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Genesis Noir is at its best when players can melt into its surreal visuals. In the same breath, we get to see exactly how far we’ve come since then with a video game that feels like a remarkable impossibility in its own right. In every frame, we’re reminded of animation’s primordial days where even the crudest movement was a miracle.
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Just as Genesis Noir captures the universe’s creation and evolution, its art style encapsulates the full breadth of the medium’s history. It has the DNA of animation’s earliest days, imbued with a distinctly modern look. The frames are busier, the animation is smoother, and the back half of the game takes a visual turn that would have made Cohl’s head pop. Of course, the game’s look is much more sophisticated than anything possible in 1908. Over 100 years later, Genesis Noir adopts that “Living Blackboard” style as its own. Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie and Genesis Noir, side by side. That gave his works a white-on-black look now known as the “Living Blackboard.” Cohl was famous for his distinct process of drawing on white paper and printing the images on negative film. The most immediate comparison is Émile Cohl, a French animator who began making films in the early 1900s. Genesis Noir harkens back to some of the earliest animations when the medium itself was still forming. It’s a cycle of birth with that first stroke on a page acting like a cartoon’s own Big Bang. Individual frames come together to create the illusion of movement. Animation is the act of giving life to something. The concept of creation is baked into the hand-drawn approach. The stylized black-and-white images call back to classic noir cinema while lending the game an otherworldly aura. The game fuses 3D environments with hand-drawn animations to achieve visuals that seem like they could only exist in an experimental short film. The most striking thing about Genesis Noir is its one-of-a-kind look. There are a handful of traditional puzzles along the way, but players are mostly passengers on one big trip.Īnd boy, is it trippy. The real experience comes from watching Genesis Noir visualize the creation of the universe across set pieces that never cease to stun. It’s more of an interactive animation where little gestures move the story along. He shoots her, but it’s not any old bullet it’s literally the Big Bang. It turns out that No Man is having a secret affair with the jazz-singing Miss Mass, and her lover, Golden Boy, is simply not having it. Genesis Noir is about a watch peddler named No Man who’s caught in the middle of a bizarre love triangle. The Big BangĪs its name implies, the game follows the basic tenets of the film noir genre.
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While it’s more art installation than video game, it’s every bit as mystifying as the cosmic origin story it looks to untangle. What better way to explore the unknowable than with a mind-bending video game that feels like an impossibility in its own right?įeaturing a jaw-dropping visual style that invokes history’s greatest animators, Genesis Noir is an unforgettable point-and-click creation tale. Developed by Feral Cat Den, the stylish indie is a surreal investigation into the granddaddy of all unsolved cases: the universe’s creation. Genesis Noir is fascinated by that same mystery, but on a much grander scale.
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You’ll observe moments in the history of the universe, from the first microseconds of Life to trillions of years in the future.Stop for a second and ask how it’s possible that lines of code can create a sweeping interactive world, like disparate stars coming together to form a swirling galaxy. You’ll jump into pockets of time, explore moments throughout the lifespan of the universe, and search for a way to change the course of destiny. The Big Bang isn’t just the birth of creation as we know it, it's also a gun blast frozen in time, with the bullet speeding towards the love of your life. Dial a rotary phone destroy a civilization plant a garden improvise with a musician create life-all in your search for a way to save Miss Mass. With a focus on tactile puzzles and exploration, you’ll experiment with objects in small slivers of the universe to discover how they can be manipulated to progress your journey. Jump into the expanding universe and search for a way to prevent or destroy creation and save your love.Ī non-traditional point and click adventure When your affair turns into a bitter confrontation, you will witness a gunshot fired by a jealous god-otherwise known as The Big Bang.
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You play as No Man, a watch peddler caught in a love triangle with other cosmic beings, Miss Mass and Golden Boy.
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