There’s this old Key & Peele skit called Dicknanigans where two performance artists continually kick each other in the business while topics display on the screen behind them. Much of it is simply making fun of people who make and consume that kind of hyper-vague art. After about half an hour with this game, I couldn’t get Dicknanigans out of my head; Genesis Noir shares the same shallow approach to the topic of the Big Bang and the game-created mythology it implies but never adequately explores, providing you with a theme or topic that barely connects to the story and then relying on vague body language and metaphors (or maybe not?) to communicate what’s happening and why. “Ineffective” doesn’t begin to cover it.
The mechanics, meanwhile, are arguably even worse than the story. Genesis Noir‘s rare puzzles are terrible, but the 90% of the game spent walking around and pressing random directions to solve puzzles for reasons that never become apparent isn’t much better. If a great art style and self-indulgent vagueries are all you’re looking for, then Genesis Noir is the game for you. If, however, you’re one of those pesky gamers who expect things to happen for underlying reasons and stories to have characters rather than just a parade of hollow archetypes, there’s nothing here to recommend.
It’s insanely difficult to care about characters with generic traits and virtually no growth
You play as a cosmic being. What is a cosmic being? What do they live like? Well, in Genesis Noir it’s all stock noir. The main character is a watch salesman, or maybe some kind of god of time? Or possibly death—at one point, his face is replaced with a skull, though that model reflects an appendage that he hasn’t yet lost, bringing me back to the possibility of him being some kind of time god. Or maybe that was a graphical bug (it happens). There are dozens of interpretations that a person could come up with to find meaning in what I’m generously calling Genesis Noir‘s story, and that’s the underlying problem; when everything could mean anything, nothing means anything concrete anymore. If you finish a story and have to headcanon the identities of the characters and the basic meaning of the whole thing, can it even be considered a legitimate story?
It isn’t just the insufferable vagueness that holds back Genesis Noir‘s story, but also its presentation. Much of the game is best described as a series of unskippable cutscenes with minimal inputs between them. Standing still is about the only thing you can do to disrupt the pacing, which makes it that much more surprising that it’s paced so awfully.
Nothing of note happens in the first half of the game, and even if it did, it’s virtually impossible to differentiate flashbacks from normal gameplay until the main character gives up alcohol. Before that point, random things happen for no discernible reason and you have no reason not to believe that you’re traveling through time each time something weird happens. This is a game where you take a nap on the ground and wake up in a particle accelerator. Causality is tenuous.
It certainly doesn’t help any that the writing is splayed out in all directions. New chapters begin with scientific details about the Big Bang that dovetail into whatever that chapter’s theme is, and that’s good, but very few chapters have anything to do with the overarching story. You know, the one detailed on the store page about a love triangle between cosmic beings. The setup is that you’re a part of that triangle, vying against a saxophonist for the affections of a singer, and the saxophonist shoots the singer with the Big Bang. Somehow, time stops and you get to work jumping throughout the history of the universe—an awkwardly human-centric vision of it, at least—to create a black hole that can stop the Big Bang.
Then you get so distracted touching parts of the universe that very little gets done. If you’re hoping for details about the love triangle, how well the three characters know one another, and what the main character’s relationship with the saxophonist is, then tough luck. It’s all implied through unclear body language and occasional concert fliers. Oh, and some flashbacks with him, which don’t really make sense in hindsight. In a lot of ways, Genesis Noir has nothing to do with the Big Bang whatsoever. Especially at the end when its human-centric history of the universe gives way to a cringe-inducing We Are The World-style song that’s supposed to represent humanity’s value (I think) but instead made me wish for its destruction.
Genesis Noir has two endings you can select from at the end. Both choices did the opposite of what I expected because nothing makes sense here.
Genesis Noir is all about nothing-puzzles, and you guess the answer most of the time
I don’t even know where to begin with the gameplay. In many ways, you don’t do anything here. The vast majority of the interactions required to move the story along are a simple click or controller button press. Sometimes, Genesis Noir is feeling interesting enough to task you with moving left or right or throwing a seed on something. It rarely boils down to more than just pressing something near something, though. This is a small mercy, as it turns out; the near-complete absence of cause and effect makes the few actual puzzles an utter nightmare of moon logic, so I can’t complain that most obstacles can be overcome by pressing and holding random directions until something happens. A nothing-puzzle is the best available kind.
It’s when Genesis Noir decides to challenge you by throwing a puzzle with barely-coherent and rarely explained rules at you that things go totally off the rails. The first time I got stuck was on a puzzle that required connecting lines. I blew through this puzzle after closing the game and taking a break, so it’s very possible that it was bugged on my first attempt. That’s what happened on the third puzzle I became stuck on; you’re required to change a clock’s time to match rocket departure times and clear out a crowd, but nothing happened when I changed the time. This required closing the game and starting from the last save point, which seems to always be the start of the chapter.
The second puzzle I ended up stuck on required manipulating a bunch of machines to match the waves on a blackboard to your left. No one tells you to check the blackboard, nor is it immediately apparent that you can even look over in that direction. Rarely, one or two of the correct machine values will show up on the board, but you’re otherwise left to tweak knobs and dials until you’ve hit upon something similar. And “similar” isn’t always the goal. You can make something identical to what’s on the board and still find yourself unable to proceed because the actual solution doesn’t look anything like what’s on the board. I would consider this to be the worst puzzle I’ve ever come across if it was truly a puzzle, but it’s not a puzzle at all. This is just a guessing game designed to waste your time.
The strongest part of Genesis Noir is the art, but art doesn’t make a game worthwhile
I don’t know what the history of this game is, but I suspect that it started out as some kind of tech demo. Much of Genesis Noir is flashy, with its starry background providing plenty of blank space for white and yellow lines and objects to play with. The transitions here are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Outside of loading screens before and after the start of each chapter, it’s seamless transitions from scene to scene. Some areas are third-person and give you the freedom to run around. Others are in first-person and send you careening down a hallway of art. I can’t praise Genesis Noir‘s art enough. The developers are even taking criticism about the subtle background flashing (which isn’t even close to being bad by normal game standards) to heart and implementing some way of reducing that in a future patch. That’s the kind of thing that’s much appreciated. The soundtrack is also solid at several points, with the strongest points leaning into jazzy instrumentation (most notably, the upright bass), but even at its best, the music doesn’t stand out in the same way Contrast‘s music did in the same jazzy style. And much of the soundtrack is just atmospheric fluff.
Story: 0/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ – 4/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean
*A Steam key was provided for this Genesis Noir review. It took me 5 and a half hours to beat the game and grab all of the achievements. Surprising. I could have sworn that it took four times that long.
Genesis Noir review – Just… what? first appeared on Killa Penguin
