 Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital, Intel, and SteelSeries. Hey guys, we're here at the Indie Megabooth checking on a game called Contrast, where you play as the imaginary friend of a little girl named Dee Dee. What more can you tell me about this game? So, Contrast is a puzzle platformer. It is set in the 1920s in a film noir-inspired universe. And as you said, you play the imaginary friend of a little girl, and you have a very special power, as all imaginary friends do. And what you can do is you can run around in 3D, and then run up to a wall. If you have a shadow on the wall, you can shift into it. So you can then become your shadow. You can platform in 2D and jump on all of the other shadows in the environment. That's great. Really interesting mechanic. And as you can see in all the art style of this game, shadows are very prominent. So you play as Dawn, the imaginary friend, and you're jumping on all these shadows. But Dee Dee will actually follow you as you're playing around as Dawn, sometimes getting in your way, sometimes apologizing. Can you explain the relationship between the two girls? Yeah, absolutely. So, Dee Dee is like your guide and companion, essentially. She's kind of the reason for your existence. So a lot of the time what you're doing is following her instructions. I think I can turn this on now. I think you're going to need to get that beacon working. Get up, Percy! Yeehaw! Woo! And she's going through the world and sometimes she'll say, hey, I can't get across here, but you can with your shadow powers. And so that's kind of how the relationship works. However, sometimes, as you said, I can't do anything, or you can't do anything as Dawn until Dee Dee helps you. So in one area she actually holds up a stick in 3D and the shadow projected on the wall, you need to jump on that to make your way through the puzzle. That's cool. And we've seen a lot of that in the gameplay of people playing that we've seen so far. Now, why does this imaginary friend exist? Well, it's all tied to the, obviously, the story of the game. Dawn exists because Dee Dee spends a lot of time alone and she's invented this friend to help her cope with some really difficult family life. So much like Ophelia from Pan's Labyrinth who invents an imaginary friend to deal with actually the rise of fascism in Spain, it's not quite so dark. It's about her parents splitting up and Dee Dee desperately wanting to get them back together. So her mom spends a lot of time away, her dad has left, so she creates this imaginary friend to cope. That's a really interesting, a lot deeper story than we've seen in a lot of video games. What was the inspiration for this? Well, very broadly speaking, our studio head and creative director was a really recent single dad at the time. So he's got two young daughters and he wanted to talk about their experience of what he went through in his life and tell a story from their perspective. That's really cool. It's nice to see personal experience going into a game because I feel like that will make a much more engaging experience because when it's based on something that someone has actually felt, it always feels a lot more easy to connect to than when someone makes a game that's based on something someone else has felt, not themselves. Well, exactly. And I mean, it's kind of hard to put yourself and your personal experiences into a game where you're playing the savior of the galaxy or something like that. So when you've got real life experience, you can draw on that. It makes actually telling things easier and more realistic. Is there any other game mechanics you'd like to go over? Look, there's one other game mechanic that you can activate, which is a dash ability. And that's really just to kind of move through space and again, a different way. Adds a bit of complexity to the platforming environment. But you can also, you can move lights in contrast. And whenever you move a light, you can shift into shadow wherever that light hits. You can also move objects in 3D, which change the shadow landscape. And sometimes you can move point sources of light. So like an actual light bulb which casts shadows everywhere. And when you move that, obviously it changes the entire shadow landscape that you're running on. Cool. To reference to something you said earlier, where it's hard to make it personally relatable when you're saving the universe. You might not be saving the universe, but you might be saving Didi's own personal little universe. So if that's something you're interested in, you should definitely check out Contrast. How would someone be able to acquire this game? Okay, so Contrast is coming out on the PC, the PS3, the PS4, and the Xbox 360 around about middle of November. So we haven't announced the launch date yet, but that'll be coming in the next few weeks. Sounds good. I'd prefer it was ready when it was ready anyway, so that's good to hear. If you want to check out Contrast, you should definitely check it out. If you want to see the rest of our PAX content, you should definitely check that out too. And the way you can do that is by subscribing to Linus Tech Tips.