Need to Know
What is it? An experimental point-and-click adventure that’s cool, stylish, and a bit odd.
Expect to pay £12
Developer Feral Cat Den
Publisher Fellow Traveller
Reviewed on AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 8GB, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
Multiplayer? No
Link genesisnoirgame.com (opens in new tab)
The Big Bang is kind of bonkers 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 domino chain started from one precise moment. Just thinking about how Earth is a single speck of dust caught in an immense hoover bag full of hundreds of billions of galaxies is enough to send anyone spinning into an existential crisis. But Feral Cat Den’s Genesis Noir (opens in new tab) takes these grand themes in its stride, creating a cosmic adventure mixed with a noir 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 reaching its seemingly 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 an unfortunate love triangle. The trio consists of a watch peddler named No Man (the character you play as), your lover and femme fatale jazz singer Miss Mass, and jealous shooter Golden Boy who makes up the third. 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.
(Image credit: Fellow Traveller)
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. Choosing to fuse the ideas of the Big Bang to a broody noir storyline is a really clever concept, and I love how No Man is constantly gravitating towards Miss Mass like he’s helplessly caught in her orbit, how the gunshot blast is visualised 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 that are beyond their control—people who are trying to stop a series of events from unfolding but ultimately have no power to do it. Genesis Noir (opens in new tab) captures exactly that and its deterministic framing of human history and poetic presentation of the Big Bang is a wonderful way to explore it.
