Check out this teaser trailer for the 2D/3D puzzle platformer Contrast. You can move in and out of the shadows (literally), using the darkness to traverse to areas you might not be able to reach any other way. In one instance early on I needed to reach a balcony that was high overhead. There was no way to reach it on my own, but there was a lantern sitting in front of a bicycle not too far away. The light cast a huge shadow of the bike up on the wall, and all I had to do was move close to the wall and flick a button on my controller; allowing me to become a shadow version of myself. From there, I had to hop along on the still-spinning pedals in order to scale the wall and make my way to the same level as the balcony. It looked great, but it wasn’t exactly challenging stuff.
After moving on I got to a huge, beautiful carousel. After getting it started, I had to then slip into the shadows and hop from horse to horse in order to clamber up the side of the building. I had a little bit of trouble here as I just rushed to the closest wall and tried to start scaling the shadows of the horses. I’d gone to the wrong place, though, and it made my life a little bit more difficult to move on. I could still get up that way, which was the good part, so it’s entirely possible that there will be openings for some creative run-throughs of the game’s stages the developers didn’t intend.
Just the same, such runs were a little beyond my skills since my sneakier route didn’t give me a lot of time to figure out what to do. You’re not just stuck inside of the shadows once you’ve slipped into them, as you also have an ability to do a short dash out of the shadows and then meld back into them. Its application became apparent pretty when I came to a pillar of darkness being cast from a pole. You can only remain in the shadows if you stay in the light, so I had to dash across these areas while keeping pace with the spinning horses. It gave the game a bit of a Mega Man X feel, for lack of a better example, so I think there could be some devious platforming in store for our heroine. I also doubt this is the only new ability that will show up along the way.
There is also going to be a little bit of light manipulation in the game. Shadows can change based on how light hits an object at any given time, so if you move something closer or farther from the light it will make a different path. I only saw little hints of this in the trailer, but it could be used to make for some fun puzzles.
