At first glance, Genesis Noir can be summed up in one word: Beautiful. This game has one of the most unique visual styles of any game I’ve played this year. Consisting of black, grey and white shades, Genesis Noir is an extravaganza of noir magic with its killer esthetic. However, a far more honest description of the game would be to call it a beautiful nightmare. Which part of the game is the nightmare? Well, excluding the art, everything else. Genesis Noir, at its core, is a work of art with absolutely no gameplay substance to back it up.
Essentially, Genesis Noir is a type of point-and-click adventure game about three jealous gods. You take on the role of a character known as No Man, who is attempting to stop Golden Boy from murdering the famous singer/bombshell Miss Mass. The game is influenced heavily by the romantic crime noir movies of old, and you can feel that influence in the game. However, the initial “wow” factor that the game presents quickly gets replaced with total and utter frustration as time passes. Everything starts to fall apart in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse.
As mentioned, Genesis Noir is best described as a point-and-click game. However, I can’t think of a single other game in the genre quite like it. If you look at other point-and-click titles, there is a pretty straightforward formula: you find yourself in an area and click around the area to explore and solve puzzles. And in a way, that’s what you’re doing here, but only in a space that is so overwhelmingly abstract, it’s like trying to make sense out of nonsense.
The gameplay part of Genesis Noir doesn’t feel groundbreaking, innovative, or fun – it’s just frustrating, and when I found myself pulling up a walkthrough 5 minutes in, the appeal started to be stretched thin. More than once, I wondered why the developers hadn’t created a short film instead of a game and six hours in, I wished they had.
Six hours is a long time when every minute is spent trying to dig your way through a plethora of tedious and drawn-out scenes that offer minimal payoff by the end of them. But I’m no quitter. So handy walkthrough in hand, I pressed through as hour after hour ticked by, just hoping and praying that the gameplay would eventually “click” and everything would pull together. Spoiler: it didn’t.
Now it might sound like I’m being overly harsh, but there is very little outside of the art to like here. Playing through Genesis Noir felt like being at the world’s longest party filled with all the pretentious people telling you that you “don’t get it” when you try to throw away the trash, and they stop you because it’s “art”.
To be fair, not all the fault can be placed on the gameplay either; even the store was a pain to suffer through. It was interesting to start, and I loved how the concept kept expanding and growing, but in the end, it had become so abstract to the point of not even feeling like a story anymore.
