Contradiction – Spot the Liar! (PC)
Once CDs became the new medium of choice for video games, a few enterprising developers saw the potential for including footage of real life actors in a video game by way of what we came to call Full-Motion Video. Unfortunately, the technology still had a long way to go, and these FMV games often had issues with video compression, corny acting, and lackluster gameplay implementation. After a short period of Sega CD and early PC games toying with the formula, FMV games mostly disappeared until we reached the modern day, where the surge of indie developers and viability of niche genres means that even odd and experimental approaches can find a welcoming audience. With modern technology on its side, Contradiction – Spot the Liar! makes the kind of FMV game we always should have had, with crisp visual quality and a story situated in the Adventure game genre where interaction can still make a difference without stretching the limits of what the creators can capture on film.
Contradiction – Spot the Liar! is a detective game, the mystery being the supposed suicide of one Kate Vine. Dying under suspicious circumstances, Inspector Jenks heads out to the small village of Edenton to take a closer look at the case and find out if any foul play was involved. Right off the bat Jenks pegs the Atlas business course Kate was a member of as cult-like, with most of the people he interviews being the people in charge of it, current members of it, or people with their own suspicions about it. The mystery ends up being just as much about Kate as it is about the unusual practices of this group, and it stays within the realm of credibility even as you uncover odder and odder secrets about it. After all, there are real life stories of businessmen and students engaging in peculiar behavior behind the walls of fraternities and secret societies, and Contradiction knows how to stay grounded while still remaining eerie.
The entirety of the game save the user interface and a few screens to show you the set-up are filmed with real actors in actual locations, and the commitment to it is truly laudable. While naturally all the cutscenes and conversations can be expected to be video files, the game environments are also lingering shots on the actual locations you’re navigating. There are no still screens where you’re staring at a picture of a place, with plants moving in the breeze and water rippling as if you were actually staring out across the location. Admittedly, if you do pay close attention, you can spot when a location’s footage loops, but it’s subtle enough that it’s nearly not worth mentioning. The video footage is also very high quality, not on par with a high profile film but still technically outstanding to where someone might think you’re watching a television show if they caught it on your screen. Despite the entire game being presented by way of these videos, I never saw a technical hiccup or obvious cop-out in the filming, although since you will be interviewing characters at length about many subjects, you can expect familiar framing and the same angles to crop up.
Because most of your time and the gameplay is focused on interviewing characters to unravel the mystery, the acting quality is a more important consideration than it is in many games. For the most part the cast puts in a decent showing, with highlights being Atlas’s head honchos the offputtingly affable Ryan Rand and his chillingly terse father Paul. Most performances get the job done save when things get too emotional and their acting chops are stretched, but the only two that feel a bit odd are a man named James and Inspector Jenks himself. James is in a unique spot, where his character seems to be aloof and somewhat spacey, but it does make it hard to tell if that’s intentional or just an effect of the actor’s portrayal. Jenks, however, seems to be from an entirely different type of FMV game, because while Contradiction isn’t without its humor and odd situations, it is mostly a fairly dramatic murder mystery. Jenks, on the other hand, is a bit of a joker with an incredibly animated face. You’ll never be wondering how exactly the Inspector feels thanks to the efforts of his brow and cheeks. The corniness is a touch endearing and the game lets important moments breathe properly, so it isn’t too hard to accept that the character might be a bit of a goofy guy despite his profession and situation.
Contradiction honing full motion video into a style of presentation with little compromise is certainly one of its most enticing aspects, but its mystery solving elements aren’t without their own intriguing elements. The main means of uncovering clues and progressing the plot is revealed right in the game’s title, although you won’t so much be spotting a liar as exposing at least one lie from everyone you meet. Jenks has to close the case in seven hours, with each hour of the game being a chapter marking your progress in solving the case. Time does not move on its own, the progress of the clock tied to you making vital discoveries as you converse with people tied to the case. Most of the gameplay involves presenting topics or items to these individuals and getting a set of topics from their responses. These topics can then be compared to each other for you to find a contradiction in their testimony, Jenks squeezing the truth out people to help bring him closer to solving the case. Finding contradictions will be mostly contingent on you paying close attention though, as the topics you get from chatting with citizens add up quickly. You could technically brute force things by combining every single topic of conversation in hopes of finding a contradiction, but it would be a lengthy process as these quickly grow to number in the twenties and even thirties. Contradictions usually make sense and if you remain attentive you’ll likely pick up on them quickly enough or at least know where they should exist, but there are some limitations you might struggle against. You can only get people to talk about things if you have the inventory item or Jenks is willing to bring up a subject, so even though you learn from Simon that James is suspicious of the government, you can’t go over and ask James about it since the game doesn’t give it to you as a topic.
The glut of topics to compare means that Contradiction requires you to pay attention, the game even encouraging you to play with others so that more minds are working on catching the contradictions. This does mean that it’s much more satisfying to keen onto what you need to do than it would be in a game with limited options, but it can make it hard to return to the game later if you aren’t going for a single sitting playthrough. Luckily, Contradiction has a few systems in place to make up for that and to help players who just can’t spot the lie. A tip system is built into the game by way of Jenks calling the police chief for assistance, and the game makes sure you don’t use them by accident so that you can earn achievements for figuring things out without them. The tips seem to mostly give you ideas what to discuss and with who, but if you use the cheats, they’ll give you what contradiction you need to make without any room for misinterpretation. The game can certainly be beat without the tips or cheats, but there is an issue that keeps the mystery solving in Contradiction from being as fast-paced and thrilling as it could have been.
Contradiction’s main issue has to be how you get topics and items for your investigation. Some can be found in the environment from very basic interactions, but most subjects you can ask people about are the result of you asking the right question to the right person. This inevitably leads to a process where you get a new topic, ask everyone you know about it, and then get a new topic with which you repeat the process. Pacing around the town like a postman delivering a single question to everyone’s doors becomes more about the act than the anticipation of the answer, and it’s not always obvious which character might suddenly give you the breakthrough. Even worse, sometimes it’s not even about bringing up the right subject or finding a contradiction. Sometimes, Jenks just needs to wander around town enough or walk into one of the spots off the main path to trigger a scene. There is no real reason to suspect something might be going down in a forest clearing or at the end of a path when these events occur, leading to potential frustration before you learn to scour the town any moment you’ve hit a conversational roadblock. It’s also fairly laughable how often the game falls back on characters conveniently dropping items for you to stumble upon, an unusually cheesy addition when most relevant details are convincingly covered up or avoided by characters in conversations. Contradictions are an important part of the game, but not as much as the title would suggest, with these back-and-forth searches for slight progress being a surprisingly abundant mode of continuing the game. Thankfully, they aren’t quite enough to undermine the other elements entirely, but more focus should have definitely gone towards clever moments of turning people’s words against them instead of happening to bumble into a meaningful cutscene or toting a new topic of discussion around town in hopes of a breakthrough.
Without spoiling how the case resolves, I will say that the game’s ending immediately made me draw comparisons to Puzzle Agent‘s conclusion. However, I think Contradiction nails a lot of what made Puzzle Agent’s ending unfulfilling. The core focus of Contradiction is tidily resolved and the questions relevant to it and the plot of the game are given sufficient explanations, but Contradiction still leaves you with the inkling that there may be something more. The game even admits that it would like to produce a sequel to delve deeper into the unexplored elements of the game’s story, but if this was just scratching the surface of something bigger, then it is thankfully not done at the expense of this game’s content. There could be a great secret to it all, there is certainly some unfinished business, but the details we need to understand this game’s plot are present and to expand upon that requires adding new details rather than picking up loose plot threads. Leaving things off like this means that Contradiction doesn’t need a sequel to be complete but still makes the prospect of one exciting, a fairly acceptable method of teasing a follow-up but one some players still might be turned off by.
THE VERDICT: Contradiction – Spot the Liar! is a refreshingly professional FMV game with a compelling core mystery and an interesting approach to its conversation mechanics that encourages actually uncovering the truth like you were the in-game detective. Its impressive devotion to using real world footage can’t completely cover up the issues with backtracking and moments of stumbling into progress instead of working it out intelligently, but a well-structured plot and the thrill of puzzling out the contradictions makes up for those faults in gameplay direction. It hits common adventure game faults, but it certainly fits in with the entertaining and sometimes cheesy plots of those titles rather than the dull, ugly FMV games of yesteryear whose format it has refined.
And so, I give Contradiction – Spot the Liar! for PC…
A GOOD rating. Contradiction – Spot the Liar! has a focused plot about the death of Kate Pine and the unusual activities of the Atlas group she was a part of, and in that department, it succeeds in telling the tale it promises. Things could be a lot more interesting if the game dug even deeper, but it already has a compelling mystery to drive the plot with many moving parts and characters to ensure it is full of enough twists and reveals to keep the player intrigued. How you solve the mystery could certainly be strengthened though. The contradictions are satisfying and are designed to reward an investigative attitude, but they are less abundant than the results of straightforward interrogation and coming across objects or scenes by showing up in the right places, so a stronger balance between these methods or better indication of when to go poking around would certainly make the mystery feel more involved and better structured.
Contradiction – Spot the Liar! is a splendid proof of concept for FMV games in the modern day. While not alone in breathing life into this moribund genre, Contradiction certainly nails the style and finds a gameplay aspect that, while in need of a bit more fine-tuning, seems a natural fit for other FMV games, its own potential sequel, or even detective games in general.