Genesis Noir
GENESIS NOIR’s adventure traverses the entire history of the universe.
The Big Bang is wild when you think about it. All that we have come to understand—space, time, our universe, and life as we know it—are all part of a long chain started from one precise moment. Thinking too much about it is enough to send anyone spinning into an existential crisis, but Genesis Noir takes these grand themes in its stride, creating a cosmic adventure mixed with a detective story that goes down like a smooth glass of whiskey.
In Genesis Noir, the Big Bang isn’t only the single biggest event in recorded human history, but a gunshot blast frozen in time, its bullet speeding toward your lover. To stop this event from meeting its inevitable end, you need to explore different pockets of time in the vast expanse of the universe, trying to undo the chain of events leading to this moment and thus changing the course of history.
This thematically epic adventure is wrapped up in a noir mystery, with your character caught in the middle of a love triangle. The trio consists of the character you control, a watch peddler named No Man, your lover and femme fatale jazz singer Miss Mass, and jealous shooter Golden Boy. These characters aren’t really people, but something akin to gods, interdimensional entities, and cosmic beings. The story is similar to the godly dramas of Greek and Norse legends, except this particular god has a trenchcoat, fedora, and an affinity for trad jazz.
Genesis Noir’s themes may be ambitious, but following along on this adventure is a breeze. Most of the time you’ll be swept along through a string of inventive animated sequences, with occasional bits of puzzle-solving mixed in. The gameplay is a little experimental, and you’ll usually be clicking parts of the scene and manipulating the environment to continue.
The game always has new ways for you to interact with a scene, like taking part in some call and response improv jazz, planting seeds that expand into all-engulfing black holes, or simply piecing a broken bowl back together. Most puzzles are pretty straightforward, but there were times where the interactions were a little abstract and it was difficult to work out what the game wanted from me.
Spending time clicking on every part of a scene and pressing all the buttons can break the pacing.
Even though there are moments lost in visual translation, Genesis Noir has a great sense of motion, and the majority of the game flows as smoothly as the coolest saxophone solo. Often there won’t be a puzzle at all and you’ll just be messing with the reality of the scene. In one section, I’m using an old rotary phone, and the background swirls around me as I spin its dial. I’ll be jamming out on some giant piano keys, only for them to melt away and reappear as the windows of a giant skyscraper.
THE HARD GOODBYE
Although playing Genesis Noir can be an effortless ride, it does lose momentum when it gets to the last third. There were multiple times where the game’s story hinted that it was coming to a close. By the time the game did come to a conclusion, it was tonally very sudden, missing out on a dramatic climax.
Genesis Noir may have some issues with pacing towards the end, but the way its story, themes and visuals are so tightly interwoven is spectacular. I love how No Man is constantly gravitating towards Miss Mass like he’s helplessly caught in her orbit, how the gunshot blast is visualized to look exactly like the scientific diagrams of the Big Bang, and how an ice cube swirling around in a gin glass can look like the spinning planets in a solar system.
The noir genre is all about how characters are caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Genesis Noir captures exactly that, and its framing of human history and presentation of the Big Bang is the perfect way to explore it.
The game always has new ways for you to interact with a scene