Contrast Review
Founded by ex-Arkane developers and led by Guillaume Provost, Compulsion Games, founded in 2009, began as a support studio for titles like the original Darksiders and Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale. In 2013, their first solo project, Contrast, was released for PlayStation 4/3, Xbox 360/Xbox One, and Windows. A smaller title that pulls from artistic Vaudeville and Burlesque inspiration and a noir theme that blends together to create a world you’d expect to see from the mind of Tim Burton. While the ideas the game is built on are solid and wildly unique, there are certain aspects that fall extremely short and hinder an otherwise enjoyable experience. What starts out as an innocent story of a girl sneaking out of the house to watch her mother sing slowly unravels into a reality-shifting adventure.
You pop into the world of Contrast as Dawn, an invisible friend of a small child named Didi who lives with her mother Kat. While this sounds like a normal childhood story, it’s quickly turned on its head as Didi is the only character you can see. Kat and the rest of the cast are only ever represented as shadows in the world. Their figures being cast against wide backdrops and moving seamlessly between the cities surfaces. As Dawn, you have the ability to travel between surfaces and the 3D world. Dawn can jump onto walls and other surfaces, turning herself into a shadow, and walk through the streets of Paris before quickly jumping into the shadows of a dimly lit alley to travel to a hard-to-reach balcony or an illuminated windowsill.
This sort of mixing of planes of existence makes for a few puzzling moments of moving foreground items in the physical world to cast different shadows and makeshift your own paths or ledges on the walls behind. While you do ever slightly expand your abilities with things like dashing to break weak structures, it never fully evolves into its own standalone gameplay mechanic. Again, the ideas are there; they just need a little more. While these puzzle sections take no more than a few minutes and most to figure out, they were a welcome break between the story bits happening and something I wish the game had more of. Traversal during both shadow and physical sections feels very flat at times; walking feels more like guiding a pebble on ice, and trying to land precise jumps becomes more of a chance roll than a skill check. There was one puzzle at the end of Act I that I'm convinced I beat in a nontraditional way by using momentum to shoot myself out of a wall onto a physical ledge:
Contrast absolutely excels in its style and presentation. Taking place in 1920’s Paris, the streets are all lined with beautiful decor and lighting, but with a slight dark edge to them. This especially kicks in when you pass audio queues that briefly light up an alley and voices echo out of thin air, making you feel small in something much larger at play. I’d like to give a shoutout to Vanesa Matsui, the actress for Kat. During the first act, her voice carries a beautiful song throughout the cutscenes that perfectly encapsulates the uneasy and “something’s not quite right” feeling of the game. Deeper in the background, beautifully crafted streets literally melt away, and fragments of a world not quite there float about.
More. That was the word that kept popping in my head during my less than 3 hours with Contrast. I wanted more puzzles that tested the player in unique ways; with a concept that does just this, the execution of it in gameplay doesn’t quite reach that level. I wanted more out of the player character and abilities you have to transition through the world. What’s there is solid and feels like a good starting point, but it has countless possibilities to be built upon. Especially towards the final moments of the game, where they go full science project on the story, there was so much to build upon or dig deeper into. Instead, you're left with one of the most sudden plot twists and cliffhangers I've ever seen. Contrast is a fine game and a shining example of a smaller team's first project; the creativity, design, and gameplay ideas are there, just not fully fleshed out to make this a knockout hit. We here at BadlandsBacklogs give Contrast a 5 out of 10.