BLACKSAD: UNDER THE SKIN
All fur coat and noir knickers
You are John Blacksad, a six-foot-tall black cat with a nose for fighting crime. In this noir vision of New York (based on the Spanish hit comic), there are no humans but all of the animals have very adult problems and understanding them is vital to unravelling this old yarn.
A belligerent rhino barrels into your private detective office, demanding that you don’t dish his particular bit of dirt. After nearly punching your lights out and then threatening you, he attempts to bribe you. Characters’ behaviour is, in a word, messy and the writing places believable motives behind their actions. Barry Johnson convinces as John Blacksad, getting the furry detective’s charm and world-weariness down pat, but the rest of the cast are oddly understated.
Familiar noir beats are faithfully recreated, then, and successfully matching clues to make a new deduction feels great when you’re already on the same page as the story. However the frustration when you’re not and are instead hopelessly pairing clues to see what sticks is a well-documented detective game phenomenon.
This realisation of writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido’s world is recognisable, but the visual direction can’t hold a candle to its source material. And this isn’t the only reason why we recommend reading the comics over playing the game. It gives us no joy to bring to task what is a small team that clearly has a lot of love for the source material. Unfortunately Blacksad is catastrophically broken.
CLAWING FOR TRUTH
Under The Skin introduces a new wrinkle, courtesy of its feline protagonist’s heightened senses. While using your Cat Senses, an on-screen indicator and controller vibration is supposed to clue you in when you’re close to sniffing out someone’s guilty conscience. Unfortunately, a glitchy gauze obscures the on-screen indicator and leaves us to mash q while our DualShock softly weeps. This is far from ideal. Once a particular confrontation demanded we do it within a time limit. We found ourselves caught in a horrifying QTE loop where our kitty endlessly had his socks knocked off as we failed to sniff out a clue over and over again. That’s to say nothing of how often the game hangs indefinitely after certain dialogue choices or the times we had to delete and reinstall the game in order to get around neverending fades to black.
To be clear, we played the full retail version of the game post-release and post at least one patch. We reached out to the publisher and were told that a number of the issues we ran into would be addressed by the time you read this. We’ve seen enough to know there’s a distinctive detective game in here, but at the time of writing it’s mired in a sea of bugs and performance issues. We only hope Pendulo Studios can crack this case wide open and let the truth emerge.