A Stylish Metroidvania With Big Promises
Constance arrives on Steam looking like the kind of indie that wants to hit both your reflexes and your feelings. The store page talks about a colorful but decaying inner world born from the heroine’s declining mental health. It promises playable flashbacks about burnout, creativity, work life balance, and inner purpose.
On the surface, it looks like a dream project for fans of emotional platformers. Think Celeste’s intense climbs mixed with A Short Hike’s gentle introspection. You play as Constance, a cloaked heroine armed with a giant paintbrush, bouncing across platforms, diving through enemies, and exploring beautifully animated spaces that feel somewhere between a painting and a nightmare.
Mechanically, it is a classic metroidvania. You move fast, unlock new abilities, clean up bosses with health bars, and poke around the map for secrets. Movement is fluid and satisfying, especially if you love tricky jumps and sequence breaking. There is even a dedicated speedrun toggle in the settings, which tells you the devs really care about the action side of things.
The problem starts when the game tries to connect this slick platforming with the heavy themes it says it wants to explore.
When Mental Health Becomes Background Decoration
Constance sets itself up as a journey through a mind falling apart, but the emotional storytelling never really shows up. You get the occasional flashback, like a scene where you help a younger Constance paint a picture. No matter what you do, the painting feels wrong and there is a neglected plant in the background. It is an obvious metaphor for depression and self doubt.
Then the scene ends. No one talks about it. Constance does not react. The game never returns to that memory in any meaningful way. You just pop back into the colorful world and start hopping over spikes again.
This is the pattern for most of the supposedly heavy material. A warning screen tells you the game explores burnout, familial conflict, trauma, anxiety, and depression. In play, those ideas are mostly presented as brief, isolated vignettes. A nightmarish violin lesson with a discouraging teacher is clearly uncomfortable, but it is not really examined. You see it once, move on, and the story never digs into how that experience shapes Constance.
The same issue shows up in the world design. The game claims that enemies and characters represent different aspects of Constance’s psyche and personal history. That sounds like Silent Hill style symbolism where every monster means something.
In practice, the enemies mostly feel like random weirdos. You fight a walking bundle of keys covered in goop that just shuffles around. You face a boxing robot with a moustache and a propeller on its head. You clash with a flame spitting armillary sphere. They are fun to smack with your giant brush, but they do not communicate anything about Constance’s inner world. You are not cleansing them, healing them, or changing them. You simply hit them until they splatter into grey paint and cough up currency.
Constance herself barely seems to have an inner voice. The game hints that an astronomy themed area might reflect her relationship with science or art, but never actually commits. Does she find comfort in stargazing? Was she pushed toward science when she wanted to paint? The level looks nice, but the story does not answer any of these questions. It starts to feel like the area only exists so the developers can drop in an NPC named Vincent who references Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
That is a recurring theme. You meet characters who are clearly inspired by real artists. There is Frida with flowers and bold eyebrows, an obvious nod to Frida Kahlo, and someone who resembles a figure from Klimt’s The Kiss. These cameos are fun to spot if you know art history, but they never deepen the narrative. They mostly exist as visual references in a world that keeps gesturing at meaning without following through.
A Great Game That Avoids Its Own Heart
Where the disconnect really shows is in Constance’s abilities. This is a perfect place for meaningful metaphor. As you progress, you unlock new skills that let you jump higher, dash further, and reach areas that were previously impossible. It is the classic metroidvania loop, and also a golden opportunity to show emotional growth through gameplay.
Instead, Constance simply finds blank canvases scattered in the world and automatically paints new skills on them. A directional stab move appears because the game needs it for platforming, not because it relates to her fears or her creative struggles. No one comments on these powers. Constance does not question them or tie them to her journey. They are just tools, fun to use but empty of story.
The result is a strange gap between what the game says and what it does. On one side, you have a warning screen and marketing copy that position Constance as a serious look at mental health. On the other, you have a tight, fast, good looking metroidvania that mostly uses those themes as background art and level dressing rather than something it wants to explore.
If you go in expecting a stylish action platformer, there is a lot to like. Movement is fast and satisfying. Boss fights demand focus and precise dodging. Levels are gorgeous and keep one upping each other with new visual ideas. It feels great to speedrun and experiment with movement, and there is clearly love in the way the world is built.
But if you were hoping for something that hits as hard emotionally as Celeste, or that really breaks down anxiety, trauma, and burnout through its systems and storytelling, Constance does not get there. The themes sit on the surface instead of being woven into the choices you make, the abilities you gain, or the relationships you build.
Constance is absolutely worth a look if you want a pretty, fast metroidvania with a paintbrush twist. Just do not expect it to say much about the person holding that brush.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/constance-is-a-metroidvania-that-wants-its-monsters-to-mean-something/
