Discover Games

The “main character” of the game is Didi, a rambunctious and genuinely likable young girl. But you actually play the bulk of the game as Didi’s “imaginary friend,” Dawn. There’s a weird plot thing at the end that sorta complicates this, but that’s the easiest way to explain it. Didi talks to Dawn, but no one else in her life can see Dawn, and when you’re playing as Dawn, you can’t see the real people Didi interacts with either. Again, it gets somewhat complicated near the end, but for the most part, this is a pretty simple story. It’s also a good one.

The story goes like this: Didi’s mother (Kat) is a lounge singer/showgirl, barely scraping by as a single parent after she kicked Didi’s dad (Johnny) out of the house. Johnny’s not the most grounded or responsible of guys, and after getting in deep with criminals and landing in jail, Kat puts him out until he can get his shit together. But Johnny’s a dreamer, and rather than just get a regular ol’ job, he decides that the way to get his footing and his family back is to put on a fabulous circus. This is actually where the meat of the gameplay is - helping him get his circus off the ground in various ways. 

But while you’re pushing boxes and fixing gears, you’ll also get more bits of story and more character development as the game goes on. The characters can be somewhat exaggerated at times (I think this is intentional, as the whole experience is from the perspective of a child), but they are also very human. Johnny is sweet and likeable, but also shortsighted, thick, and deeply insecure under the surface. He makes terrible decisions and refuses to grow up, which can be both admirable and frustrating. We learn more about Kat as we go, including some poor decisions of her own, and how she can’t seem to fully quit Johnny. And Didi remains delightful throughout; self-assured and adventurous, but not overly precocious. It’s always nice to see a kid in media get to be a kid. Overall, the story is unique and refreshingly human, and probably the best part of the experience.

The gameplay is a mix of 3D puzzle platforming and 2D puzzle platforming. The main gimmick or USP of the game is that Dawn is capable of phasing in and out between the real world and the shadow dimension. If you point a light source in such a way that it makes shadows on the wall, you can then become a shadow and run and jump along the shadows as though you were both solid. The majority of the gameplay is variations on this trick. You often need to move a light source or move the objects in front of it to create the right kind of shadows to allow you to traverse the environment. Sometimes these can be clever, and sometimes they are simply neat to experience in a visual way (like when the shadow is of a working carousel, making you quickly navigate the moving horses.)

The controls are often frustrating (more on that in a moment), and there were no puzzles that really stood out as amazing, but what does stand out is how well the gameplay and story are integrated. Again, everything you’re doing is to help get Johnny’s circus up and running and get Didi’s parents back together. At one point, the princess is missing from a fantasy puppet show, so you actually have to fill in for her, which is a fun and totally unique section. At other points, you’re fixing broken attractions and getting things where they need to be in order for people to agree to participate. Perhaps the most striking marriage of gameplay and story is when the shadows you must run across are the silhouettes of Didi’s arguing parents, or those of mobsters laying hands on Johnny. For my money, most games have too much separation between their story and interactions, but that is not a criticism you could level at Contrast.

However, there are plenty of other criticisms I have for this game. For one, it’s glitchy as hell. Collision detection is all over the place. Whether Dawn will grab a ledge or a box, and whether she’ll make a platform, and whether she just phased through an object or ran into it - all of these things are so inconsistent as to be almost arbitrary. This is not helped by the other main issue: imprecise controls. Dawn runs pretty fast and takes huge elaborately-animated strides, which makes it difficult to do anything (jumping, stopping, turning) with any degree of precision. Worse, the controls for phasing in/out of the shadow world and for your big dash move seem to work if and when they feel like it. Some of the most frustrating parts of the game are simple areas where you’re in the shadow world, but there’s a shadow wall blocking you, and you’re supposed to phase out, dash past the obstacle, and phase back in. Mechanically, this should not be a difficult task, but thanks to these sloppy controls, it’s often an annoying trial-and-error slog.

There are a couple of other issues with the gameplay. There are collectibles which - while not as far along my meaninglessness scale as others - are nevertheless not very well explained or integrated into the main experience. And towards the end, the more inventive light-based puzzles give way to a lot of weighing down switches with boxes, which doesn’t really make sense in this world, and takes away from the unique feel of the rest of the game.

Here’s the obligatory story blurb: You play as Sean Devlin, an irreverent Irish mechanic and race car driver who finds himself in Paris just in time for the nazis to take over and occupy the city. Sean eventually hooks up with the French Resistance, and you spend the rest of the time trying to dismantle the German war machine and kick the nazis out of Paris. Sean can be an enjoyable character at times (though the game leans too hard on the “look how cool and aloof he is” thing), the voice acting is pretty decent, and a few of the side characters are also fun to interact with. 

But here’s my problem with the story: for some reason, the developers chose to go with the Standard Videogame Plot - that is, a morally grey white guy hero; a tragic backstory; a wise-cracking friend; a brief unremarkable love interest; and the whole thing is motivated by getting revenge on the guy who caused the tragic backstory, and who will definitely be the final boss. And that’s obviously pretty tired, but I wouldn’t be so bothered if this wasn’t the French Resistance! There are jack-booted nazis killing and oppressing everyone. There is a scrappy underground resistance fighting to retake their homeland. There is human drama and tense stealth and bombastic action just by the very nature of the setting. Sean shouldn’t need the standard videogame tragedy to motivate his personal, morally grey revenge narrative. He can just join the resistance and fight the nazis because the resistance is awesome and the nazis are evil. I realize I’m making a lot of this point, but from minute one, it never stopped bothering me.

Fortunately, this is still a great setting for a videogame. Like most sandbox games, your missions will typically involve going to a place, killing someone or destroying something, and then escaping. Here, though, there’s a greater emphasis on stealth. Most of the places you’re asked to go are heavily fortified nazi bases that you can’t exactly just stroll into. There are a number of solid mechanics to help with this. The most obvious is the costume system. If you can sneak up behind an enemy and take them out by hand, you can immediately put on their uniform (it has to be by hand, because burns and bullet holes are noticeable - nice touch). Once in uniform, you can waltz right into nazi areas, but you have to walk casually, not get too close to enemies, and avoid doing anything suspicious - like running, climbing, or fighting - within eyesight of an enemy. There are helpful indicators that let you know when you are being watched, and from where, which makes things a little smoother. As a stealth enthusiast, though, the one big knock against it is that you can’t stop an alarm from being raised, and once you’re spotted, every nazi in a two-mile radius knows your exact position.

The stealth gameplay was easily my favorite part of the experience. Often, you’re tasked with blowing up a bunch of equipment or killing targets in an area, and it’s really tense and satisfying to walk around these fortified areas, silently taking out baddies and completing objectives, while they’re none the wiser. Stealth is often required, but even when it isn’t, it’s usually the best way to go, because of the generally frustrating character of the other mechanics. The shooting is merely passable. You’ve got the standard array of guns (though modified for the time), and there’s decent impact on the enemies when you land a hit. But landing a hit is difficult, as the guns are often inaccurate, and they almost feel like they’re being governed by KotOR-style dice rolls, rather than where your reticle is actually pointing. And the controls for the shooting, like most of the rest of the game, feel sloppy and loose.

Once you’re in a firefight, you’ll find that the enemy A.I. is actually pretty solid - flanking, finding cover, tossing grenades to flush you out, etc. Actually, that brings me to my next frustration: just like the developer’s previous game Mercenaries, it seems every enemy has explosive ordnance of some kind, and they all have perfect aim. This means that many (if not most) all-out firefights are spent with an all-red screen, trying to dodge explosions you can’t anticipate, and trying to figure out where enemies are located and shooting from. The majority of my deaths in this game came not from gradually dwindling health as I failed to overcome the odds, but rather a single explosion that came from offscreen, which I could neither anticipate nor stop. I don’t mind legitimate challenge (and this game has its share), but these are cheap deaths which serve not to teach or challenge, but just to frustrate.

Most of the rest of my deaths came from fall damage, which brings me to the platforming and climbing. The basic climbing comes from Assassin’s Creed, though rather than going up automatically, you have to pick each new handhold surface and continually hit the button to select, a wrinkle that has both pros and cons over the AC series. But much like AC: Revelations’ Constantinople, Paris is lovely to look at, but not very much fun to get around. I get that you don’t always want your world to look “gamey,” but these buildings are laid out in such a way that just the simple task of running across rooftops is annoying, frustrating, and nearly as dangerous as streaking through a nazi base. There are also a lot of areas with secrets, but which are protected with all kinds of impassable barriers that deliberately make climbing annoying to the point of quitting. Luckily, the vast majority of time, you will not need to climb and jump with any kind of urgency. But when you do (as when you’ve set off an alarm and are looking for an AC-style rooftop hiding place to reduce your wanted level), it’s almost better to just accept the sweet embrace of death than to try to navigate these rooftops.

The other annoying mechanic is the driving, because the combination of giant 1930s cars and twisty, cobblestone European streets leads to slow, clunky, trudging gameplay. Truthfully, though, the chill jazz that plays as you drive around is so undeniably cool that I don’t even mind. The final big gameplay push I haven’t mentioned is the destruction of nazi assets. In a very Just Cause 2 kinda way, the nazis have tons of destructible objects spread throughout the map, all helpfully colored red, and you get money (and, let’s be honest, satisfaction) for destroying all of them. These things range from speakers spouting propaganda to sniper nests to tanks to zeppelins. Sean gets a seemingly endless supply of dynamite, and it never stops being fun watching nazi structures explode and crumble into so much rubble. Doing all of these things could be a completionist’s nightmare (though my brother claims to have gotten 100%), but if you can avoid compulsion, it remains a fun activity throughout the game.

I can’t leave without mentioning the audio-visual achievements of the game. The areas of the city controlled by the nazis are all in black-and-white, while areas that are “liberated” (in a very Okami or Flower sorta way), return to full color. This is a nice marrying of visuals to narrative, though I have to admit that I simply liked the greyscale color scheme better. You’re supposed to want to pretty everything up, but I found the colored art style to be a bit hazy and dull, while the black-and-white (with red nazi accents) was much more striking. I thought the music was great overall, both the in-game radio tunes and the thumping orchestral battle music. Overall, the game does a decent job with atmosphere, whether you’re tensely creeping through a nazi base, or cruising in the countryside with the top down.