Contradiction: The All Video MYSTERY™️ | Spotting Liars in the British Countryside

Contradiction: the all-video murder mystery adventure or Contradiction: spot the liar or just Contradiction is the greatest Murder, She Wrote Extended Universe fan fiction ever written. A death is hanging over the small British village of Edenton (population approximately 8) and Scotland Yard plans to send in their best man to investigate whether or not this death was accidental or the result of a murder most foul. That man is unavailable, so instead the game’s plot is anchored by Detective Inspector Frederick Jenks—a policeman somewhere on a spectrum between Dale Cooper’s enthusiasm and Ryo Hazuki’s… spectrum. Jenks has just the one night to determine whether or not there’s more to this case than meets the eye, but the eclectic residents of this hamlet won’t make his job an easy one. 

Originally Contradiction was a larger story planned out by video game composer Tim Follin, 

the man who wrote one of the most technically impressive soundtracks produced by a Nintendo Entertainment System. The game we can play is the scaled-down reality made capable through the power of crowd-funding. Sourcing an incredible 4000 pounds sterling, which is an awful lot of sterling I think, Contradiction was brought to life as a full-motion mystery game in the vein of Night Trap or The Pandora Directive. 

Full motion video is a fun house mirror, showing us a familiar but slightly warped reflection of our own reality. The rules there are a little different. People are a little stranger. Things don’t quite work how you’d expect them to. Most of the time, these differences are innocuous, but sometimes they jump just far enough to be absurd: controlling a network of advanced security cameras with a SEGA Genesis controller, for example. Perhaps Contradiction’s greatest strength is in its pacing, though its success is an unorthodox one. I do not mean that the pacing of the mystery is satisfying, a number of logical leaps and unresolved threads keep that from being the case. However, the pace at which one is thrust through the mundane and the absurd is such that it mimics brilliance. Perhaps it simply is brilliance. 

An example, to illustrate my point. The mystery begins simply. A girl, Kate Vine, is dead and we need to figure out why. Our investigation is straight-forward. We arrive and decide to interview a local couple, one of whom was known as a friend of the victim. Even our early questions are basic. What do you know? Who was the victim to you? Procedural stuff. But in between our arrival and asking these questions, our intrepid detective spots a bin full of bottles, a tube, and a screwdriver. Not only does this become a line of questioning we can inexplicably pursue through conversations as we meet more characters but Jenks digs into the bin and pockets the screwdriver. In your typical point and click, it’s accepted that the character you control is a borderline-if-not-full-blown kleptomaniac. But something about seeing an actual man bend down and steal this tool for later use is surreal. There is no layer of abstraction. Jenks is not conjured of the same pixels as Guybrush Threepwood or Sam and Max, he is just an exceptionally British man who I just watched commit a petty theft. Fun house mirror. 

A game presented like a film or television serial will live or die by its characters and the people who portray them. It’s a popular thought that the original wave of full motion video games that accompanied the advent of CD-ROM storage in the late 90s is nothing but terrible acting and cheese. Rather than wave away an entire era of production, I want to ask this question: what is a bad performance? For real, humor me and think about a terrible actor. 

Maybe your mind wanders to The Room, the notorious 2003 cinematic ego-stroking of writer/director Tommy Wiseau. A performance that is clearly being done by a man who has no idea what he is doing, but wants to do it so very hard that there is no more room in his head for self-awareness. A man who believes what he is doing is art. Work that is so universally recognized as sub-par that Vox literally called it part of “the worst movie ever.” But do you know what else Tommy Wiseau’s work has done? Inspired song. How many of us can say that? Certainly not I! 

There is inherent value in taking joy from a production, even if not for the reasons we traditionally seek. A movie that makes me happy because it is terrible is infinitely better than a well-made one that is lost in a miasma of same-y looking blockbusters flitting out of mind within hours of viewing. What I am saying is that I can quote The Room at you but I can’t tell you a single line of dialogue that happened in the big superhero movie I saw in a theater the same year I saw The Room—which was Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, a movie that made over 800 MILLION dollars and was nominated for a fucking Oscar. 

All that buildup probably has you thinking “Oh wow, the acting in Contradiction must be terrible.” Not the case! It is, however, extremely weird. During my play through, some delivery was so stiff that I hypothesized actors were shot separately for conversational scenes and then smashed together in shot-reverse shot. It feels like no one is reacting to one another, or when they are it is comically exaggerated. Behind the scenes photos, however, seem to imply this theory is incorrect, which makes everything even stranger. But then it hit me. 

“These people were a DELIGHT in a community theater somewhere.” 

That’s what it is. That’s Contradiction’s vibe. I finally got it. Contradiction doesn’t have the same energy as a daytime crime serial (see Murder, She Wrote referenced earlier). Contradiction is a play put on by actors at a community college who are doing their best with next to no support, budget, or oversight. Contradiction is a pack of people coming together, putting all the energy they have into something, and letting it out into the world. 

Contradiction is wonderful. It is, in of itself, contradictory to what I consider when I judge the media I enjoy. Some games go out of their way to please me. To present me with such a buffet of content that I will never feel hunger or to produce set pieces of such grandeur that no one pair of eyes could ever drink in all of their detail in a single viewing. Sometimes games get lost because of that. Not because they aren’t good, but because there’s a sea of them. A person with access to a single console or even a reasonable computer can have near-instant access to more games that I will play in my entire lifetime. Add in additional considerations for enthusiasts, such as libraries of emulated games or access to marketplaces full of experiences not found elsewhere like itch, and you have more possible entertainment than can be feasibly consumed. It’s an ocean, an ever-deepening trench in which all new games are cast in the hopes that enough people may see them before they are inevitably covered by the next wave of releases. Games that often try so hard to vie for my attention that they become comically flavorless (Valhalla). 

Contradiction, my friends, is nothing if not flavorful. From the way Jenks forces his hands into the local cult’s salute to the fact that Ryan Rand has a drink in his hand every time you speak to him like some kind of British Trailer Park Boy (Julian car flip). It isn’t the most well-designed or expertly-written game but over the course of the ten hours it took me to make it from beginning to end, I didn’t regret playing it for a second. And long after I have forgotten whatever the twist was in that last Assassin’s Creed, I’m going to remember Detective Inspector Jenks asking someone he just met if THIS means anything to them.