Rarely have I played a game that's made me more intensely question why it's a game. I was attracted to Genesis Noir by its visual style, and that turns out to be about the only thing this game has going for it... so why not just make it a cartoon instead? The interactivity in the game ranges from "press forward to progress the plot" to "click arbitrarily around the screen until you figure out what obscure thing you're supposed to do to progress the plot", and never once does it justify having interactive components at all.

Fortunately for those who might feel obligated to play it anyway, the plot does nothing to make up for the mechanical unsophistication. The jumble of biblical and scientific metaphors are too arbitrary to have anything interesting to say and too obvious to be intriguing. They act like a mountain of unflavored buttercream frosting, hiding the fact that the paint-by-numbers noir plot underneath has barely anything going on at all.

Reviewed on Jun 13, 2022


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