Playing as a girl trying to navigate a surreal dream environment, Constance is a Metroidvania trying to shine a light on something everyone feels sooner or later – burnout. The beautiful backdrops, fluid hand drawn visuals, and snappy controls remain the star of the show but it isn’t all high notes, unfortunately.
Gameplay is reminiscent of Hollow Knight. Here, you have an unlikely, weak looking protagonist trying to survive and make sense of a dark world. The painted visual style and overall pacing is common ground too as this quest is far from a cake walk. While the opening segment is easy going, the difficulty spikes are fast and furious. Some common enemies can become more easily defeatable with some practice, but useing every ability at Constance’s disposal is commonplace. Often times finger gymnastics are required to navigate spike-filled passageways, requiring Celeste-like combinations of precise actions. Don’t be fooled by the soft, cartoony visuals. This game is no joke.
In fact, the developers knew exactly what they were doing with the harsh difficulty because they added a built-in cheat menu. Here, the player can reduce or turn off damage entirely. Admittingly without shame, I had to use this feature otherwise I would have never been able to beat one of the mid-game bosses. Once I turned off damage, I never turned it back on as it significantly eased my rage-quitting frustration. Death is also handled uniquely. If you die, you can choose to respawn all the way back at the home base, forcing the player to backtrack, or the player can spawn in that same room but with much tougher enemies. Since there is no insta-fast travel option, I always voted for the tougher enemies with invincibility active instead of tediously retreading 10 minutes of lost time.
While the goal is to traverse a large interconnected map and collect a bunch of items to get back home, the entire premise is designed around being stressed in real life. After acquiring the first main item, the player must navigate a cutscene through the eyes of a modern-day artist which hit really close to home personally. Switching between Photoshop, then answering emails and DM’s, then switch back to video editing, and trying to juggle multiple requests from impatient co-workers is something I know all too well. This one scene probably captured my daily stress more than any other game. While I was touched how accurate this moment was, I just wish the game’s presentation leaned more into it as a whole.
NPCs are forgettable and are only there to give you busy work to pad the game’s overall play time. Without something more in which to care, the narrative has its heart in the right place but stops short along the way. Instead of pinning a section on the map, the player instead can take a limited number of photographs as a reminder to come back to that spot when you have that new ability to grab the thing. Still, without a faster way to travel, backtracking can be tedious. However, this is more or less and necessary evil as most enemies can drop currency which is needed to buy items in the shop. A lot cash is needed to unlock everything so it feels like this was an intentional but more time-consuming design choice.
Constance is a beautiful game but the higher difficulty might not be for everyone and the narrative starts strong but unfortunately weakens soon afterward… but I guess these are all symptoms of burnout, and needing to grind through things you don’t necessarily enjoy, so maybe it is more relatable than one might think.
SCORE: 7.5/10
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
X/Twitter: @ZackGaz
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