If you’ve picked up a Playstation 4 on launch you’re probably going to take notice of Compulsion Games’ first title, Contrast. Contrast is available to Playstation Plus users for free but has also released on the PC via Steam.
In Contrast you take control of Dawn, a foxy minx and silent protagonist who for reasons unknown has taken a young girl, Didi, under her wing. Didi’s friends and family are unable to see Dawn and are themselves only portrayed as shadows on the wall. And so as invisible friends are prone to doing, it’s up Dawn to help Didi make her broken family whole again. The story has enough charm to it to keep you going. The voice acting is generally passable and even though you’ll already know all the story beats the drama doesn’t feel too outlandish or over the top.
The entire game is wrapped in a pretty well designed 1920s-esque theme that fits somewhere between Cabaret and Tim Burton. It looks great but the issue is rarely with how the game looks and instead with how the game feels.
Contrast’s unique hook comes from having Dawn “fade in” to the shadows behind her. Becoming a part of the shadows will let Dawn traverse parts of a level that normally wouldn’t have been accessible. Most of the time you’re just bouncing around on scenery but occasionally you’ll find yourself jumping around on the shadows of moving people.
The game’s problems almost all reside at a technical level and most of them are big enough that the entire presentation suffers as a result.
Although Contrast looks okay graphically the game is frequently plagued with frame rate issues, I played on PS4 (which made FPS problems sting all the more) but I found multiple people on Steam forums reporting performance issues for the PC as well.
Dawn feels very floaty, her movement has no weight to it, and her jumping leaves something to be desired. But the big issue isn’t so much how Dawn controls but instead how the environment reacts to her.
Pathing in Contrast is an absolute nightmare. There is nary a wall in the game that Dawn can run along without snagging some invisible piece of scenery and getting stuck. This of course would be acceptable in an RPG or some type of game where movement was inconsequential, but not in a platformer. Getting stuck in the world is just something you will get used to as you play. Sometimes the simple action of just setting a box I was carrying down would result in Dawn freezing in place while said box slowly made its way to the ground. This kind of stuff could be forgiven if it only happened once or twice but I had multiple issues with getting stuck on scenery in every single act, usually within minutes of one another.
The poor controls and janky platforming made it so that when I solved a puzzle I would oftentimes wonder whether or not the solution I’d found was actually the one the game had intended. In some cases I even went on to YouTube and found people who solved some of the puzzles in an entirely different fashion than I did. Who had the right solution? It’s tough to say most of the time because all of them feel broken.
There are also a few parts of the game where the “puzzle” is just to find a very slim piece of wall that will allow you to turn into a shadow. I got stuck a couple times because I couldn’t figure out where to go and the game made no effort to help.
In short, you will die in Contrast, and when you do it will oftentimes feel like it was not your own fault. You will solve puzzles in Contrast, but it will oftentimes feel less like you solved them and more like you hacked the game to progress further.
The game is also quite short. Unless you go out exploring for every collectible Contrast isn’t likely to take up any more than 3-4 hours of your time.
Compulsion Games really did have some great ideas and I feel like this particular release is a rushed first stumble for a studio that will probably deliver some great stuff in the future.
If you’re planning on picking up Contrast on the PC I’d suggest seriously considering whether or not that $14.99 really couldn’t be better spent. If you’re like me and got it free on Playstation Plus then the only consideration is your time and unfortunately it’s hard for me to guarantee that Contrast will be worth any of yours.
