Fun Concept Held Back by Poor User Experience Design – Contradiction Review

The general concept of solving a murder mystery by rooting out contradictions in testimony is an interesting one that initially engaged me. But the game suffers from a lack of attention paid to the user experience in the following areas: * Still photographs used to navigate the town would flip to mimic the direction the character was facing. This seems sensible, but in practice causes a disorienting flip-flopping of left/right targets that caused me to endlessly travel the wrong way. (It's sort of like breaking the 180-degree spatial orientation rule in cinema.) Granted, an attempt is made to mitigate this by offering a list of options beside the photo, but the labels in the list assume you've memorized street names on the map or are vague and hard to tell apart. * Cut scenes while entering a location are fine the first few times, but the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth time they become unbearably irritating. This could have been mitigated by allowing users to quickly skip cut scenes with a tap on the video. * The list of topics became frustrating to navigate in such a small space and hard to read because of the claustrophobic graphic elements boxing them in. As the list grows, it becomes very hard to remember where a certain response sits in the hierarchy as it doesn't always directly relate to the parent's topic. * Items that you can't ask questions about should be kept in a separate inventory area so they are not cluttering the list of topics. * By the end of the game, the list of responses is too long and finding contradictions stops being fun and starts being really tedious. A search feature would have been desirable. * The graphic design is wanting. Typographic and element layout (especially in the interrogation overlay) are not optimized for scanning information and seriously slow you down. I never got used to it over dozens of hours of use. * It fundamentally doesn't make sense that I can't take a statement from one character and match it up as a contradiction to what another character says, like real detective work. The limitation of only being able to contradict a characters words against his/her own statements makes the game feel less natural. I feel like this was a missed opportunity, though I understand it would have increased the complexity of making the game. * Overall, the gameplay experience could be significantly improved with the help of a UX professional. Full disclosure: I say that as a UX professional (joe.co). * But let me not leave out the good parts: I enjoyed the campy plot and the acting. The red herrings and runaround were fun. And, I'll say it again, the core concept is golden.
Review by lem0nayde on Contradiction.