Compulsion Games

Compulsion Games

Type	Private
Industry	Video game industry
Founded	2009 (2009)
Headquarters	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Key people	Guillaume Provost Whitney Clayton
Products	Contrast We Happy Few
Website	compulsiongames.com

Compulsion Games is an independent development team on the gaming market known for Contrast and We Happy Few. Its headquarters are located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, a city known for its great productive ferment in video game industry.^[1]

History

Compulsion Games was founded in 2009 by Guillaume Provost;^[2] previously he had worked for companies such as Arkane Studios, in France, a company well known for Dishonored.

Provost decided to start his own business and recruited within an old gramophones factory a team including Alex Epstein (Narrative Director) and Whitney Clayton (Art Director).  Team’s previous experience ranges from working with Valve on the Orange Box to Ubisoft with Far Cry 3. To raise money for Contrast, their first game, the team worked on projects such as Darksiders, Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale, and even Arthur Christmas: Elf Run for iOS.^[3]

Games

Today (November 2016) the Canadian team has produced only two games, the second of which is still in Early Access: Contrast (2013) and We Happy Few (Early Access from July 2016).

Contrast (2013)

Contrast was one of the few titles available at PS4 launch. The central theme of the title is the care for children.^[4] The title is a twilight adventure suspended in Belle Epoque magics and Art Nouveau aesthetics, with film noir atmosphere and haunting soundtrack (Shadow Music: a Soundtrack to Contrast). Contrast is set in the 1920s, blending influences from the 1920s Burlesque and Vaudeville era with some more classic film-noir elements from the 1940s.^[5]  You play Dawn, the imaginary friend of a little girl, Didi, who has the power to turn into her own shadow.  She can do this any time you want, provided there is a lit area where you can see your shadow. Original gameplay is based on the clever interplay of shadows and lights: Dawn has the ability to transit from the colorful 3D world of the streets of Paris into the two-dimensional world of shadows, flattening herself on the walls of buildings or rooms; so you can face unusual 2D platform levels, provided the presence of favorable sources of light that you can move to solve the puzzles. You can turn yourself into your shadow, at any lit wall surface.  You can then traverse the shadow landscape – jumping on the shadows of things seen in the 3D world.  You can move those things in the 3D world, and even the light sources, resulting in an ability to dramatically alter the 2D shadow platforming environment. << Provost worked a bit with Valve, around the time that the original Portal was released, and was really inspired by how Portal encouraged people to think about space in different ways.  The idea of 2D shadow/3D world interaction came to him in a coffee shop in France, and seemed to be a great way of exploring new puzzle mechanics.  The film noir world, and the narrative, all flowed from this simple concept>>.^[3]

We Happy Few (2016, Early Access)

We Happy Few is a "cheerful" dystopia set in a fictional English city, Wellington Wells, which remind us the psychedelic London of the '60s. It's about a retrofuturistic-fashioned society formed following an alternate timeline of events within World War II, which is now on the verge of collapse in the mid 1960s. The residents of the city, seeking to forget an unspeakable horror they committed, began taking a hallucinogenic drug called "Joy" that makes them happy, but also leaves them easily controlled and lacking morality and understanding of anything else. Players will control one of three characters in the full release, who becomes dubbed as a "Downer" after choosing to stop using Joy, and must try to survive long enough to complete something important and personal to themselves, all while trying to escape the city before the impending social collapse. Played from a first-person perspective, the game combines RPG, survival, and light roguelike elements, with the developers focusing on creating a story with strong narratives, gameplay underlined by a sense of paranoia, and decisions having moral gray areas and weight that influence and affect later parts of the game.This peculiar mix of laughter and dystopia, another “contrast” after the lights and shadows of the previous title, remind us of the movie Brazil by Terry Gilliam, in turn inspired by the quintessential dystopian novel, Orwell's 1984. In the first trailers, we can recognize traces of Kubrick's masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange.^[6] The aesthetic style remembers vaguely Bioshock Infinite, because Compulsion Games seems particularly linked to the Art Deco style, also present in Contrast. The company filmed a whole entire interview-themed short to present the game to the campaigning masses. The video explains the lore, reveals some characters such as Percy and Uncle Jack, and teases the adapted alternate history setting of the game.^[7]

External links

• Whitney Clayton Portfolio
• Contrast Concept Art

References