In Constance, you play as the titular heroine. Or at least a mental stand-in for her as she explores the furthest corners of her impressive mind palace–a surprisingly beautiful backdrop for a 2D action-adventure game that delves into the trauma of burnout. Armed with nothing more than a paintbrush, Constance bashes and dashes through the physical manifestation of her decaying mental health and clashes against her inner demons. It’s a narrative with memorable moments but not an abundantly clear throughline, and an adventure that makes a few missteps throughout. Still, when Constance slows down long enough to allow you to appreciate its splendor and think through its platforming puzzles, it’s often a marvel to behold.
The story of Constance draws clear parallels to the likes of Celeste or Tales of Kenzera: Zau, dispensing emotional gut-punches in the quiet moments between the frenetic platforming. But unlike these comparisons, Constance’s story isn’t linear. This greatly enhances the game’s metroidvania inspirations, opening up the beautifully hand-drawn world to be explored and overcome in nearly any direction you want after beating the first boss, but it makes it harder to follow the protagonist’s growth and relate to her overall journey.
Compounding those problems, none of the characters in Constance are all that memorable or feel enough like people. Many of them ask Constance for help with their problems–which play out as optional side quests–but these quests don’t lead to substantial revelations or gift anything necessary to beat the game. The quests (and thus the characters) feel like unnecessary fluff and are subsequently not important enough to interact with. Perhaps more of a selfish desire on my part, but it’s such a shame how little there is to the story’s characters. Without anyone for Constance to narratively bounce off of, it leaves her feeling flat as well. The situations we see her endure in her real life are still emotional, but because Constance doesn’t feel like a person, they lose the relatability. I cared less and less about Constance as the game went on, playing the game for the pleasure of beating a platformer, not to meaningfully engage with its narrative of burnout.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of Constance sees you primarily jumping, dashing, and bouncing your way through platforming challenges populated by enemies of all shapes and sizes. Each area is vibrantly visualized with bright colors, differentiated with unique enemy types and obstacles–the persistent annoyances that populate the green-colored Vanishing Vaults do their best to stun you long enough to fall victim to electrical beams or boiling acid, for example, while the teleporting spellcasters and flying books of the blue-purple Astral Academy can (and will!) attack as you attempt to dash through interconnected portals floating above spikes and endless drops.
A fairly easy opening chapter quickly gives way to a series of difficult challenges that test your ability to adapt and respond, pushing you to chain together Constance’s various abilities to maneuver through a world all too eager to send you back to the beginning of the platforming puzzle you messed up. Frustration is a key part of the experience, though the feeling largely stems from your own mistakes, not the game’s design. This is a tough game, and one meant to emulate the struggle of forcing yourself through mental burnout.
This sense of struggle and pushing through is best accomplished with two different features, both of which better the overall experience of Constance. The first is a meter that showcases how much paint Constance has left to use for her abilities. This meter refills rapidly once Constance firmly plants her feet on the ground, so there’s never a moment when you’re out forever, but you still have to manage it. Once the meter empties, Constance can continue to use her abilities but each use takes a chunk out of her health. Narratively, this reinforces the notion that putting too much of yourself into something can be actively harmful, and from a mechanical standpoint, this encourages you to tackle each platforming challenge with a semblance of strategy. Throwing yourself into a platforming puzzle without thought or consideration might leave you spamming air dashes or repeatedly stabbing downward to pogo off the same sharp spikes one too many times, leaving you weakened for a future fight.
The other feature deals with how the game handles respawning. If Constance loses all her health, the game pauses and allows you to decide whether you want to go back to the last checkpoint that Constance rested at or immediately revive where Constance fell. If you choose the latter, all enemies have additional health, do more damage, and hurt Constance if you dash through them (which is normally perfectly safe). This effect does not stack if you die multiple times, and you can use it as many times as you want, but it only dissipates if Constance rests at a checkpoint.
This creates a fun (and tense) consideration with every death, especially if the last checkpoint you rested at is quite a few rooms back, potentially back before a platforming challenge or enemy you struggled to get past the first time. This also leans into Constance’s narrative, standing in for the familiar problem of striving to determine whether to push through a stressful situation and possibly make it too hard to overcome or take a step back and try again later. I used both options throughout my time with the game, thankful for the ability to immediately revive whenever I died within eyeshot of a checkpoint, but not afraid to go all the way back to a previous checkpoint if a specific area was proving too challenging and becoming an obstacle I wished to come back to later.
There’s a wonderful level of pushback to Constance’s strikes, creating heft to each attack while also encouraging you to adopt a hit-and-run tactic of quickly moving across the screen and striking with purpose, not frenzy. It’s not all that different from the sensation of rapidly flicking a paintbrush across a canvas, and–much like painting–you grow better and faster at it as you continue to go through the movements and slowly add new tools to your repertoire. Constance (the game) borrows elements from the metroidvania genre, with unlockable abilities granting Constance (the character) the means by which to access previously unreachable areas, unlock shortcuts that connect back to already traveled levels, or complete optional platforming puzzles to find the hidden resources used to improve passive traits (like critical-hit chance, for instance).
After a linear opening, Constance offers you three goals in three different areas and allows you to pursue them in any order you desire. Each of those areas can be completed with the abilities you unlock by exploring that level, but each goal is also easier to achieve by utilizing the powers earned in other areas. This format affords you a great deal of agency in how you want to approach its various challenges, and–in a sense–make Constance as difficult as you want to make it. I was struggling with one boss but after going to another area and unlocking a new ability, I returned and found the new ability allowed me to approach that arena in a new way and much more easily dodge an attack I had previously just been jumping over to mixed success.
Constance has some great boss fights that challenge you to use Constance’s abilities in make-or-break scenarios. The one major exception is a boss that’s less of a fight and more of a chase, as an unkillable maw menacingly flies toward you from the left side of the screen and you have to platform for your life to get away. As good as Constance’s platforming is normally, much of the game is built around rewarding experimentation and letting you approach each segment of its challenge carefully–a bunch of small individual flow states, not a series of extended ones. This chase sequence goes against the grain, pushing you into a scenario that expects you to fall into the type of long flow state that the game has not prepped you for. It’s still feasible to overcome, but you irritatingly have to die a lot and repeatedly start over to learn the correct pattern of inputs to ultimately succeed. It’s a serious speedbump to the overall progression of the game, and not one that felt all that rewarding to beat.
More than anything, Constance is a beautiful game. Its hand-drawn art style makes for one of the prettiest games I’ve seen all year, and the platforming gauntlets it puts you through make those sights more rewarding. While its narrative elements fall short and a chase sequence proves more annoying than challenging, the overall experience is a rewarding platformer with entertaining boss battles. Not a bad choice if you’re looking for a way to take out your frustrations on several manifestations of burnout.
