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Genesis noir11/17/2023 We’re watching it evolve at a rapid pace and seeing the intermediary moments that future history books on the subject will try to preserve. It’s a form of media that’s still shifting and growing. It most certainly could have been cleaner as a feature-length film without the eccentricities of a touchy medium.īut experiencing Genesis Noir only works as well as it does because it’s a game. There’s an argument to be made that Genesis Noir didn’t need to be a video game at all. No Man stares at a galaxy in Genesis Noir. Don’t try to make heads or tails about what it all means the formal experiment is the experience. It’s like walking through an elaborate art installation that momentarily teleports you out of time and space, like Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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