Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of pax 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel and steelseries hey guys we're here at the Indy mega booth checking on a game called contrast where you play is the imaginary friend of a little girl named didi what more can you tell me about this game so contrast is a puzzle platformer it is set in the 1920s in a film noir inspired universe and as you said you play the imaginary friend of a little girl and you have a very special power as all imaginary friends do and what you can do is you can run around in 3d and then run up to a wall if you have a shadow on the wall you can shift into it so you can then become your shadow you can platform in 2d and jump on all of the other shadows in the environment that's great really interesting mechanic and as you can see in all the art style of this game shadow is a very prominent so you play as dawn the imaginary friend and you're jumping all these shadows but you're the DD will actually follow you as you're playing around as dawn sometimes getting your way sometimes apologize can you can you explain the relationship between the two girls yeah absolutely so our DD is like your guide and companion essentially it's just kind of the reason for your existence so a lot of the time what you're doing is you know following her instructions I think I need to get that began working for see ya she's going through the will and sometimes she'll say hey I can't get across here but but you can with your shadow powers and so that's kind of how the relationship works however sometimes as you said I can't do anything well you can't do anything as dawn until DD helps you so at one area she actually holds up a stick in 3d and the shadow projected on the wall you need to jump on that to make your way through the puzzle that's cool and we've seen a lot of that in the gameplay of people playing that we've seen so far now why does this imaginary friend exist well it's all tied to the obviously the story of the game dawn exists because deedie spends a lot of time alone and she's invented this friend to help her cope with some really difficult family life so much like a affiliate from Pan's Labyrinth win Vince an imaginary friend to deal with actually the rise of fascism in Spain it's not quite so dark it's about her parents splitting up and didi desperately wanting to get them back together so so Spencer her mom spends a lot of time away her dad has left so she creates this imaginary friend to cope that's really interesting a lot deeper story than we've seen a lot of video games what was the inspiration for this well very very broadly speaking our studio studio head and creative director was a really recent single dad at the time so he's got he's got two young daughters and he wanted to talk about their experience of you know what he went through in his life and tell the story from their perspective that's really cool it's not it's nice to see personal experience going into a game because I feel like that will make a much more engaging experience because when it's based on something that someone has actually felt it always feels a lot more easy to connect to than with someone makes a game that's based on something someone else has felt not themselves well exactly and I mean it's kind of hard to put yourself and you know your personal experiences into a game where you're playing the savory of the galaxy or something like that so when you've got real life experience you can draw on that it makes it mates actually telling things easier and more realistic is there any other game mechanics you'd like to go over look this is one other game mechanic that you can activate which is a dash ability and that's really just to kind of move through space in it and again a different way adds a bit of complexity to the platforming environment but you can also you can move lights in contrast and whenever you move a light you can shift into shadow wherever that light hits you can also move objects in 3d which change the shadow landscape and sometimes you can move point sources of lights so like an actual light bulb which cast shadows everywhere and when you move that obviously it changes the entire shadow landscape that that you're running on cool so reference to something you said earlier where it's hard to make it personally relatable when you're saving the universe you might not be saving the universe but you might be saving dd's own personal little universe so that's something you're interested in you should definitely check out contrast how would someone be able to acquire this game okay so contrast is coming out on the PC the ps3 the ps4 and the xbox 360 around about middle of November so we haven't haven't announced the launch date yet but that'll be coming in the next few weeks sounds good I'd prefer it was ready when it was ready anyway so that's good to hear if you want to check out contrast if you you should definitely check it out if you want to see the rest 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