Rapidly clicking on a door and watching a line of cloned protagonists slowly walk through one at a time doesn’t work as the atmospheric buildup it’s clearly intended to be, and I found myself impatiently clicking to get the sequence over with. Certain sections ask the player to repeat a task several times in a row, and the unskippable cinematics and generally clunky interface ensure that this repetition never feels invisible. For most of the campaign, this gameplay approach works fine, but there are a number of times when it falls flat. They are simply fun, interactive moments intended to engage the player and pull them further into the game world. Other reviewers have called these segments “puzzles,” but that’s not really what they are aiming to be. Gameplay segments are, once again, minimalist in nature, with the player often performing simple tasks like popping floating bubbles or rotating the sky to make time pass by. Since the game mostly focuses on its aesthetics, the gameplay mainly exists in service of those elements. It’s easily the most consistently appealing aspect of the game, and even though not every sequence is a winner, it was nonetheless enjoyable to keep playing just to witness what kind of crazy scenario would happen next. Moments like the improv jazz number with the friendly musician or the repeated meteor strikes are very impressive in motion, and late-game sequences play with the visuals and audio in ways that I didn’t quite expect. Genesis Noir constantly experiments with its aesthetic, to the point where no two scenes feel the same outside of a few intentional outliers. Accompanying the visuals is a beautifully dynamic, often jazzy soundtrack that tends to respond to small interactions with the game world. It’s a striking visual style further propped up by minimalist animation that is technically limited in frame count yet brimming with expression. It’s a strange, inherently novel setup that perfectly justifies the visual aesthetic, which is mainly comprised of simple line work and an intensely monochromatic color scheme with the occasional touch of yellow to highlight important objects. The apparent god-like being that the player controls dons the typical appearance of a man wearing a hat and trench coat, and he travels across spacetime to find clues pertaining to the Big Bang, which is represented by a disgruntled saxophone player shooting the protagonist’s lover. It involves cosmic forces that facilitate the creation of the universe, but these ideas are presented like a detective noir film. The general premise of Genesis Noir is difficult to describe, as its concepts are largely abstract and metaphorical in nature.
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