From the developers at Compulsion Games comes a visually interesting shadow-based platformer called Contrast. After getting green-lit on Steam, Contrast will be available on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade and PC in Q4 2013, with publishing from Focus Home Interactive. The game was originally planned for a May release.
If you are familiar with Hudson Soft’s Lost in Shadow (especially after our review), or are fans of silhouette animations by Lotte Reiniger, then this is a game you may want to pay attention to. You can watch the trailer below:
From earlier sources, Contrast takes us into a 1920s vaudevillian setting where a nine year old girl, Didi, uses dreams from loneliness to materialize shadow landscapes to search for her mother. She is paired up with a woman named Dawn, who can travel between shadows and reality to scale areas unreachable by humans.
The platforming is like that of any 2D side-scrolling game, yet the game is actually three-dimensional. Its shadow-shifting feature is revealed when Dawn enters billboards to travel inside them, before leaping out and re-materializing to normal matter. The shadow-shifting mechanic goes into effect whenever there are shadows within solid walls, where Dawn can enter them and take advantage of the environments.
Contrast looks like an interesting game that makes incredible use of shadow play. It may look a lot like Lost In Shadow, but there aren’t many games that make use of silhouette aesthetics, thus making Contrast an excellent candidate in representing visually unique titles. Hopefully, this game will be a success when it is released.
To get an idea of how Contrast’s shadow platforming works, Lost in Shadow is available on Amazon:
