Contrast

Overview

Set in a noir art deco atmosphere, the player controls Dawn, a little girl's imaginary friend, who is able to move in 3D or become a 2D shadow on the wall, where she can use existing shadows as platforms. There is control over different light sources in the 3D world (spotlights, film projectors, etc) to create the proper shadow paths in the 2D world to let her reach different areas in the 3D world.

The idea for the game came to creator, Guillaume Provost, in a coffee shop in Lyon, France when he was working as a freelancer for Arkane Studios.

"I used to be a rendering programmer when I used to write code, so I thought about a lot of physical and/or graphical novel ways of interacting with games, and that's how the idea sparked," he says in a 1UP interview. "I can't say 'I saw a shadow on a wall' and had this sudden boom of an idea. I was basically sitting in a café when I got the original idea, and I built up from that."

Story

There are two main characters, Didi, a young girl, and Dawn (the player character), Didi's imaginary friend, a woman dressed as an acrobat who has superhuman strength and magical shadow abilities. Didi has a dysfunctional family, since her mother Kat is a cabaret singer who is forced to spend nights away from her daughter, and her estranged father, Johnny, is always going after get-rich-quick schemes and breaking his promises. When Didi sneaks out of the house at night, Dawn must use her powers to help her make things better for her family, to make a reconciliation between her parents possible. At one point before release, Guillaume Provost apparently said "She's asking the player to change the course of past events in order to mend her family. And that's a little bit the theme of the whole game", but in reality, time travel and affecting the past actually have nothing to do with the game's story.

Release Date

Along side Sony's announcement that Drive Club would be delayed past the PS4 launch Sony also confirmed that Contrast would be available on PSN Instant Games Collection instead of Drive Club PSN Edition.

System Requirements

• OS: WINDOWS XP SP2/WINDOWS VISTA SP1/WINDOWS 7/WINDOWS 8
• Processor: AMD/INTEL DUAL-CORE 2.3 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics: 512MB VRAM, COMPATIBLE DIRECTX 9.0C AND SHADER MODEL 3.0, AMD RADEON X2600 XT/NVIDIA GEFORCE 7900 GTX
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
• Hard Drive: 4 GB available space
• Sound Card: DIRECTX 9 COMPATIBLE
• Additional Notes: The Original Soundtrack and the Programme (Artwork, Dev. Diary) will be placed in your CONTRAST folder in the Steam Directory: ...\Steam\SteamApps\common\Contrast\CONTRAST_Programme-OST