Genesis Noir
PC, Xbox One
It plays with scale, perspective and recursion with a confidence that takes the breath away
The Big Bang told through the lens of a classic noir? Not that old chestnut. As the film critic Mark Kermode once noted, 2001: A Space Odyssey takes the viewer from the dawn of mankind to the birth of a new species in two hours and 44 minutes. Well, in around twice the runtime of Kubrick’s masterpiece, Feral Cat Den’s mind-boggling debut carries us from the birth of our universe to its inevitable demise – and beyond. It opens with wailing sirens contrasted with smooth jazz, in a familiar world of shadowy streets and smoky bars; there’s a hard-drinking, world-weary antihero, an alluring femme fatale and a violent murder. But before long, we’re dealing with quantum physics, black holes and stars going supernova, while playing an active role in the evolution of primordial life forms. Genesis Noir is, in every sense, a trip.
Its highfalutin ambitions are immediately apparent from opening captions that have us a little concerned, but it’s much more playful than its hard-science underpinnings would suggest. At heart, it’s a simplistic point-and-click adventure, but with fewer LucasArtsstyle ‘USE glowing logarithmic spiral ON planetoid’ interactions (though there’s a bit of that) and more of the puckish tactility of Amanita Design’s work. That’s evident from the opening few minutes, when the protagonist (a humble watch pedlar in Raymond Chandler garb) attempts to make a sale, only for his third customer to hand him a pair of underpants rather than cash. After skulking back to his poky apartment, he promptly makes a mess of his room – or you do, at least. Guide your pointer across the light fitting and it swings gently, while nudging a precariously positioned vase on a wobbly shelf causes it to crash to the floor. When you find a phone number on a discarded napkin, you get to dial it using a rotary phone, the environment steadily fragmenting around you to the sound of gentle chimes. Soon after comes the bang: a cylinder of light flaring out from a gun pointed at the big-haired dame whose door you’ve just barged down.
And so your cosmic journey begins. Within this flash, you find a series of stars, taking you from barrel to bullet, each representing a step in the life cycle of a universe. Throughout, the focus is on exploration and straightforward interactions, each of which is lent texture and character by astute combinations of animation and sound. Its mix of mechanics gives it the variety of a WarioWare, while at times you’ll be reminded of Electroplankton’s musical toys – never more so than during the wonderful Improvisation chapter, in which a duet between a sax and a double-bass segues into a sequence where you build a city with a virtual theremin. You spin a vinyl record through days and nights to turn a seed into a plant, after tuning a radio to the right frequency to make it sprout. You arrange a meet-cute between single-celled life forms to spark the first stages of evolution, and sweep your reticule across the striking surface of a matchbook to illuminate the darkness of a black hole. This being a noir, there’s a bit of detective work, too, as you part the leaves of flourishing flora to reveal a golden trail of footprints.
Where might they lead? One of the joys of Genesis Noir is that you rarely have a clue where (or when) you’re going to end up next. By turns, you’re a matchmaker, stargazer, hunter-gatherer and scientist – the latter a thrillingly iterative highlight as you tweak knobs and switches on what looks like a Hadron-esque particle accelerator from scattered instructions pinned to a chalkboard, steadily getting closer to an epiphany. Even when the interactions are at their most limited, the sumptuous chiaroscuro presentation picks up the slack. Sometimes it’s just a simple image: constellations becoming a twinkle in someone’s eye, perhaps. At other times it’s the mise-en-scène that mesmerises, such as a moment when you hold down the left mouse button to advance through a crowded bar, as if magnetically drawn towards the bright spotlight and the sultry chanteuse silhouetted against it. It plays with scale, perspective and recursion with a confidence that takes the breath away. And towards the end, it really goes for broke. Though it would be indecorous for us to reveal precisely how, let’s just say it somehow ends up even farther away from noir territory than those opening captions suggest.
For some, that won’t necessarily be a good thing. At times, Genesis Noir’s abstractions elide emotion: while these scenes frequently dazzle the eyes and stir the soul, it rarely manages to touch the heart. The jazz theme promises a degree of player expression that never fully materialises either – at least outside that delightful bout of musical improv and that unexpected late-game curveball. And it’s true that not all (Fibonacci) sequences are created equal: it turns out even a game as consistently inventive as this isn’t beyond succumbing to the occasional fetch quest, as fitting as it may be for the era you’re visiting.
In a strange way, these prosaic tasks help to ground the cosmic flights of fancy elsewhere. Even so, we can’t help but feel that sometimes we’re getting in the way, our involvement tantamount to a clumsy actor spoiling an otherwise perfect take. Still, these moments of awkwardness feel fitting in a game that’s at least as concerned with capturing the mysteries of humanity, with all our imperfections, as the universe we inhabit. That Feral Cat Den should even attempt to connect the cosmos with the quotidian is worthy of applause; that it seems to have taken its opening line (“sometimes reality is too complex for visual perception”) as a challenge even more so. Here’s to more games that dare to shoot for the stars – and to those that, like Genesis Noir, set their sights even higher.