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Above, Inspector Jenks being his usual, almost excessively, debonair self. Contradiction is an FMV game along the lines of Phoenix Wright, except that you’re a police inspector and not trying to fight against the most inhumane court system imaginable.
I’ve not played many FMV games other than Her Story and Not for Broadcast (if you can call that an FMV game). Not for Broadcast set an incredibly high bar, combining a fantastic mechanical hook with funny and earnestly corny acting without seeming hammy. Contradiction’s acting definitely skirts that line, but I’m not sure it’s as successful – even if Jenks’ expressions are sometimes worth the price of admission.
Sadly, the real trouble is with the finding of contradictions. Often, I found myself seeing a contradiction between two people’s testimony or noticing a connection between pieces of evidence, but the game only allows you to find contradictions between two statements made by the same person, and evidence has to come from those conversations (or very specific items in the world). This is a common problem with detective games, I suppose, but I can still hope that someday a game will find a solution. Being able to organize evidence by category or subject, rather than by initial conversation topic, would be a good start.
Adding to this inelegance are the numerous treks back and forth you must make as you pick up evidence. Once you find a new piece of evidence, you’re practically obligated to go to every single person and ask them about it. Even worse, sometimes these pieces of evidence (or topics of conversation) are on side paths that you have no reason to return to, so you’ll end up traversing the whole map hoping to run into a new trigger.
I’m not sure if this is a fair criticism, but I also solved the murder about twenty minutes into the game. I can’t say that it was any great expertise on my part – I think I may have solved it anyway, but the camera lingered for about half a second on an image (I’ll not mention what it was, just in case) which gave the whole thing away. I spent about 15 minutes trying to point out this discovery, before giving up and deciding it must not have been as important as I thought it was. From there, the game had so many rabbit trails that I completely forgot about it until it came time to use that knowledge right at the end of the game.
What made this strange was that there were people doing things that didn’t make a whole lot of sense if they weren’t guilty – but it turned out that those people were likely being set up for the sequel…which has not come. Sadly, this meant that the “grand reveal” just never happened. There was no satisfying click of evidence into place, no summation gathering, no pondering over all the evidence trying to find the answers. The game just sorta…ends.
The game must go to Tier Three given both the lack of depth as a mystery and the inefficient ways you are able to discover information – not to mention the loose ends that were hinted at (or perhaps beaten over your head) throughout the game. Quite similar to the problem Firewatch has, actually.