The big bang of the gun blast is explicitly tied to the Big Bang of the universe. During the cold blooded murder of Miss Mass, Genesis Noir and its protagonist, No Man, rove through circumstances that lead to this apocalyptic moment in time. Genesis Noir opens in the trappings of its genre: a black and white visual pallet, wet smoky streets, slow jazz, and the ubiquitous presence of crime. Genesis Noir presents that thesis to its player under the guise of an adventure game. No one’s life escapes fiction, either experienced or imagined, and it all builds into the shape and psyche of a human being. In reality, or at least the version of reality I experienced in Genesis Noir, it’s a suitable climate to merge dreams and reality into the same space. Charitably, it could be a deluge of incomprehensible or ambiguous minutia masquerading as plot and character.

In bad faith, it could be read as an excuse to bury the player in aesthetic and expect them to subsist through spectacle. This is the first sentence of the preamble that opens Genesis Noir and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I finished the game. Unlike with the actual Big Bang, the creation of this universe won’t accelerate quickly, but this cosmic journey looks like it may still be worth the wait.Sometimes reality is too complex for visual perception. Still, what we have seen so far is a visual treat that has the makings of a one-of-a-kind graphic adventure game, thanks to a surreal story and some impressive art and animation. So things are still a bit rough at the moment, but all of the various pieces so far suggest that they’ll hopefully come together to create a fascinating game.Īs you may have garnered from the previous paragraphs, Genesis Noir isn’t expected until a much later date - December of 2019 at the earliest - and thus we still don’t have a huge amount to work with in the terms of a playable product yet. Oddly enough, though, I had triggered a bug that bypassed the puzzle altogether, going straight to the end of the demo. This was evident during the final puzzle, which had a notable bug that could make it so that players might not be able to view the solution to the final puzzle, which involved a combination of card suits. It’s important to note that despite coming across as as a highly-intriguing adventure game that oozes style, Genesis Noir is still in its earliest stages of development. The rest of the demo was mostly linear, going through some eye-catching cutscenes that revealed bits of the plot while wandering on a path through the cosmos, but kept up with the impressive style and hinted at greater things to come, including a part where a single scene seemed to cycle through individual frames as we walked along and we had to pay attention to key parts of it. The utilization of almost chalk-like white lines on the black vastness of space creates a rather striking look that also naturally fits the noir theme rather perfectly. This scene easily illustrated one of Genesis Noir’s greatest strengths: its unique monochrome art style. But then, when dialing the number, each spin of the rotary phone cause the lines and scribbles making up our location to break apart and swirl around, quickly establishing that we were in for quite a trip. To start, we had to click around the apartment in order to locate the telephone and discover the phone number that we needed to call, in a standard graphic adventure puzzle that still worked nicely.

Like a lot of noir tales, it involved our grizzled protagonist waking up depressed in their ramshackle apartment (seemingly inside of a clock tower, with a giant timepiece on the wall) and having to venture out to work on their next case. The demo started out fairly simple enough. Naturally, the plot about attempting to save a jazz singer from being killed by the start of the Big Bang through examining all of the time and space in between and all told within the trappings of a film noir tale generated a fair share of interest, and the early demo suggests a gleefully odd plot like that will have the great game it deserves in the end. It was a promising title, albeit one with a highly unusual premise, and thankfully it ended up reaching its funding goal, hooking up with publishers Surprise Attack afterwards. The last time we saw Genesis Noir, the newest adventure game from developers Feral Cat Den, it was beginning its Kickstarter campaign earlier this year.

Genesis noir bug