Contact

Friday 7 April 2006
It's rare when the most straightforward thing you can say about a game is that it's a collaboration between the people who made Harvest Moon and the people who made Killer 7. But no matter how strange the game you're currently imagining - a seed propagator stuffed with severed heads, maybe? - it won't be quite as original as Contact's set-up.

A mysterious professor, fleeing some more mysterious pursuers, is contacted by a yet more mysterious intelligence through the means of an entirely mysterious device. That intelligence is you, the device your DS, and the professor, soon stranded on Earth once his spaceship crashes during the chase, is in need of your help.

Above: The top screen shows the inside of the ship as the prof sees it, the bottom as its outside appears to the rest of the world

Being a quick thinker (as any professor should be), your new friend quickly disguises his damaged spacecraft as a pirate ship and enlists the help of a young local boy, Cherry, to run errands to help him repair it. So you, through the means of your mysterious DS, guide Cherry on his way, with the professor looking on.

The professor lives in the crisp, pixellated sterility of the top screen, Cherry in the lush, naturalist wilds of the bottom; when he wanders up to the top screen to check in with the prof, the two art styles clash in neat underlining of the close-encounter themes of the story.