Constance is a beautiful and satisfying metroidvania with excellent movement, but its limited combat, uneven difficulty, and fuzzy storytelling keep it from reaching greatness.
I had been keeping an eye on Constance for a while. I remember seeing clips of it on PC and thinking, yeah, this looks like exactly my kind of thing. At the time I only had a PS5 and an Xbox Series X, so I was a little bummed that it was not available on consoles yet. Now that I have a ROG Xbox Ally X, I finally got to play the PC version properly in handheld form.
For anyone still waiting on the console versions, Constance is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S on May 1, 2026.
The short version is that I liked Constance. I just did not love it as much as I expected to. Some of that is probably because I came into it after spending more than 70 hours with Hollow Knight: Silksong, a game that kicked my ass until I got good enough to decimate its bosses and love every second of the suffering. Constance looks like it belongs in that conversation at a glance, but it is not on the same scale, not in scope, not in technical mastery, and not in design excellence.
That does not make it bad. It just means Constance is a smaller, more condensed thing. I finished it in around 9 hours, and that length works in its favor in some ways. The map is not massive, the toolset is not overwhelming, and the game moves at a decent pace once it opens up. It feels like a focused indie metroidvania rather than a giant genre-defining monster.
Visually, Constance is easily its strongest feature. The hand-drawn art style is lovely, with colorful backgrounds, imaginative biomes, and a fluid sense of motion. Constance herself is animated beautifully. The way she runs, jumps, slides, swings her paintbrush, and moves through the world gives the game a lot of personality even when the story is not landing as hard as it should.
The setup is easy to understand. In real life, Constance is a remote-working artist sitting in front of her setup, editing photos and videos, answering messages, sending emails, dealing with teammates, and trying to handle everyone needing everything yesterday. As a remote worker myself, I got that part immediately. The game is obviously about burnout, self-doubt, creative pressure, and the way work can eat into your life until you do not know where the job ends and you begin.
Where it lost me a little is in how that idea translates into the other world. You travel through different biomes and fight clowns, robots, blobs, weird jumping things, floating wheels, and all sorts of strange enemies. I kept feeling like these things had to symbolize something specific, but I was not always sure what I was supposed to take from them. The broad emotional theme is clear, but the details are fuzzy.
Thankfully, the movement feels great. You start with basic jumps and attacks, then gradually unlock the usual metroidvania traversal tools. Wall jumping, double jumping, pogo-style bouncing on spikes or enemies, dashing, and moves that let you disable corrupted fields all fold into the platforming nicely. By the later areas, the game expects you to chain these mechanics together very quickly, and when you get into the rhythm, it feels fantastic.
The brush is also tied to a paint resource. Your special traversal and combat options use paint, and if you overuse it, you enter a corrupted state where continuing to push can cost you health. Mechanically, that reinforces the burnout theme pretty well. You can keep going past your limit, but the game makes you pay for it.
Combat is where I wish Constance had more going on. From the beginning, you get a simple paintbrush combo, and that is basically what you use for the whole game. There are no meaningful weapon upgrades or major changes to your basic attack flow. You do unlock traversal and utility moves, and there are scribbles or inspirations that work a bit like trinkets or charms, but their effects rarely felt dramatic enough during normal play. I would equip them, swap a few around, and continue playing more or less the same way.
The difficulty curve is also uneven. Some platforming sequences are incredibly challenging, asking you to use nearly every traversal tool in rapid succession. You will fail a lot. Most of the time, that failure feels fair because you can see what you did wrong and try again. The problem is that Constance can be stingy with recovery. In Hollow Knight or Silksong, hitting enemies gives you a resource you can spend to heal when you find an opening. Here, healing is far more limited, so there is no reliable way to top up during the hardest fights.
That makes some boss fights more annoying than satisfying. You have to be extremely careful because a few mistakes can ruin the attempt, and without a consistent mid-fight heal, the pressure gets high fast. I do not mind difficult bosses, but the best tough games make every failed attempt feel like progress. Constance reaches that feeling sometimes, but a few fights and platforming rooms tipped into frustration before I finally cleared them.
Still, I have to give the game credit. If you take your time, learn the patterns, and accept that some rooms are going to punish sloppy inputs, you can overcome everything it throws at you. The controls are responsive, the animation is readable, and the game rarely feels broken or unfair.
On the ROG Xbox Ally X, Constance felt like a natural handheld game. The 2D art looks sharp on the screen, the controls map cleanly, and the shorter structure makes it easy to play in sessions without feeling like you are chipping away at something endless. I did not run into any major technical issues that hurt the experience.
Constance is good. It is beautiful, it moves well, and it has a strong emotional idea at its core. But it also left me wanting more from its combat, more clarity from its world, and a smoother difficulty curve. I enjoyed my time with it, but I did not walk away obsessed with it. If you love metroidvanias and want something stylish, compact, and challenging, it is worth playing. Just do not go in expecting the next Silksong. Thanks for reading!
