Okay, full transparency here: I’ve been trying to write something about Genesis Noir off and on since I played it in August. As so often happens, nothing stuck. But I’m giving it one last try here because it’s an interesting game that deserves to be talked about. Since it’s possible that something else could push it off my year-end list, I want to give it its due here.
Point and click. Jazz music. Astrophysics. Genesis Noir synthesizes my tertiary interests so well that I must love it, right? You inhabit the lonely No Man, a watch peddler caught in a love affair with the alluring singer Miss Mass. When rival Golden Boy shoots Mass with the Big Bang itself, No Man sleuths through the history of the universe to find a way to save her. The vignettes take you through the cosmos’s early moments, the formation of solar bodies, the emergence of life, and beyond. You essentially get the cliff notes version of Astronomy 101, all filtered through an awe-inspiring visual style.
As we’ve found, Game Pass is a good home for arty games, and the art is absolutely the reason to play Genesis Noir. An evocative palette of deep blues and gold highlights soaks the universe in moodiness. The commitment to a few colors makes moments when the game breaks out of them so much more effective. Environments are rendered in 3D, but objects have thick outlines that ground them and trick you brain into seeing them as traditional animation. As you can tell by the pictures in this blog, Genesis Noir employs a truckload of potential camera angles and scenarios. If there is one thing to expect, it’s dynamism.
That dynamism is both Genesis Noir’s greatest strength and the element it depends on the most. Often on a minute-to-minute basis, Genesis Noir shows you a parade of cool stuff. No Man starts in a dark city fencing his timepieces, but he’ll visit the primordial ooze, a research station on Jupiter, the space-time continuum itself, and everywhere in between. Appropriately, your method of interaction with these spaces changes just as often. One section has you influence primitive organisms’ reproduction to kickstart evolution. Another is simply throwing down notes for an improv jam session. We’ve been taught by plenty of games to expect a repetitive gameplay loop stretched over many hours. The complete inversion of that ethos here is refreshing. The quick pace is not only engaging on a gameplay level, but it inspires fascination with our universe. It’s a game that seems created for me, specifically, and when Genesis Noir is at its peak, there’s nothing quite like it.
That’s not to say the game doesn’t have its follies, however. For all my excitement about the game’s pacing, it has moments of drag. Several times, a puzzle would stretch on too long or I would get stuck. Because I had been trained to expect a faster progression, these instances made me lose my patience faster than normal. The game’s minimalism in dialogue also made things more difficult sometimes, as I lacked feedback on some of the more complex puzzles. These became trial-and-error, and that’s never something you want in an adventure game. The unclear communication was felt big time in the ending choice, where my selection had the opposite outcome than I intended. One sentence explaining the decision would have made things a lot clearer and given me more ownership over the conclusion. But to paraphrase Bugs Bunny, “Ehhhhh, it’s Noir, doc. What’d you expect, a happy ending?”
The road to that ending became bumpy and prolonged with some weird turns in story. I understand what they were trying to do for the most part. The visuals and sound during this part are the most stunning in the game. However, the climax is heavily disjointed from the love triangle murder that kicked off the game. To avoid spoilers, I’ll use an analogy. Imagine if in Mario 64, after the second Bowser fight, Mario forgot about the princess and entered the skateboarding tournament with his new friend Gordy. Would I want to see that? Sure! But it’s not what I was invested in. It feels like Genesis Noir transfers to a second plot at the last half-hour, only clumsily connecting the two at the very end. During this time, the player gets a lot of supposition and theorizing about The Meaning of Life. This isn’t something I ask for in my media, especially since the conclusions reached are so often ephemeral. Ultimately, I think the storytellers overreached here, albeit in front of an unforgettable light show.
Look, if you’re an art hater, run away from Genesis Noir as fast as you can. But for anyone else, it’s a game you really should experience. The number of ideas crammed into these two hours is – pun intended – astronomical. To see a game that I might have made, done better than I ever could, is thrilling. While not every element of the piece is successful, the fact that it was executed at all is as miraculous as any one of the cosmic forces that brought us here to enjoy it.
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