Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 09/May 04:35

Constance (Switch) – Review

Earlier this year, we took a look at the PC version of Constance and gave it a glowing review. Console gamers, rejoice, as BTF’s Metroidvania masterpiece is now available on consoles too. If you’ve been waiting, treat this as your sign to go and pick up the game. If you’re still on the fence, or if Constance has flown under your radar up until now, then read on to find out why this game deserves your attention. Story In recent years, we’ve seen an increase in games that aren’t afraid to touch on burnout, anxiety, and overstimulation, but few of them handle these heavier themes as elegantly as Constance does. The titular Constance is a young artist struggling with mental health issues. Her coping mechanism is to retreat into her own mind, where she has created a surreal inner world. This fantasy realm reflects her creativity… but also her distress. As her real-life pressures, like work deadlines, strained relationships, and fear of disappointing others, build up, her inner world begins to decay. Constance adopts a “show, don’t tell” storytelling approach: rather than relying heavily on dialogue, the story is mostly conveyed through visuals, gameplay, and poignant small moments that reinforce its themes by tying our heroine’s emotional state directly to her self-created world. Graphics The world that Constance has created for herself is as much of a character as its creator. It feels both surreal and alive, with strong use of colour and subtle visual storytelling communicating personality and mood without much dialogue. The painterly presentation is thematically fitting and allows for expressive animations and vibrant, carefully crafted environments. Each of the different areas you explore has its own distinct aesthetic, from a carnival to a library to a greenhouse and urban spaces. From a performance standpoint, the game runs smoothly on Switch 2. Multiple graphical modes are available too, allowing you to prioritize frame rate over visual fidelity, although we do recommend sticking with Balanced mode for the best overall experience. Sound Because Constance prioritizes different kinds of storytelling over dialogue, the game’s lack of voice acting doesn’t feel like a huge miss. Instead, the game’s soundtrack takes center stage, setting the mood and helping with emotionally convey the story even without words. Music adjusts to the area that you’re in, making each location feel distinct. Ambience and sound effects contribute in more subtle ways, reinforcing the game’s exploration of mental health and supporting the emotional and thematic focus. It’s hard to put into words how everything comes together audio-wise, without hearing it for yourself, but Constance’s soundscape was the final piece of the puzzle in conveying how Constance herself feels at any given point in the game. Gameplay We’ll start by getting that elephant out of the room: on a surface level, Constance is very similar to the Hollow Knight series, particularly Silksong, but outright comparing the two wouldn’t be fair. This is partially due to the visual presentation, which immediately evokes Silksong. Mechanically, Constance also draws from the same pool of ideas that defines the modern Metroidvania. The game’s design philosophy is built around tight movement, challenging encounters, and exploration. That is where the similarities end, however. Constance is a smaller, more focused genre entry that prioritizes thematic storytelling and cohesion over scale or innovation. The game leans heavily on familiar ideas and doesn’t want to reinvent the genre, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This approach allows Constance to distinguish itself through its themes and atmosphere instead. That’s not to say that there are no original gameplay elements in Constance, but they serve to reinforce, rather than be the central focus here. The most prominent feature is the game’s paintbrush system. Nearly all combat and movement abilities consume a paint meter. When that meter is depleted, using abilities starts draining Constance’s health instead. This creates a constant risk-reward balance, forcing you to think tactically about when to attack, evade, or conserve resources, especially during tougher encounters and boss fights. Constance’s second signature mechanic also ties into a risk-reward balance. Whenever you’re defeated, you can choose to continue from where you fell, at the cost of increasing the game’s difficulty. This ties into one of the game’s central themes, persistence. Altogether, Constance’s formula is polished but largely familiar. Platforming is fast and fluid, with some of the trickier sections becoming quite demanding and precision-based. The game does expect sustained concentration. You can’t simply breeze through previously cleared sections, as enemies and hazards continue to demand attention and careful play. Despite that, combat itself is straightforward but effective, with an emphasis on timing, positioning, and managing that resource system, while bosses tend to focus on pattern recognition. Boss battles are the one aspect where Constance occasionally falters, as they do tend to feel like repetitive and punishing walls. The boss-related difficulty spikes weren’t able to quell our enthusiasm, and after around 13 hours of playing, our adventure was over, and the credits rolled. An adventure that was well worth the €19.99 price tag, we might add. Constance nigh on perfectly balances quality with quantity. Conclusion We often say that a game’s sum is bigger than its individual parts, but in the case of Constance, that is exponentially so. Its gameplay doesn’t reinvent the genre, but through its emotional storytelling, beautiful audiovisual presentation, and solid mechanics, the game managed to surpass our expectations and then some. It may not be quite up there with Silksong, but Constance is still one of the better modern Metroidvanias that we’ve played in recent years.