Let’s cast our eyes back to the heady yesteryear that was 2013. The PS4 was on the horizon, and the gaming community waited with baited breath to see what delights were in their future. Unfortunately, the launch line-up was a little anemic to say the least.

However, there was one game that stood out from the crowd of sequels and mediocrity, and that game was Contrast, a third-person puzzle platformer which incidentally is also available on Xbox and PC.

Steeped in noir sensibilities, Contrast is set in a shadowy art-décor city in which a little girl named Didi lives with her mother Kat, who spends her nights performing on stage. Whilst her mother works, Didi gallivants around the city with the aid of her seemingly imaginary friend Dawn.

At this point, you’re probably struggling to figure out who the player character is, and this speaks towards one of Contrast’s inherent faults. You play as Dawn, who is blessed with the ability to become a shadow.

Despite this, the main character of Contrast is Didi. In a story-driven game, having the player not at the centre of the story is foolish. The aim of the game is basically to help Didi and her family re-construct their lives whilst facing up to long-hidden secrets. We, as the player, have only a supporting role in the narrative.

The entire success of the game’s story relies on whether the player feels invested in Didi’s life, and personally, I didn’t. She’s a box-standard little girl. She can be a little cheeky and mischievous, and she can be a little naïve, but there isn’t enough personality there to enthral the player.

It’s a nice story well-told, it’s just misplaced. It does have some really imaginative touches, such as that Dawn and Didi are the only 3D characters, and the other characters are portrayed by silhouettes, but at times it feels a little stagnant, such as the section blatantly ripped off from (or an homage to) Limbo.

Fortunately, the setting does a lot to keep the game feeling fresh. Contrast is a very cool game. The environments feel rich in atmosphere. The only downside is that there isn’t more to explore.

The puzzles involve shifting in and out of shadows and often involve climbing on silhouettes to reach goals. It’s a really interesting and imaginative mechanic, and I found myself early on thinking ‘Wow, this is such a good idea. I wonder what they’re going to do with it’.

There are a few highly enjoyable puzzles that involve things like lighting up jazz bands, creating smooth music in the process. Unfortunately, the puzzles are so easy that they lack that satisfying sensation elicited to the player when a difficult puzzle is solved, and that sensation is normally the meat of a decent puzzle game.

Any difficulty the puzzles have comes not from intelligent design but from the iffy platforming, which gets particularly problematic towards the end of the game when the puzzles involve flicking in and out of the shadows to succeed.

I began this review by discussing the PS4’s launch line-up and how Contrast benefited from being something original in a mostly tired bunch. I stand by that statement, but I also believe that being a part of that line-up resulted in one of the nails in Contrast’s coffin.

It’s buggy. I assume that it was rushed towards its deadline and there just wasn’t enough time to focus-test it properly, because I had to restart entire sections of the game on several occasions because I’d placed a box to near to a switch, so the game had no way of differentiating between which one I wanted to interact with.

That’s just a decent example, but on the whole Contrast just doesn’t feel right to handle. In classic platformers like Crash Bandicoot, there’s an assuring weight to the controls that means as you play it, all you focus on is the next obstacle.

In this game, the player character feels too light, as if Dawn is just hovering slightly above the ground. It might sound like a petty quibble, but it makes playing the game slightly irritating.

In many ways, Contrast is the atypical indie game. It’s fuelled with ambition and imagination but lacks the resources to truly realise its potential. It may disappoint at times, but at least Compulsion Games were attempting to innovate.

In the end, despite its glitches and its lack of focus, Contrast is still such a cool game, with its jazzy soundtrack and romantic yet sleazy noir tone, and I’d recommend it above many of the big-budget titles it was released alongside. Red-carpeted theatres and streets barely lit by neon signs trump gritty greys and browns every time.

5/10

 

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