Constance - Switch Review

After a Steam release late last year, metroidvania Constance finds its way onto the Nintendo Switch. From German developer and publisher Blue Backpack Games (formerly btf Games), the beautiful hand-drawn art style and comparisons to Hollow Knight have certainly piqued my interest!

The Good

Constance is a beautiful game; let's get that out there. As previously stated, this being a hand-drawn project is all the more impressive, especially from an indie studio. You play as the eponymous Constance who is on a journey to find four tears across the game world which represent her various anxieties and mental health struggles. Yes, make no mistake, Constance does come with an actual trigger warning at the offset. The story material is somewhat dark, but on the flipside, it’s really great to see a studio candidly address things that many of us struggle with in our personal lives. Upon obtaining each tear, there is an interactive cutscene that plays, and each one made me feel incredibly reflective on life; it may sound a bit bleak but it truly is something we don’t see enough in this art form that we all love.

As you would expect with any good metroidvania the exploration is on point in Constance. She uses a paintbrush as her main and only weapon, and you can unlock further abilities with it along the way that enhance traversal and melee attacks. That brings me to the boss fights in Constance, which, in my opinion, are perfectly pitched. They are challenging enough but also very strategic; learning the boss's pattern and adapting to it never felt more rewarding. I actually had a rare feeling that I get in metroidvanias with Constance; when a boss fight was over, I felt a bit gutted, unlike other recent games (mentioning no names) where the boss fights felt more like an ordeal and had me hyperventilating for about 15 minutes afterwards.

Lastly, Constance is probably the perfect length of gameplay for many in this day and age of limited attention spans and a yearning for digestible games. You can 100% it in about 10-15 hours, which feels meaty enough but also not something that requires you to fall out with your spouse. I enjoyed my time with Constance but equally, when it finished, I felt content; it was enough and it was a great time.

TL;DR

• Thought-provoking and brave story content
• Fun and fair boss fights
• Perfect digestible gameplay length

The Bad

In my book the quadfecta of a perfect metroidvania is good story, good combat, good exploration and challenging but rewarding traversal/platforming. Constance certainly has three of the four; I personally found the combat (outside of boss fights) quite vanilla. Constance only really has her paintbrush melee attack and for most fodder enemies, you are best placed to just approach and button-mash, which more often than not works. Some more ranged attacks or something similar would have been welcome.

Also, and I have criticised this in other reviews, but I personally like the exploration to be ambiguous in so much as when you ‘complete’ a room, it isn’t marked as such on the map, because that way you never really know where to look to find the last few collectibles. If a room gets marked as complete on the map, then it makes it pretty easy and obvious to track everything down. That is fine in itself if you have that feature, but my bugbear in particular with Constance is the ‘room completion’ feature only becomes available when you purchase a certain item in a shop. However, it didn’t say that item would have that particular effect; it just says it would display a percentage of completion for each region on the map. So yes, when I got that item and it started displaying room-by-room completion (unexpectedly), I was a little bummed, because it suddenly over-simplified the exploration a bit too much for my liking.

TL;DR

• Combat is pretty basic
• Exploration becomes hand-holdy after purchasing a certain item (unexpectedly)

Final Score: 8/10

Constance is a fine metroidvania which is well-paced, well-designed and beautifully drawn. The combat is a bit meh; however, some will view that as being more accessible but some will view it as lacking ambition. Whichever way you view it, I would personally recommend Constance to any metroidvania fans who love a meaningful story and/or don’t want a massive time sink.

Thank you for checking out our Constance Switch review, thank you to [PUBLISHER] for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
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