Genesis Noir is, if nothing else, a genuinely fascinating genre experiment. What would it look like if you created a hard science-influenced neo-noir creation myth? I bet you can’t quite picture how all those things work together — but, if you’re like me, you’re intrigued. A scientific creation myth is already an interesting concept, something rife for exploration. But introducing the stylistic genre tropes of film noir to give it form? How? Why?
Thankfully, Genesis Noir is newly on Microsoft’s Game Pass, a streaming service that lets you download and play games for a small monthly subscription fee. So let’s dive in!
Exodus.
He doesn’t seem to have a name. Later, he will be called ‘No Man.’ For now, he’s just a street corner watch salesman, living in a clock and drinking the day away. He was in love once, with jazz diva Miss Mass. That was before she took up with Golden Boy, a handsome sax player with a temper. Now, No Man is just killing time.
That is, until he happens to overhear a fight between Miss Mass and Golden Boy — and a gunshot. No Man stops time as the burst of light and energy from the laser blast rushes towards Miss Mass. But how to stop it? Harnessing the power of the gunshot (its Big Bang, if you will), No Man starts to build a universe within the awesome energy of the blast. He wants to discover a way to create a black hole, something that can swallow the light and power and save his love.
To that end, No Man scours time and space, an invisible entity there from the dawn of time to its roaring climax. He finds himself entangled with a handful of mortal souls, who push him forward on his journey. He wants to find the means of creating a black hole to swallow the energy of Golden Boy’s gunshot. But as he does, No Man is forced to ask himself: Is it worth preventing the creation of the beings who help him on his quest to save someone who never cared for him to begin with?
A smoking gun.
I get where the noir idea came from. The idea of tying the Big Bang (the most important explosion to ever occur) to the a gunshot taking down a loved one (its emotional equivalent) is a potent metaphor. From there, you might start to make other connections. Jazz, which fits in with the noir milieu, has an improvisatory nature that plays well with both the slapdash randomness of the construction of the universe and the fitful starts of scientific evolution. On their surface, these connections feel meaningful.
If they are, though, Genesis Noir fails to make its argument. Noir, at its heart, was about introducing character to the locked-room mystery genre. In noir, the mystery is typically second to the personality — of the detective, of the femme fatale, of the staccato rhythms of the storytelling. While there are definitely clear archetypes in the genre, they are a framework to build on, not the end goal. Genesis Noir has precious little by way of traditional storytelling, and what it does have is muddled by a style that creates potent flourishes but falters at the basics. Noir is a genre where the basics matter. The Big Sleep isn’t a particularly tight mystery, but its characters and style bring it to life.
Noir can handle confusing — if you understand the stakes. What matters is that you understand its characters. Noir characters want the way a black hole does: All-consumingly. But Genesis Noir‘s characters are too slim for desperation to fit them comfortably. The models, beautiful in their simplicity, struggle to convey complex emotion. At times, they figure out how to convey it purely physically — at one point, a vast, cosmic vision of Golden Boy literally puts his cigar out on you and flicks it away. It reminded me of an old Tex Avery bit, and it conveyed emotion and character in a single image. But moments of clear emotional storytelling like that remain too-rare in the first few hours. It’s not until they abandon the noir genre almost entirely that it finds its voice.
The terrifying origin of the universe.
Speaking of genre: Genesis Noir is very much a point-and-click adventure game. If Paradise Killer masterfully updated the genre to a 3D space, Genesis Noir is a bit more traditional. Don’t get me wrong, the aesthetics of the puzzles are incredible. But, like… there were multiple puzzles where I literally did not know if I was succeeding or failing. I wasn’t sure if I even could fail. Like, one puzzle found me clipping tree branches. It took me a minute or two to realize that’s what I was doing. Then it took me a solid five minutes to figure out what the goal was. Was I trying to make the branches particularly high? Make some sort of shape? Was there any punishment if I trimmed too much? I had no idea.
And unfortunately, there were some issues with the X-Box One port. The point-and-click adventure aspect feels like a more natural fit for PC; on the X-Box, there were times when I missed what certain puzzles wanted because the game’s margin of what counted as engaging with an object were incredibly small — too small for the clumsier controller interface, perhaps. I only had two game-crashing bugs; irritating, but not unforgivable in such a short game. Who else will let you explore all of space and time in four or five hours?
Again: The game looks phenomenal. The art style is almost entirely a combination of black, white, and gold, with the gold providing a beautiful pop while the black and white are harnessed to present a timeless cosmos. And because of its remarkable sense of style, when a puzzle hits, it hits. One puzzle found me in what I assume was Pompeii, a silent, immortal witness to the explosion. At the end, I cleaned the ash from my screen and saw the bodies of the people around me. It highlighted so many of the game’s themes in a single, melancholy image. It’s one of a dozen or more moments in the game like that — but spread out between a lot of confusion.
We steel ourselves.
That said, sometimes a killer ending will make up for some lackluster storytelling in the middle. And Genesis Noir‘s final chapters are remarkable. The game is at its best as it drops the traditional puzzle trappings and focuses on what it does best: Pure sensory experience. The final chapters open the story up to new emotional beats and innovative design decisions that reframe what you’re watching. I went from an allegorical noir to… well, a proper creation myth. And I wasn’t prepared for how beautifully that transition would be handled. It never tops its climactic moment, a ‘psychadelic mandela‘ in the words of Blake Andrea, instead sinking into an epilogue that reiterates the plot rather than finding a new note to end on. But a week later, I barely remember the actual ending. It’s the mandela, the explosion of sound and light, that sticks vividly in my mind.
Genesis Noir is a vibe. If you are on its wavelength, if its aesthetic trappings get their hooks into you, there’s a lot to love. And I’ll be honest: After a rough middle section, I found myself firmly on that wavelength. The puzzles weren’t always the most engaging and the writing was sometimes too simple for its own good — but fuck, I felt it, you know?
Genesis Noir didn’t totally succeed at what it set out to do. The noir part is slim and forgettable. But as a work of creative mythmaking informed by science by willing to go beyond its limits, well… the ‘genesis’ aspect has a lot more to offer, I’ll say.