Mobile gamers have been enjoying a physics-based puzzle game dubbed Contre Jour since the title launched in 2011. Now PC users can get in on the fun by playing the game online.
The popular title was ported to the web to highlight Internet Explorer 10’s (Win8) touch capability, with the Contre Jour team at Chillingo using a number of of HTML5 and CSS3 techniques to facilitate fluid game play.
Indeed, Microsoft’s senior director of Internet Explorer Brian Gavin even went on record as noting that Contre Jour “is arguably the most ambitious use of HTML5 to date.”
Meanwhile, Contre Jour developer Maksym Hryniv said: “At the beginning, I thought that HTML5 just isn’t ready for this game; that we’ll have a lot of performance issues and things that are just impossible to implement using HTML5 or support in a browser. The biggest surprise for me was that performance is good, the physics are perfect and everything is just beautiful.”
The game was a obviously big production, with the developer partnering with Hollywood movie in-game music composer David Ari Leon. Leon has previously worked with Danny Elfman on soundtracks for various films helmed by Tim Burton.
“The music’s job is to evoke a feeling that enhances the mood of the game, which, in the case of ‘Contre Jour,’ is rather minimalistic,” Leon says. “The composer’s ‘palate’ of instruments is much like a painter’s palate of colors, and paring all of your instrumentation down to a piano solo is a bit like limiting yourself to a pencil sketch.”
To play the game on Internet Explorer 10, you’ll need to download Windows 8 Release Preview. However, you can still play the game without using Internet Explorer 10. And yes, the game worked perfectly on Chrome for me using just the mouse.
