I briefly touched on Genesis Noir‘s flicker—which I described as “subtle background flashing”—when I reviewed it, mentioning that the developer Feral Cat Den was already looking into an option to disable the flashing in order to make the game more accessible for those sensitive to such things. That option was implemented earlier today, as you can see from the video below (which begins with the flashing version, though the video compression dulls the effect somewhat). There are still star clusters and cloudy areas that randomly teleport around in parts of the background, but any flicker from this is much less prominent.
If you’ve ever seen me review something with lots of flashing, you know that it’s one of those effects that I try to warn about ahead of time, so I appreciate Feral Cat Den taking the time to implement something that greatly reduces the amount of flickering in the image, even if it didn’t personally bother me. And speaking of welcome accessibility features, there’s also a new “always run” option that makes it possible to play Genesis Noir more reliably using only the mouse. Double-clicking to run doesn’t work very reliably in this game, so having the option to run everywhere with a single click is a very handy option to have.
I was hard on Genesis Noir when I reviewed it (and I stand by my story criticisms—I’ve since seen at least six completely different interpretations of what the story is about), but it’s hard to hold much against devs who are responsive and willing to include accessibility options like this. The only other developers I’ve seen who pay any attention to the mitigation of unnecessary flashing would be first-party Nintendo devs, and even then, that change only started to come about around the time that one Pokemon anime episode was banned after sending a bunch of people to the hospital thanks to flashing red and white lights. The point being, a developer spending time on this kind of thing is rare, and even rarer when you filter out changes that have been made more for liability reasons than wanting-to-make-something-better reasons.
Genesis Noir has a new “flicker off” option first appeared on Killa Penguin
