The build I was provided was played on a mid-range PC with an Xbox 360 controller and a DX10 videocard. The game’s main menu included listings for Achievements and Leaderboards, but these weren’t active, but they can be expected to be live for the final code. From the “Help & Options” area, I was able to examine a “How To Play” guide that had picture descriptions of the core gameplay mechanics, view a controller map, and adjust volumes (Master/Music/Sound) as well as play with Brightness, Graphics Quality, Resolution, and toggle Full Screen mode. Initially, I change the default resolution up to 1920×1080, full screen, but this is really a perfect game for playing in Windowed mode, so after the first hour or so I switched to 1280×720, windowed. The game handles multitasking and the like very well.
Before getting to the controls and gameplay of Constant C, a bit of backstory. You play a small, silent robot, a Crisis Rescue Robot to be exact. Your system is activated after an experiment goes very wrong aboard the space station you are assigned to. What exactly happened you don’t know, and the way to unlock a dozen or so cutscenes that explain the story is by collecting data tubes throughout the game. Acquiring data tubes is as simple as standing next to them for a few seconds, but, actually safely getting to the data tubes is where the challenge comes in. Anyway, after solving a few puzzles to get from point A to B (literally from a starting or entry door to the exit door in the same room), you encounter a large computer known as the AI. After stirring from his slumber, he informs you that most of the space station is offline or otherwise inaccessible, and he needs you to explore the station and bring back more data tubes to help him fix the problem. Speaking of the problem, time has literally stopped passing in the space station. The AI grants you a new power — a small bubble or sphere encompasses you, and anything within this bubble “wakes up,” in other words, time is again passing for anything within your very localized sphere. You also get a gravity remote, which allows you to flip the orientation of the room you are in ninety degrees to the left, right, or a complete 180 degrees.
So, it’s up to you to guide your little robot through dozens (the final build will have over 100 stages) of challenge rooms. Each room is basically it’s own stage. You enter in through one door, and the objective is to safely get to the exit door, which is always easily visible, at least. The data tubes are also highly visible, but getting to those presents a steeper challenge. Your robot can’t fall very far at all, so missing a jump or changing the direction of gravity resulting in a fall is fatal. Fortunately, Constant C has practically no load times, so when you die on a stage, you are respawned immediately. As a bit of humor, the charred walls resultant of the flames of your destruction from your previous attempt are still visible. You can also restart a stage at anytime by pressing the Back button, in case you’ve gotten yourself stuck or otherwise just want a quick, penalty-free restart.
Navigating a single room to get from A to B, with sometimes a stop a C (collecting a data tube) may sound easy, but as we’ve seen with games like The Bridge, another game that teases your brain in similar ways, it’s often a surprisingly tough challenge. Sometimes you reach success very clearly, and it only takes twenty or thirty seconds. Other times you may get to the data tube or the exit door on accident, or by luck, for example if you used the Gravity Remote at just the right time to avoid falling to oblivion or before you got crushed by a box. On other occasions, I died probably thirty times, sometimes even more, before stumbling into the right solution or getting the timing and gravity rotations just right. Understandably, these are the frustrating moments of the game, but like most puzzle games, if you walk away from it for a few hours and try again, you’ll often come back with a fresh perspective that leads to the answer. One good thing about Constant C is that I was enjoying myself and was interested in progressing through the stages, and yes even the story, enough, that I worked my way through these ‘brickwalls.’
In addition to the main story mode, there is a Time Attack mode that I’m not quite ready for. Within this mode are Practice and Challenge modes, the latter of which puts a time limit on how long you can take to get to the exit door. You can collect time boosts to give yourself more time, and it’s ok to die and respawn, although of course you lose some time off the clock in the process. Practice mode doesn’t put the pressure of a ticking clock in your HUD, but the stages here are as difficult as some of the latter ones from the story mode. In trying Time Attack mode, I failed early and often, and to this point, have played it only a fraction as much as the story mode.
Constant C gets a lot of important things right. It’s accessible, has responsive controls, is challenging, fun, does a good job of balancing reward with frustration, and I appreciate that they included a fair story that you unlock as you go rather than just making it completely a puzzle game without a premise. The premise alone is good, though, I’m a fan of games that allow you to manipulate gravity and time, but the inclusion of this story, and humor of the AI actually, was nice. Visually, it’s a clean and crisp looking game, nothing that will likely blow you away, but it looks very good and I experienced no technical problems. To my delight, the soundtrack is actually pretty sweet too — it’s a sort of instrumental electronica, but it’s more down tempo and I thought it fit well with the light-hearted dark tone of the game.
Constant C has a lot going for it, and I applaud their efforts to include support for quite a few languages, too. If you’re in the market for a solid 2D puzzle platformer, this belongs at the top of your list of considerations.
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