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Genesis Noir reviewItalo Calvino’s Warioware
Italo Calvino’s Warioware
Genesis Noir is coming March 26Watch on YouTube
Genesis Noir is coming March 26
Evidently though, as you can tell from the fact I was able to type this post, I have not eaten my hands. Genesis Noir is not half as pretentious as it could be. Still - and I say this respectfully - I’m not sure it’s quite as profound as it compels you to think that is, either.
If it was a story about a bin man, entwined with a metaplot about the biomechanics of farts, and suffused with raucous polka music, it would be easier just to be honest about it as a game. But it’s not. It’s a story about a… film noir… bloke, entwined with a metaplot about the formation of the cosmos, and suffused with sultry jazz. And that’s basically critic-proof armour, isn’t it? You’d look like aproperboafus if you didn’t think it was mega clever.
The problem is, I cannot look at this image and not hear the saxophone solo from Baker Street.
I will say this without hesitation: Genesis Noir is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen on a PC screen in ages. Creative lead Evan Anthony has managed a herculean bit of art direction here, which gave me the same feeling as I got watching Into The Spider-Verse - the sudden, delightful shock of seeing something truly visually original.
This game took six years for Anthony and technical lead Jeremy Abel to make (with help from Mercy Lomelin, David Szmit, and Adria Navarro), and it really shows. To absorb all that work over the course of just four hours, makes for a right old spectacle. And while you might query my raving on the basis of the nice-but-quite-simple screenshots you can see here, I can only implore you to see it in motion.
Seriously, this Lascaux-style cave is breathtaking in a way a screenshot can’t do justice to.
Needless to say, the music is great too. What I should do here, is come up with some really poetic way to describe how saxophones and that sound, before namedropping a handful of semi-obscure jazz musicians in comparison. That would make me look well smart. But I can’t do that in good faith, as I wouldn’t know what I was talking about. So I’ll just say: it sounds very pleasant, and accompanies the art perfectly.
Looking back on what I’ve just written, you’d be forgiven for thinking I was talking about an animated film here. I’m 500 words into a review of the video game Genesis Noir, and I haven’t yet talked about how it plays. And that’s never the sign of an absolute thrill ride, is it? I know, I know: it’s absurb to apply the same criteria when assessing art and entertainment, etcetera. But I’m going to be painfully honest here and admit that I play games primarily “for a laugh”, in which context I found this one a bit hard going.
The lion’s share of the fun here is in orienting yourself to each new challenge. There’s been a lot of creativity thrown into differentiating the dozens of games within the game, and there’s always a dependably enjoyable bit of brainfizz as you try to work out what the operating conditions are each time. After you’ve worked out what to do, the puzzles are usually pretty quick and straightforward. It’s Italo Calvino’s Warioware, in short.
This game was about balancing a frequency in order to get a sapling to grow, and made superb use of audio cues. Also, it’s adorable how so many of the minigames involve the protagonist looming in the background, like a curious toddler peering at a worm :3
For the most part, the interactive and non-interactive parts of the game flow together very elegantly. Without offering you any instructions beyond the time-honoured “press WASD to move” at the very start, Genesis Noir pretty much always makes it clear what you’re meant to be doing.
Still, there were some failures of intuitive design, where I was left aimlessly clicking around the screen, keen to move on. It might seem mean to nitpick this. But then, if you’re aiming for the feel of a silent movie with occasional segues into player agency, you want to bear in mind that Jimmy Cagney never paused halfway through his films to stare brutishly at a desk for three minutes, prodding randomly at objects with an increasing sense of frustration.
Me, gazing with faint aggravation at a blank piece of room, as I click-bombed everything in sight. Turns out there as a yellow diamond I had to click on twice, arbitrarily.
I could say there are sweeping thematic connections between the two stories. That Genesis Noir is a self-supporting web of metaphors, positioned in graceful chiasmus across both strands of its being, something something double bass, something something saxophones. Maybe it is all that; I dunno. I could invent all kinds of semiotic structures that were either intended or weren’t, but I’d be lying if I said I was pondering them, hours after finishing the game.
Honestly, consider this sequence, in which you have to whirl your mouse around the screen to make a star rotate faster and faster, until it eventually swells and bursts into a supernova FROM WHICH A STAG EMERGES, and tell me it wouldn’t be quite a treat while mashed.
Or if you’re stoned. And that’s neither a weak burn on the game, nor a cheap drugs punchline. I’m being completely serious when I say that Genesis Noir would be properlytranscendentalto play while off your tits on edibles. The constant, unexpected transitions between visual schemes, the wild leaps in subject matter, and the sudden appearance of majestic stags, would all have slam-dunked me into the bin of my own subconscious like I’d stuck every Boards Of Canada album on simultaneously. Never let it be said I don’t appreciate the highbrow.
