Constance

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted December 5, 2025 on Steam This is the longest review I ever wrote. It has no spoilers. Constance is a gorgeous game and a comforting experience. It gives you full control over the risk management. On player death you can choose to prevent it and continue with temporarily empowered enemies, or simply respawn at save point and retrace your steps. You can prefer to practice your skills and go through the area again by respawning, or prevent your death, persevere and push through the enemy if you're feeling close to your destination. This respect for player agency contributes to the game feeling less stressful while being just as rewarding. The enemies and the skills in this game are also unique. Each enemy, whether stationary or moving, has a unique attack pattern. For each you develop a personal strategy, and as you unlock new skills you also unlock new ways of dealing with them. Exploring the locations is fun in part due to engagements being immersive and not mindless nor repetitive. This is further reinforced by the mechanics of death prevention, upon being empowered many enemies force you to evade by jumping rather than dashing, although even in normal gameplay you will sometimes use this approach as well. As you progress through, you are given freedom to choose the order in which you will clear the areas. Each one also has lots of additional content available after acquisition of skills found elsewhere, encouraging more exploration. This includes secrets as well as challenges. Even previously explored spots may have secrets you notice only after you progress through other locations. On two occasions I failed to grasp how to access a small secret area, although upon searching for the answer it all made perfect sense. I wonder about the experiences of other curious people who found these answers by themselves. Another fun aspect is the use of your skills in traversing the landscape. The game does not hold your hand in explaining how to use your abilities to full extent, and it feels exciting to figure out new ways of traversing the environment. The game introduces more niche ability mechanics by showing you them through natural gameplay occurrences, mostly by cleverly planned parkour segments. The save points are ranging from two to four per location, making the exploration feel not overly risky while still giving an opportunity to get lost in the game's world. Runbacks to bosses are very short, to the point of being non-existent. All bosses have different phases, and each time you rematch a boss you may notice a change in attack pattern, with a couple exceptions to this rule. It often makes new attempts at the same boss feel refreshing, as boss can behave a little differently each time. Sometimes, you will need to perform a different set of actions to proceed to the next phase, and other times you will see that a seemingly familiar attack now casts different projectiles and changes direction, or that different minions are spawned as you face the boss this time. The game also features some nice puzzles and a few minigames. The world of the game serves as a means to explore the inner world of the protagonist, and that is reflected throughout the story. The in-game world has hints to its inner workings, it is created with a consistent structure, each location is well defined both in art and gameplay. The world and its characters are also a big mental health metaphor, with the game's focus being on the state of mind of the protagonist. The game allows the player to choose whether to rush through it or go slowly. Both in combat and in location completion. In my experience, at least one of the base abilities is optional and can be avoided altogether. You can reach 100% completion before the ending, which is the way I did it. It can be a short 8 hour journey, or it can be a 15-20 hours long adventure as it was for me in a single playthrough. This game can be played and enjoyed in the exact way you prefer it, and it quickly earned my adoration and respect. I also happened to find a sweet easter egg along the way. The game has fantastic art style, it is an absolute eye candy, the contrast between locations stunned me every time I entered a new area. The animation flows perfectly and feels great, at times it is also quite sweet too. The music leaves an impact during the gameplay, and some tracks linger in your mind even after completing the game. Sound design is wonderful and one of the first things I noticed while playing. Having found the footage from early development, it is heartwarming to see how the animation and vision of Constance had evolved. Constance gave me a lot of comfort, I related to its topics and their depiction as well as I related to the protagonist herself. The main character design is gorgeous and so is that of the world that surrounds her. I enjoyed the process of playing this game, and I also enjoyed its ending. Constance is a concentrated, warm feeling projected straight into one's heart. It is a fleeting feeling, and it is also beautiful. It feels sweet to recall my time playing it. The fights are as tough as you want them to be, and so are the platforming elements. The world exploration takes as much time as you're willing to invest, and the story is as relatable as your personal experience with its theme. No matter which way you choose to play this game, you will find that it does its best to account for your preference. It is the very way the flow of the game feels that you can adapt to your preference. I played this game on its release build, I encountered no bugs, and as I write this developers have already released a roadmap addressing players' comments on the game map. Even though I had no issues with knowing where I am in the game's world, it is great that devs are listening to feedback. I love Constance for the game it is, I love Constance for the protagonist she is, and I would recommend this game to anyone as it certainly is capable of being an absolutely great experience. Constance is an amazing effort at creating a unique and satisfying product in many aspects, and the result is a fulfilling game that can enact many different emotions within its player. I'm glad I found it, and I can confidently say that it is worth it. Constance did everything it possibly could to make me enjoy it and then some more, an inspiring game and a 10/10. (Review updated due to spelling!)
• Not recommended Posted November 27, 2025 on Steam After getting 100% in this game, it’s about time I leave my honest review of Constance. This game gave me mixed feelings throughout the whole time I was playing it, mainly a lack of polish. I will note my issues with the game below: -Bosses feel too bare bones and unrememberable, they feel more like fighting a regular enemy with a long HP bar as they do not have a lot of attack variety and the game tends to stall out fights by making bosses invulnerable which feels more uninteresting as the attack varieties are very repetitive. What I personally love in metroidvanias is the strong engagement with the boss where both the player and the boss can fight at the same time rather than dodge a long repetitive attack, stagger the boss and deal most of its health, repeat. -Parkour chase segment, the respawns could use a rework as instances such as falling into the void can teleport the player directly into an instant death zone, this segment got rather gritting as this was a frequent occurrence and the same cutscene to initiate the segment was forced to play every time. [strike] -From a 100% completion perspective, exploring feels like a chore, running through the rooms over and over until the final collectable has been found, backtracking rooms feels very tedious as the general map layout is very strange with its lack of shortcuts and rooms not really giving much of an impression. As the map in this game is fairly vague, something that could improve exploration without feeling tiresome to those dedicated to 100% the game could be some indicators that and individual room has had all of its secrets and collectables discovered such as changing the colour of the room on the map. The game does have a feature that shows an entire areas percent, but this still leads to a whole chunk of the map to backtrack. [/strike] There is now a feature that shows the completion of individual rooms, thanks for the change.❤️ -Need for more animations, do not get me wrong, this game has a lot of lovely animations, though there are several moments where it feels like the main character is missing an animation and it really stands out. these include no animation for leaving a lift, there is no proper turn right to left animation in cutscenes, which is a funny one as it does exist in gameplay. fluid stand up animations suddenly snap to a static talk idle animation where the weapon just shows out of thin air, etc. Of course this does not make the game unplayable, just touching up on these would help with immersion. -NPC conversations, this one is a more minor pick, there is instances where the final repeat text does not line up with the games progression such as the shop keeper saying he is out of stock, find more of his brothers to get more despite already finding all of his brothers and bought every item that exists to buy. -Most quests feel too vague, it felt more like the objectives would be found out of pure chance rather than figuring it out through the hints, more structured hints would have been appreciated. This was a big list of my personal issues with the game, do I find this a bad game? no. I actually think the game was pretty good, just not strong enough for me to recommend it. I would feel bad leaving the game on a fully negative note so here are a few things I did like: -This arts style is very pretty, the art feels consistent and polished. there are a few animation issues but for the most part they are very fluid and visually pleasing. -This game has a lovely OST, there may not be a lot of themes in this game but the themes are not the kind to grow tired of, they are very relaxing and fit their dedicated environments really well. -The story was simple, but the nice kind, it may be relatable to some people. Overall, I think that Constance is a chill low difficulty metroidvania, it may be worth trying if you are a big metroidvania fan but want to play something more casual to take a break from difficult games. And maybe who knows? the game has not been out long since this review so some issues could have been adjusted to enhance peoples gameplay experiences. I do believe the devs still did a really good job, its just those extra tasty toppings on the cake that is missing.
• Recommended Posted December 9, 2025 on Steam Wonderful game. Not much more needs to be said. And don't compare it to Silksong, another great game. This stands on it's own.
• Not recommended Posted November 28, 2025 on Steam Before anything else, I want to be clear, Constance isn’t a bad game. There’s definitely a vision here, and the devs clearly have potential. But my experience was very mixed. A lot of the time I felt more frustrated than anything and honestly there is a lot to be desired, the whole time playing I just could not help but feel that there was something missing. To sum up a few major dissatisfactory points, as other reviews have mentioned: -[b] Exploration is a chore [/b] The map looks cool but it does not help much. It's practically useless. I have no way of knowing where I may have missed an item, backtracking is not fun and there is a noticeable lack of shortcuts between rooms, some of the platforming was just plain bad, and the level design itself could use some improvement. -[b] The quests are bad. [/b] They are way too vague and don’t even give you a direction to go in. Any objective that I made progress with honestly happened by pure coincidence as I was exploring. -[b] The bosses are conceptually interesting, but weakly executed. [/b] No boss was particularly difficult, just tedious and most of them just have the same 2-3 moves repeated and stalling for time. Going through the carnival fighting the jester and manipulator both twice, then fighting the main boss of the area. I just wanted to stop playing by the time I got through that boss rush of an area. The bosses were not fun at all. -[b] The healing system is not good [/b] Having to find breakable objects around the map in order to heal just a little bit of my health is not great. I understand wanting to try something different instead of going the usual estus flask route, but sometimes the systems that are already in place are what work the best. -[b] The NPCs are very dull, unmemorable, and the dialogue is boring. [/b] -[b] The story was quite lackluster, too much so for me. [/b] -[b] The game is way too short. [/b] I did not rush and yet I completed the story in just under 6 hours with 64% completion. On the positive side, I really like the art style and atmosphere of the game, I believe that this is something they excelled in and honestly is what captured my interest in the first place Overall, I don’t think Constance is a bad game. I did have some fun with it, but there just isn’t enough here for me to recommend it to someone. There is something here, but it needs a lot of refinement. I wish the devs the best in their future endeavors.
• Recommended Posted November 26, 2025 on Steam It's a bit like if [b]Silksong[/b] or [b]Biomorph[/b] had 6 biomes and under 10 hours of content. [b]Constance[/b] is quite the disappointment, it feels like it ought to be 5x bigger than it is. Colourful and fun otherwise, but that was a big pill for me to swallow. There are many short metroidvanias that feel complete for what they are: [b]Islets[/b], [b]Moonlight Pulse[/b] etc, but I didn't feel that way about [b]Constance[/b]. It felt like the devs called it quits and threw in the final boss long before finishing making the game. This may or may not be true to what actually happened, but most importantly, that's how this product feels to me. I felt somewhat similarly about [b]Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus[/b], but here it's even more egregious. Some games like these set you up to expect and feel that you're playing something grand in scale due to the pacing and then you hit a point where you realise that it's almost over which collides with what you were feeling a minute before: that it had only just begun. The wall jump takes getting used too, it felt pretty awkward at first. It also requires you to press the dash button rather than the jump one, which goes against what we've all been trained to press in that situation. Some platforming sections are actually very difficult, requiring a lot of different inputs that need to be done correctly and quickly. Most rooms aren't like this but when you hit a place with the tricky platforming it can be reminiscent of the challenge sometimes thrown up in games like [b]Lone Fungus[/b] or [b]Aeterna Noctis[/b]. Because the game doesn't go consistently hard like this, or entirely limit its hard platforming to optional segments, at times it felt like the game had a bit of an identity crisis, difficulty-wise. The game lets you take screenshots for its map marker system, but you have a limited number of them and if you run out that can be very annoying. Whilst exploring you can aquire more film to take more pictures, but limiting your film so strictly in this way only serves to self inflict a quality of life problem that shouldn't exist. While I do think screenshots are a nicer version of map markers, I don't like when devs replace having a well marked map by having the players do it all by themselves. One way that system can fail the player is if they explore part of a room and then enter a new one. The map will show the room you were in, fully mapped but with no markings, and it is very easy to never think to revisit it for 100%. This is less of a problem in games that have more detailed maps, that don't fully map a room for you when you enter it. Speaking of the map; rooms just display as squares or shapes, similar to [b]Ender Lilies[/b] in that it doesn't show any useful detail of the rooms geometry. I'm leaving this a positive rec, because for the most part I enjoyed [b]Constance[/b] despite its shortcommings. That doesn't change that it was lackluster and a disappointment though. There's actually a real temptation to leave a negative rec, just to put my foot down on releasing what feels like 1/5 of a metroidvania (and at a full length price point!).
• Recommended Posted November 25, 2025 on Steam Don't compare it to Hollow Knight or Silksong — it's not a soulslike and the scope is intentionally smaller. It's no Ori or PoP: The Lost Crown either. But it [i]is[/i] a little metroidvania gem! Think more along the lines of Islets, Guacamelee, SteamWorld Dig, The Messenger or Haiku. The [i]"your backlog won't judge you for picking this"[/i] tier. Constance shines with its unique setting about a paintress confronting her inner self. The world is beautiful, the controls are tight, and the focus leans much more toward platforming than combat. A top-tier Steam Deck game... especially if you enjoy looking artistic while falling into pits.