Contradiction: Spot the Liar! was quite a letdown. Both the mystery itself and the process of solving it felt acutely underdeveloped, giving the impression of being a really long demo rather than a full game. The mystery is just too simple to justify the mechanics surrounding it, meanwhile the story acts like bait for a sequel rather than a proper experience in its own right. Lacking any strong aspects elsewhere to compensate, there isn’t anything about the game that leads me to care about it. At best, it was a passable way to spend a few hours but I don’t think it’s anything I’ll remember for very long and there are plenty of better mystery games that could occupy your time instead.
---------------------
As an FMV game, Contradiction uses real acting and locations to create a more grounded impression. The playable detective Jenks did a solid job in his role, as did most of the other major characters, and the setting was quite nice overall. Some of the FMV aspects quickly became annoying, particularly the long unskippable transition scenes when moving between areas. The lighting was also poorly handled as, despite going from day to night over the course of the game, there isn’t actually any nighttime footage and instead there’s just a very obvious and weird-looking blue filter over the daytime scenes. I’m not averse to the FMV format overall, but I don’t think it was used to particularly good effect here. Nothing about seeing real people or scenes ever added anything to the mystery which couldn’t have been achieved through another art style, and while doing so isn’t necessary it does leave the FMV aspect feeling like a product of either budget or gimmicks rather than a meaningful artistic choice.
---------------------
My bigger gripes with the game come more from the mystery and how it's solved. The premise is simple enough: a local girl drowned in the lake with drugs and alcohol in her system and you’re trying to figure out if it was an accident or a homicide. By talking with the various people of the town and showing them the evidence you find, they’ll tell you what they know about it. When you match two statements from the same person which appear to contradict one another, Jenks will call them out and they’ll elaborate with new statements or provide additional evidence. The evidence itself rarely tells you much compared to the things people say about it, so the crux of the game is about finding these contradictions more than anything else.
There are two annoying things about this system. First, since you can’t infer much from the evidence, figuring out who the relevant person is to show it to is a shot in the dark. Whenever you get a new piece of evidence, your first priority will be to run around the town and show it to every character possible until you’ve found the one person who has anything meaningful to say about it and find the contradiction in what they said. But because of the FMV style, doing so involves an unreasonable amount of loading and scene transitions that will seriously pad the time and kill the mood of having cracked a piece of the puzzle now that you have to spend 5 minutes walking around aimlessly.
And second, because contradictions can only be caught on an individual basis, the game puts you in awkward positions where two people are saying very different things about the same evidence but you can’t do anything to bring that up since each person is internally consistent with their stories. Sometimes this may indicate that one of them has a contradiction you just haven’t picked up on, but plenty of other times the next breakthrough came from someone else entirely and the contradiction between those two accounts was completely irrelevant.
Finding these contradictions is even worse when they’re sufficiently obscure or rely on imprecise language in such a way that the answer feels like a stretch. I had plenty of moments when I had shown all available evidence to every character and still had no idea which one had the next contradiction I needed to detect. The game isn’t punishing when it comes to wrong guesses and there’s an in-game hint system so the friction isn’t too bad, but a bit more polish in the writing to make the contradictions flow more naturally would have been appreciated.
---------------------
The mystery itself is also incredibly underwhelming and ultimately sinks any chance I had of recommending it overall. While the game brings up a lot of important-seeming plot threads –a local cult, government conspiracies, supernatural elements, etc– none of them actually matter for the murder itself. Instead, the game ends with a teaser for a sequel that would involve all of those weirder plot threads, leaving much of this game feeling hollow in retrospect as it only exists to set up a completely different game rather than improve the one that I’m already playing. While I wasn’t a fan of all those elements initially, the fact that they still occupied such a prominent place in the story while still having no actual relevance to the mystery is the worst of both worlds.
Stripping away all the irrelevant plot threads and focusing solely on the parts that are important to the mystery, the answer also turns out to be quite dull. 80% of the characters, evidence, and plot threads are irrelevant to how the murder actually happened and just act as intermediary points so you can get the decisive bit of evidence towards the very end. The entire solution hinges on a single piece of evidence (one with no shortage of easy alternative explanations) yet immediately upon being shown the evidence the killer will fold and confess. It’s not a satisfying answer, regardless of whether you view it from a mystery or a narrative lens, because it feels so disconnected from everything else the game was building towards.
To spoil it for anyone who doesn't want to bother playing, [spoiler]a local woman (wrongly) thought the victim was having an affair with her husband because she overheard an argument between the victim and another woman (who was having the affair). She then found the victim’s missing license, told her that the license was by the lake, then pushed her in when she went to find it. Because the victim was inebriated, she ended up drowning and thus the investigation began. [/spoiler]
---------------------
On the whole, I don’t think Contradiction is worth playing. The mystery is incredibly unsatisfying, the gameplay is tedious, and there aren’t any other redeeming factors to make up for the game’s core shortcomings. The only aspect of the game I’d call decent is the acting, but that only goes so far when everything surrounding the actors is mediocre. I can’t think of a compelling reason to play this game regardless of what you’re looking for.
