#Genesis noir engine full#
#Genesis noir engine trial#
#Genesis noir engine series#

The individual chapters – the time bubbles you explore – fare better, as they have a bit more structure to them. Flashbacks to nightclubs and diners where you met are welcome, but they’re more flavour than emotion. When you have to make difficult choices towards the end, the ramifications don’t resonate because of the lack of air it is given to breathe. The overarching story of No Man, saving Miss Mass, is kept at an arm’s length and is explored in the lightest of touches. The plot, story or whatever you would call the framing of Genesis Noir, isn’t quite up to the same artistry. Genesis Noir doesn’t quite go there often enough, delivering high points, but only a few. There are occasional moments – like the mandala sequence mentioned earlier – where the visuals and audio work perfectly together, like the cosmic Fantasia it could quite clearly have been. If anything, there’s room in Genesis Noir to do more with its jazz soundtrack. It’s dazzling, really, and makes you wish that jazz was used more in gaming, as the few examples we can recall – Ape Out is another – have all been effective.

#Genesis noir engine full#

The restraint allows the full Blue Note-style jazz to underline the emphatic moments, as the band comes together to communicate euphoria or wholesale changes to your environment. The small interactions receive a reply from a thrumming bass or swooning saxophone. Often sparse and even silent, Genesis Noir doesn’t apply its jazz themes heavy-handedly. It would be nothing without the soundtrack. It’s a trippy combination of 2D and 3D, with some fantastic animations too, and Genesis Noir can use these tools to communicate huge emptiness, as well as the more showy, ‘universe is ending’ stuff. These 2D characters wander through dark environments that have been stippled and bruised to give texture, and then vector-style environments have been layered on top. You can tell Feral Cat Den’s background is in visual design rather than gaming: the simple line art of the characters allows for expression through animation, and a look or a wink is characterful. While its palette is barely more than black and white, it’s an astonishing game to experience. It points towards another of Genesis Noir’s real wins.

Yet, the only interactions are moving your character over a few dots and stripes on the floor, like an interstellar version of the Billie Jean video. A mandala towards the end of the game is so sublime, a confluence of audio and visual design that is so beautifully crafted, that you wished the game ended there, rather than stuttering on for a few more scenes. They’re like playing with living puzzle cubes, as you poke and prod at things, and they react in unexpected ways.

#Genesis noir engine trial#

There’s a limp fetch quest randomly in the centre of the game, while a frequency-matching puzzle towards the end of the game both outstays its welcome and introduces too much in the way of trial and error. Occasionally these toys can teeter off to the extremes: some are a touch too abstract, and you’ll be screaming at the devs to get off their pretentious high horses to help you out with some hints others will be surprisingly conventional, and feel drafted in from other games. There’s rarely a conventional cause-and-effect here, as you’re toying with celestial bodies, primordial gloop and black holes. Games like Florence and If Found… have a similar approach to these toys, but Genesis Noir’s scope is outwardly greater. You’re often just tapping, spinning or pushing things to see what they’ll do, getting a reaction and then taking their cues. In that foliage will be birds, which you can interact with to make them fly off, so your aim – you presume – is to prune where there’s room to grow, and send more birds flying. A particularly memorable one starts you off with a small shoot, but by pruning that shoot, more and more branches appear, eventually leading to foliage. We say toys, because the puzzle is often working out how you interact with them.

#Genesis noir engine series#

The best way of describing Genesis Noir is that it’s a series of toys, tied together by some very simple exploration.

It’s all chopped up into chapters, presented as stars, with grand titles like Reflection and Thaw, each showcasing a principle of existence. No Man’s journey takes him chronologically through the Big Bang, from the first moments of darkness and explosive creation to the seeds of life – from primordial soup to civilisation – and then onto the universe’s decay and reversion.