Quickly Released. Quickly Forgotten.
Contrast is a classic example of a game that could have done with a little more time in the oven. Its got great potential but a combination of a bad camera, bugs and fiddly puzzle solving ruin a world that is interesting to look at and explore.
The world of contrast is without doubt its strongest feature. It is, at times beautiful and it is sylized in such a way that it serves to stand out when just taking a passing glance. The aesthetic reminded me of some sort of lovechild between Bioshock infinite and psychonauts.
The world takes on a dream like quality and at times geometry makes no sense with roads crumbling away into nothingness and the void and the lighting in the game adds to this beautifully.
Contrasts whole gameplay loop revolves around you the player being able to warp between the physical world and the shadow world enabling you to platform across the shadows objects cast in the scene.Many of Contrasts puzzles involve you manipulating a scenes light sources so that they cast shadows in the most desirable way possible.
This means Contrast has to implement a pretty nice real time shadowing system and it does a mostly good job at this. Shadows cast realistically and react to a moving light source as you would expect but they aren’t perfect. Quite often Contrast just seems to turn off the lighting system if you wander too far away from the lightsource and there are certain sections in the game where you can have a wall full of shadows that disappear as soon as you take one step further. This will undoubtedly have been a resource decision to sustain a decent frame rate but it speaks to the overall lack of polish Contrast has. It needed a few more months before it saw the light of day.
This lack of polish carries over into things such as the platforming. All to often i would be making a jump in the shadow universe only to have the game glitch out and fire me back into the real world. There may have been reasons that was happening but if there was Contrast was not doing a great job in communicating them.
More concerning though than a general lack of polish is the plethora of bugs i encountered. Two occasions during my playthrough the game failed to trigger cutscenes meaning i was stuck unable to progress. These issues were corrected with a reload but the poor checkpointing meant i had to replay more than i wanted too each time this happened.
I also saw graphical glitches that left particle effects active when they should have been turned off and i had several occasions where characters speech overlapped each other. Games often ship with bugs but the sheer quantity i saw in a game that took in total about three hours to complete was worrying.
Beyond the lack of polish though lies a game that had great potential. The core concept is a great one and id love to see the story go more in depth with how the real world and shadow world interact. What little story there is in Contrast is pretty good, its well written, the voice work is great and the characters are interesting enough to sustain a three hour adventure. Im not sure they could sustain anything longer though.
Contrast is a game that probably suffered from DriveClub being delayed. Id put good money on the developers planning to release the game later than they did. When drive club was delayed and a space came up in the PS+ roster for launch i imagine the devs were made a pretty nice offer to fill in that gap. Ultimately though the general lack of polish and severe bugs ruin an otherwise interesting experience. What benefited the studio in the short term may have done harm in the long term.
