The game review space is always overflowing with hyperbolic epithets. Every game released is referred to by someone or the other as “the best ever” something or “the most ever” something else. And while I generally cringe at that style of writing, Genesis Noir is a game I find impossible write about without devolving into hyperbole, so I’ve decided to just roll with it.
Genesis Noir is quite possible the most conceptually insane game I’ve ever played. The game follows a bizarre love triangle between entities who aren’t so much characters as they are metaphors for cosmic concepts. You play as No Man whose secret love affair with jazz singer Miss Mass sparks the jealousy of Golden Boy, her saxophone player and erstwhile lover who deal with his emotions by shooting Miss Mass. This gunshot, prompted by the passion of a perceived slight, Genesis Noir claims says is the Big Bang. Yes, that Big Bang.
Instead of immediately killing the victim as gunshots aren’t known to do, Golden Boy’s projectile simply hangs in the air like a slowly expanding balloon, and within the shot itself are various points in time that No Man can investigate in an attempt to find the pieces to build a black hole large enough to prevent the Big Bang. So yeah, Genesis Noir is essentially a game about stopping the big bang to save someone you love. It was at this point, roughly five minutes into the game, that I was completely sold on the idea. And that’s only half of the setup.
A premise as unusual as this can’t be contained within traditional gameplay loops, and this is where I imagine Genesis Noir will ruffle some gamer feathers. If you put a gun to my head, I’d describe it as a point-and-click adventure game but it’s just as much a puzzle game, a visual novel, or an art installation. Sometimes you walk around planting light and dark seeds that absorb light and dark energy to create a path forward. You can physicall grab and spin the galaxy to move time forward for these seeds to grow. You join clusters of atoms to create constellations, but sometimes you just click on burp bubbles to pop them.
If you want to move beyond traditional genre definitions that we’ve learned to judge games by, I’d describe Genesis Noir as interactive animation, because when you move beyond the raw gameplay of it, the real joy of Genesis Noir comes from the bonkers imagery used to visualize the creation of the universe are routinely stunning and kept me moving forward more than any amount of gameplay could. The puzzles feel more like punctuations at the end of sentences than the meat of the narrative, the main reason to pick this game up is to vibe with its visual artistry and music.
The developers at Feral Cat Den have fused 3D environments with traditional hand-drawn animation with a distinct lighting style to create an aesthetic that never stops popping. The stylised black and white palette brings to mind classic film noir which, combined with the abstract cosmic imagery and unique rendering technique give the game a one-of-a-kind look.
What really makes this interesting is that the developers didn’t stop with the visuals being a stylistic choice, because the concept of creation is baked into the very craft of traditional animation. Genesis Noir makes no bones about its artistic inspirations (and aspirations), routinely calling back to some of the earliest animation techniques pioneered by the, well, pioneers of the medium. The most obvious comparion here is to French animator Émile Cohl whose process of drawing on white paper and then printing on negative film gave birth to the “living blackboard” aesthetic that inspired Genesis Noir.
This living blackboard style is bolstered by the joys of modern-day game development because Feral Cat Den has created something that moves with the smoothness and style you couldn’t even imagine achieving with traditional animation in the 1900s. So the game at once calls back to the early days of its visual medium while propping it up using the technological advancements in game development. The form is the thesis. The medium has never been the message more so than it is here. Marshall McLuhan eat your heart out.
Near the end of the game, you find a narrative log on a spaceship that goes “Just because something is a game, doesn’t mean that your thoughts, your feelings, your expectations are trivial, or irrelevant, or meaningless. For it is in these that lies a game’s true beauty.” That sums up the core thesis of Genesis Noir better than I ever could.
As the case tends to be with games like this – think Kentucky Route Zero or Control – Genesis Noir isn’t really a game you understand but something you felt. In a conversation with a friend, I likened it to the difference between listening to a song by Linkin Park and listening to something from an instrumental post-rock band like Mogwai. Lyrics are meant to be understood, but music is felt. In your bones and in your soul.
Genesis Noir is music.
Review code provided by Fellow Traveler Games. Genesis Noir is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox Game Pass.