Genesis Noir is genre fiction that slow burns from a hard-boiled detective mystery to a cosmic exploration of potential and possibility. It showcases a form of storytelling exclusive to an interactive medium, not only immersing the player in rhapsodic visual landscapes, but expecting them to find tactile interpretations from its collection of curiosities. Genesis Noir doesn't position chaos as a subject for control, only an objective to be experienced and appreciated.
Sometimes reality is too complex for visual perception.
This is the first sentence of the preamble that opens Genesis Noir and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I finished the game. In bad faith, it could be read as an excuse to bury the player in aesthetic and expect them to subsist through spectacle. Charitably, it could be a deluge of incomprehensible or ambiguous minutia masquerading as plot and character. In reality, or at least the version of reality I experienced in Genesis Noir, it’s a suitable climate to merge dreams and reality into the same space. No one’s life escapes fiction, either experienced or imagined, and it all builds into the shape and psyche of a human being. Genesis Noir presents that thesis to its player under the guise of an adventure game. A lot can happen in a five hour runtime.
Genesis Noir opens in the trappings of its genre: a black and white visual pallet, wet smoky streets, slow jazz, and the ubiquitous presence of crime. During the cold blooded murder of Miss Mass, Genesis Noir and its protagonist, No Man, rove through circumstances that lead to this apocalyptic moment in time. The big bang of the gun blast is explicitly tied to the Big Bang of the universe. Genesis Noir’s strict genre fiction keeps its focus, but careens into the philosophical depths of madness before emerging in a jubilant celebration of the world it has formed. At its close—and Genesis Noir really goes for it—the player won’t have an explicit narrative, but rather a visual memory of everything that lead to this specific point. It’s a wonderful use of the genre, and, in a larger picture, demonstrates the vitality that can separate games from other artistic mediums.
Early on, Genesis Noir is more interested in light participation than gating progress with puzzles. No Man drifts through black and white environments with occasional flecks of color. This color poses as bread crumbs to the next attraction. Plant some seeds to bend away light or darkness. Connect constellations to move through space and time. Shower a musician with notes and applause to make him practice his craft and refine his ego. The micro games of Genesis Noir reminded me so much of the play spaces inside of Gnog. It treats interaction as opportunities for tactile gratification, reveling in simplicity but rewarding the player with an acute hit of dopamine for what’s unfolding on the screen. It’s a call and response, sure, but it’s a treat inside of Genesis Noir’s style and camera angles.
As Genesis Noir proceeds, so do the severity of its challenges. It’s nothing as obtuse as the heyday of 90’s adventure games, but a few segments do seem relatively out of character. An elongated sequence where the player interprets clues on a white board and fiddles with radio waves and frequencies gets lost in the fog of trial and error. Playing Simon Says with an upright bass musician may be a barrier for those without a knack for memory games. It’s unfair not to expect Genesis Noir to push back (this is a game), but sometimes its puzzles feel like an interruption in an otherwise divine flow.
Despite those aberrations, Genesis Noir does a marvelous job of teaching the player a visual language. Rotating the analog stick sometimes moves time and space. Popping stars like bubbles fuels inspiration. Assembling puzzle pieces completes a picture. Genesis Noir spins a web of abstracts, but they’re all linked through experimentation and intuition. It strays from the pratfalls of a walking simulator by keeping the player active and engaged in its narrative. You’re a participant and not a witness.
It takes a considerable effort to tell a story without dialogue. Other than some philosophical bookends, Genesis Noir is free of english. Plot and story are showcased through its visual presentation. An investment in noir fiction may help speed the player along, but Genesis Noir’s basic premise—an exploration of the birth of the universe and a meditation on the evolution of humanity—is easy enough to gather by pushing No Man across an escalating series of vignettes and minigames.
Games have a tendency to cause chaos and challenge the player to arrest that chaos with some kind of control. Genesis Noir seems to prefer the player persist inside of that chaos and understand it as a texture instead of an obstacle. I guess you could gather the same sentiment from watching Cosmos or reading Asimov, but rarely do games feel organized enough to take that leap. Coherence seems to be the byproduct of Genesis Noir’s natural systems and visual splendor.
None of that really applies to bugs. It has since been fixed with a patch, but connecting constellations together took me an hour longer than it should have. A bug with some puzzle pieces once made progression impossible. There was no music during the epilogue and I have no idea if it was intentional or not. Genesis Noir is proud of its peculiarities, but the line between a Genesis Noir breaking expectations and literally breaking was too blurry for my tastes, although I have to imagine that will get better with time.
The culmination of Genesis Noir is a parade of ecstasy and power that made me wish I was on some kind of hallucinogen. It’s like persevering through Area 5 of Rez, surviving the climax of Sayonara Wild Hearts, or understanding the rebellion brooding inside of Umurangi Generation. Before that point I admired its indirect narrative, its clever presentation, and its general sense of restraint, but I was thoroughly unprepared when I reached its ultimate destination. It’s there where Genesis Noir finally embraces the sense of spectacle it spent the last four hours politely avoiding. It goes all in at precisely the right time in a medium that struggles with climax and conclusion. The faults that Genesis Noir owns are quickly forgiven.
I have no idea how Genesis Noir will connect with human beings are who aren’t me. It’s as open to interpretation as the nuclear bomb episode of Twin Peaks or the final act Kentucky Route Zero. This feels impossible to fund at the level on which it’s operating. I can’t believe it exists but at $15 it’s really not a risk, especially in an indie space that has been at $20 for half a decade. It’s less that they don’t make them like this anymore and more that they don’t make them like this.
Genesis Noir is genre fiction that slow burns from a hard-boiled detective mystery to a cosmic exploration of potential and possibility. It showcases a form of storytelling exclusive to an interactive medium, not only immersing the player in rhapsodic visual landscapes, but expecting them to find tactile interpretations from its collection of curiosities. Genesis Noir doesn’t position chaos as a subject for control, only an objective to be experienced and appreciated.
