Set in 1920s Paris, Contrast is a curious title with its dimly lit streets and heavy focus on the music of the era. The setting is strong, the gameplay however is not always quite so impressive and that’s a real shame as the game has an incredible aesthetic and feel that could easily have made for a very enjoyable puzzle game.
With its stuttering frame-rates and huge amount of repetition, playing Contrast can sometimes feel like a bit of a chore. Some of the puzzles can at times be a little tricky to work out, most of the time you’re just progressing from A to B, however, utilising the shadows to make your way through the game and manipulating them by moving objects from one place to another in order to create a shadow that suits your needs to progress further through the game. When the game does at times require a little more working out, you often find the same solution is then required several times over in quick succession; the game suffers due to a mix of there being a lack of variety at times, and at other times the puzzles just being relatively easy to work out yet incredibly fiddly to successfully execute. With less framerate drops and more of a fluidity about the game, Contrast could be a lot more fun, as it stands it just feels a little too buggy to properly enjoy though, and the game suffers from being beautiful to look at yet at times incredibility unintuitive to play.
One incredibly positive quality to note about Contrast is the strength of the storyline, something that probably keeps you playing moreso than the gameplay. The script is incredibly well written, but in a way this is actually another aspect that can make the game so frustrating as you’re often completing tedious sections of gameplay purely to find out the next part of the story. The gameplay itself doesn’t keep you playing, just the drive to find out where the story will go next, a credit to the scriptwriting department, but not such a ringing endorsement for those responsible for the gameplay.
Dependent upon how well you take to the game’s puzzles, Contrast is a game that can be finished within a few hours and is therefore not a title for the long-term. Some of the gameplay can be enjoyable and the script is certainly strong, all too often the game tends to be incredibly disappointing though and can feel like a bit of a one trick pony with its fundamental focus on lurking in the shadows and manipulating shadows in order to overcome obstacles. There are definitely worse titles out there than this one and the scriptwriting department deserve every credit for their role in the process, it’s unlikely that Contrast will be your favourite ever indie title though, and once you’ve played through the game once for its storyline it’s unlikely that you’ll ever want to come back to it again in the future. Some games are short yet have a fantastic amount of replay value nonetheless, Contrast is definitely not one of those titles though and it’s therefore difficult to recommend the game for anything other than its storyline.
UK based film graduate with a huge passion for music, sports and video games.
