It doesn't help that the presentation leaves a lot to be desired. The initially quirky charm of the visual style wears out its welcome, since you'll wind up fighting so many plain-looking creatures and Terry himself looks generic. The game doesn't do much with the two screens of the Nintendo DS, either, as the top screen is almost exclusively limited to showing you the professor dillydallying as you do his dirty work. You use the touch screen and other DS features in a few spots, such as for peeling off and slapping special decals onto the screen, but this might as well have been a Game Boy Advance game. Contact does have a few nice music tracks here and there, but a jarring transition to and from combat music is what sticks out. Sound effects are sparse but decent. There's no speech, though you hear a little vocal cue when some of the main characters talk, which helps give them a bit of personality. It helps that there's some nicely written dialogue, which is rarely flat-out funny, but often amusing. There's a creative edge to this game, such as how the instruction manual is presented as if it were the professor's personal Web log, complete with some emotional rants and pointless surveys.
...and that's kind of the point. But Contact's interesting ideas would have been better off in a game that's more interesting to play.
Contact is pretty brief for an RPG, clocking in at around 10 or more hours, though it could take you longer if you get stuck. There's more stuff to explore after you've finished the main storyline (besides trying to wrap your head around the ending), such as trying to win over the hearts of several young ladies, but Contact doesn't offer much in the way of clear-cut replay value. The game does have some basic Wi-Fi support in the form of a system that lets you and other Contact players exchange friend codes so that you can visit a special island where you'll get to meet each other as non-player characters. That you can get some special items here is probably the most worthwhile thing about it.
Contact is either not quite fun enough or not quite weird enough. Its strangest ideas are introduced at the beginning and reconciled at the end, to a certain extent. But in the middle, you get a basic adventure role-playing game that'll make you forget about the game's oddball style and good writing. This turns out to be part of the point, but that point may get lost in the shuffle because the underlying game doesn't have more to offer.
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