Е*аная х*ета / Unfortunately, very disappointing

I played the demo of this game when it came out and waited for the full release. I found a few minor issues, which I hoped the developers would fix till release, and overall, Constance felt nice and had potential.

Now I played the full game and it’s the most frustrating experience I had with a game in a long while. We’ll start with the good stuff: art style and animation are fine. The platforming is okay. The snapshot mechanic is simple but revolutionary and absolutely genius.
The problem is... everything else.
Fighting system felt strange from the start, since I killed pretty much any enemy faster than it could make even one attack of its own. I thought it was a temporary thing and enemies will get stronger once I get out of the tutorial area. Some of them did… kinda. Every enemy in this game either dies too fast to do anything or is the most infuriating mf you can imagine. And I do not mean difficult to kill, just unbelievably annoying. And their positioning plays specifically into their annoying traits. “This enemy has a big AOE attack? Let’s put it on a platform EXACTLY the size of that AOE. Our enemy is designed to throw hammers and then hide and become invincible? Let’s put it on the ceiling and put only one small platform near that enemy so the player has to jump off every time to deal 1 hit, since the enemy punishes the player for dealing over one hit with a hammer to the face and the platform the player jumped from is going to be the landing spot of all 4 hammers, which renders it very dangerous to return to.”
Paint is a very strange and poorly balanced resource. It’s spent on almost every action except basic attack and movement and you receive damage upon trying to use paint skills with no paint. The result of this ingenious decision? The player gets damaged during platforming sections for using one too many dashes. The player can’t attack or has to take damage to attack a flying boss, because the only vertical attack in the game is a paint skill. The player get’s damaged for moving around the map in the most efficient, fastest way, which is the paint dash. At this point, an inspiration that allows to deal damage to enemies when dashing through instead of dealing it to yourself seems like a necessity instead of a bonus. Nothing but frustration comes out of this limitation the entire game.
Bosses are poorly designed as well. All of them are easy, but I died to almost every one of them at least once because:
Firstly, Constance really likes to make the player unable to attack the boss for a certain stage of the fight. It is on the screen, but it’s invulnerable, in an inaccessible position or immediately punishes the player for an attempt to attack too early. Most of the time I couldn’t tell if the game wants me to attack right now or not.
Secondly, poorly telegraphed boss attacks. Some attacks are telegraphed very well, others have windup animations that are both short and uninformative. These attacks require memorizing and can barely be avoided without it.
Thirdly, health system. The health restores ONLY by breaking vases. Constance does have a self-healing mechanic but it works by storing overheal from those vases. Constance does not get any of this overheal upon respawn so it needs to be farmed before the fight or the fight has to be started without any healing.
And finally, the hitboxes. Most of my deaths in this game were due to contact damage. And not even once did I actually see the frame of this contact. Every such death felt like I died of the enemy’s bad breath and not a hit.
Which gets us to the respawn mechanic. Upon death the player is given a choice between spawning on checkpoint and perseverance. If “persevere” option is chosen, all enemies get buffed and Constance will now receive damage when trying to dash through them, but enemies drop healing on death. This mechanic, like any other in this game, seems interesting at first and loses any sense the moment you give it some actual thought. Why would I run half of the location from checkpoint if I can just stay here AND get another source of healing, which is usually very limited. Outside of inability to dash through the enemies, the game actually seems farer in this state.
Constance also has the worst variation of the wall jump mechanic I’ve ever seen. Instead of being a regular ability to hold onto a wall and jump off it, the player is required to use dash input on the wall which turns Constance into a drop of paint sliding up the wall. This is obviously a PAINt skill and has all the problems related to this fact but it’s also hard to control and sometimes it just refuses to work for no apparent reason. One more frustrating mechanic that could be fixed by simply making it like everyone else. And that can be said about everything else I haven’t listed.
Every mechanic in this game feels like a fun idea that was awfully designed and dramatically undertested. Constance tries to be unique so hard in the things where it is not needed. The result is a huge number of problems which are entirely avoidable and aren’t present in any other metroidvanias I played.
The exploration is linear and boring, not very rewarding either.
The story and dialogue are… existent. And I wish they weren’t.
Constance is also full of unnecessarily long and unskippable animations.

My playthrough of this game is the definition of frustration, which is painful to admit since I waited for this game’s release. In the end, it’s a major disappointment that I cannot recommend it to anyone.

Took some getting used to, but after I got used to it, played like a breeze. The bosses are creative, the exploration is enticing. The enemy patterns are respectable. The platforming is a lovely inclusion. The QoL update did seem to make my experience better. I love the themes in this game, the devs definitely put their soul into it. Movement is fluid - nailing sequences of chained movement sections is satisfying. The soundtrack is nice, it's nothing spectacular but each theme works well for each region, and isn't the type of music that makes you want to switch it off, unlike some other games. Replayability is good too, nice to come back to familiar parts of the game and witnessing improvement.

Paint... must paint. Everything clean, everything new...