Review: Genesis Noir

Genesis Noir (Feral Cat Den, 2021 – Xbox Series S) reframes the Big Bang – and subsequently, the human creation myth – as a jazz-infused noir mystery tale. This framing mostly works, aside from a moment of jarring tone shift toward the end, and getting from the beginning to this point is a pretty good time.

You play as Daddy Time,^[1]this is what I’m calling the protagonist a wristwatch-hawking clockmaker-turned-private eye who likes the occasional drink and loves Miss Mass, the voluptuous star jazz singer currently burning up nightclubs Time happens to frequent. The only problem is that Miss Mass is in an on-again, off-again relationship with the possessive Golden Boy (he represents energy, for physics fans), a member of Miss Mass’s band and a virtuoso on the saxophone.

While much of the story is pure visuals, we are given enough information up front to infer that the Golden Boy found out about Mass and Time’s passionate tête-à-tête and, in a fit of rage, shot and killed Mass with… the Big Bang. Time is, well, time, and he uses his fourth-dimensional perspective to travel along the path of the Big Bang’s trajectory, observing key moments in the history of the universe (and conspicuously, in the history of Earth) in order to piece together why the Golden Boy took the shot and, more importantly, see if a way to unshoot the gun might exist.

For much of Genesis Noir‘s runtime, the gameplay exists primarily as a series of vignettes, small cross-sections of time and space that we insert ourselves into to do some primordial forensics. Early on, we move about the early universe almost dispassionately following the Golden Boy’s trail. Existing as we do in the fourth dimension, we are able to see the beginning, middle, end of a particular scene all at once, meandering across landscapes at once sparse and lush in the way only a landscape never perceived by humanity could be; we stumble upon the Golden Boy seeding the universe, contemplating his role, playing the saxophone to an audience of no one.

As we proceed with our investigation, Genesis Noir frames our relationship with the Golden Boy as one where we are not just mere enemies, but actually diametrically opposed to each other. It makes sense: the Golden Boy is consistently framed as a creator and a composer, while we are always tinkering, meddling, deconstructing. But it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Daddy Time is exclusively a destructive force; in one segment we build new multicellular organisms out of geometric and polygonal shapes in a process reminiscent of evolution; in another we use the Golden Boy’s eventually-abandoned saxophone to perform a sublime improv duet with a busking upright bassist on a subway platform. But something that we, the player, must understand is that everything we’re doing in this game is geared toward erasing this universe from existence; in saving Miss Mass we will ensure that all the wondrous examples of life we have witnessed across billions and billions of years will never have had the chance to stir from the primordial soup. In fact, we are trying to make it so that the primordial soup itself – or any component that made it – never existed.

Ultimately, and this is where the tone and theme of the game shifts, we are brought into direct conflict with humanity deified, or at least ascendant; jazz is dropped for psychedelia, stark black-and-white (infused occasionally with gold) is dropped for vibrant colorscapes, and the progeny of this crime we have been so invested in stopping is finally able to take enough power to plead with us to give up our own struggle. The simple calculus of the early game – save our beloved from the Big Bang – is replaced with a trolley problem: let Miss Mass die and create a thriving universe, or save her and prevent this universe from ever existing.

It might sound weird, but while I didn’t enjoy this tonal shift at first, I didn’t hate what it did for the narrative. I honestly thought it was pretty clever for the writers to take this noir framework and actually mythologize it for the people in the universe of concern, to make it a reference point in at least one life we intervened with (the scientist who finds the way to reverse the gunshot). I thought it was kind of neat that humanity became its own god, and was able to challenge Time as a foil, while the Golden Boy kind of ceased to be relevant as the game went on.

Ultimately, we’re taken back to a much more fundamental choice that Time had made earlier: whether we want to be involved with Miss Mass or not in the first place. And when I made my choice, it was bittersweet yet it felt correct.

Check out Genesis Noir on Xbox, Steam and Nintendo Switch.