FMV games are pretty silly. Often, in their more primordial days, this wasn't necessarily the intention. Therein lied a lot of the fun! The acting, editing and effects can be spotty at best, but there’s a strange and wonderful gratification in being able to feel what a labour of love a game is. Modern FMV games can sometimes feel like they're trying a little too hard to recapture that essence, but Contradiction! (henceforth referred to without the sentence-shattering exclamation point) is a straightforward and fairly clunky FMV adventure that does an admirable job of capturing that campy feel while telling an interesting and bizarrely humorous tale all its own.
As Detective Inspector Jenkins, it's your job to comb a small English village, question its residents and unearth the real reason that student Kate Vine wound up dead there, drowned in a lake. If you've so much as dabbled in traditional adventure games before, the basics of doing this will be very familiar. You view the town one angle or "screen" at a time, flipping to adjacent areas with your cardinal direction keys. If you come across someone to talk to, you automatically switch to your inventory and can start asking about anything substantial you’ve seen or heard, automatically recorded in your notepad.
Eventually somebody around the village will let a discrepancy in their story slip within your current roundup of evidence, and highlighting two opposing statements will cause Jenkins - or Jenks, as some like to call him - to press a contradiction and move the story forward with the resulting scrap of confession.
That makes things sound a lot more clinical than they are. Adventure games can often feel plodding and self-serious, but those words couldn’t hope to describe what unfolds by the end of Contradiction. Once Jenks finds evidence of an auspicious hand symbol used by villagers - some straight up rock and roll devil horns - he can then throw them up at people during questioning, complete with a preciously manic expression on his face. Later on Jenks has to find a flashlight to explore a particularly dark area of interest. When you finally do come across one, he postures toward the camera and sets it alight underneath his face, ghost story style. Watching the cast act (and over-act, and under-act) and have a lot of fun delivering the nutty story is the reason to play this game, and it’s very clear that no one involved is taking things too seriously.
The shaky technical foundation this is all working off of can make your time with Contradiction pretty cumbersome, though. The inventory starts out unwieldy and gets out and out messy as time goes on, and the key bindings for using and managing the clutter are weird. You can change them, but they never seemed to permanently save for me. (For what it’s worth, I played on a Mac.) Sometimes a set of clues will only register as a contradiction if combined in a specific order, which unintentionally threw me off the trail a couple of times. The subtitles are littered with typos. While no one aspect completely derails things, a lot of the getting around and managing your inventory can feel inconvenient and unpolished.
When I said the plot was the reason to play Contradiction, I meant that as a testament to the contagious energy the storytelling can conjure but also as a knock against the gameplay. Constantly flipping through your over-flowing notebook and combing the same old text starts to wear thin even during Contradiction’s lean run time, and nothing ever gets introduced to mix up or supplement that one basic action in any way. There’s no messing with fingerprints or other forensic evidence, and not even hot spots on screens to look into points of interest. It would have been great to have seen some - any - additional mechanics to help freshen up the same handful of screens you hoof across, though considering the wobbly groundwork of what is included, simplicity was probably best here.
Contradiction has a lot of heart, and it's up to the story’s charm and the enthusiasm of the cast to pull past the simple and shaky adventure game mechanics. I was legitimately surprised at some of the directions this games veers off into. Sometimes that was because things got incredibly goofy in a way I could get behind, but there were a few honest, well-crafted twists to take in too. Even as the absurdity builds, the story plants the occasional revelation or intimate character detail to keep your attention. I only really mentioned Jenks specifically in this review, but the rest of the cast is memorable too, especially the father and son Ryan family duo that figure prominently into the overarching mystery. The moments where Jenks has to go to bat against them are the best in the game. And who could forget James, a sinister stoner who answers all of Jenks questions while staring spaced into his fireplace?
It’s tough to say much more without spoiling what is by far Contradiction’s best asset - its concurrent stimulating and goofy storytelling. If you can get behind its absurdist murder mystery and can handle some good old fashioned jank (and Jenks!), this is an FMV adventure that mostly gets it.