collecting the cash, and repeating. After a few minutes of this I gained enough coins to move on.

The crux of the matter is that there simply isn’t anything to do in Seclusa except unlock packs of trading cards, camera features, or new levels. I loathed the card pack feature in this game; getting a pack of three random, useless cards as a reward for completing a quest is worse than nothing. If the collectibles were tied to something, like getting a lion cub card for getting a great picture of a lion, it’d improve the whole game greatly. As it is, they’re just lootboxes for items you can only see in a grid collection. I want to qualify there are no microtransactions in Seclusa and nothing to spend real money on – it just feels like it.

The other unlock option, as I mentioned, is a variety of camera upgrades. You can get the ability to adjust saturation, contrast, temperature, etc. Basically all the standard photo mode stuff. I did not like that these very basic photo tools were locked behind upgrades that took so long to grind out. I keep coming back to this factor, but the only reason anything at all is locked behind an upgrade is because if it wasn’t, there would be nothing to do.

There is no resistance, friction, or obstacle to getting the perfect picture of any given animal in a few seconds. Unlike New Pokemon Snap, where you’re on rails, there’s no puzzles to solve, no specific behaviors to try and capture, no exploration, no secrets to find, nothing to discover, and no method of scoring your pictures. There’s no way to measure whether a new picture you’ve taken of a zebra is better than your old one and no sense of accomplishment in beating a high score from the professor. All pictures are equal, and also mean nothing until you can submit them for a task once every few minutes, leaving 90% of your photos feeling worthless.

I know there are some people out there who would enjoy Seclusa, but they are likely the same people that love the art of actual real-life photography. Spending several minutes on each single creature, taking dozens of shots, lining up your angles and playing with lenses – all of these things are both foreign and utterly draining to me. My brain was going haywire itching for any amount of interactivity. From a video game perspective, Seclusa has essentially nothing going on. It looks gorgeous and has some cool information about the animals for science nerds like me, but that does very little to make up for how boring every second of it is. There is no video game here, and Seclusa was absolutely not meant for me.

Nirav reviewed Seclusa on PC with a provided review code. The review score is final at the time of publication and will not be changed.