Developer-Feral Cat Den

Publisher-Fellow Traveller

Format-PC (tested), Xbox One

Release-March 26

The Big Bang told through the lens of a classic noir? Not that old chestnut. As the film critic Mark Kermode once noted, 2001: A Space Odyssey takes the viewer from the dawn of mankind to the birth of a new species in two hours and 44 minutes. Well, in around twice the runtime of Kubrick’s masterpiece, Feral Cat Den’s mind-boggling debut carries us from the birth of our universe to its inevitable demise – and beyond. It opens with wailing sirens contrasted with smooth jazz, in a familiar world of shadowy streets and smoky bars; there’s a hard-drinking, world-weary antihero, an alluring femme fatale and a violent murder. But before long, we’re dealing with quantum physics, black holes and stars going supernova, while playing an active role in the evolution of primordial life forms. Genesis Noir is, in every sense, a trip.

Its highfalutin ambitions are immediately apparent from opening captions that have us a little concerned, but it’s much more playful than its hard-science underpinnings would suggest. At heart, it’s a simplistic point-and-click adventure, but with fewer LucasArtsstyle ‘USE glowing logarithmic spiral ON planetoid’ interactions (though there’s a bit of that) and more of the puckish tactility of Amanita Design’s work. That’s evident from the opening few minutes, when the protagonist (a humble watch pedlar in Raymond Chandler garb) attempts to make a sale, only for his third customer to hand him a pair of underpants rather than cash. After skulking back to his poky apartment, he promptly makes a mess of his room – or you do, at least. Guide your pointer across the light fitting and it swings gently, while nudging a precariously positioned vase on a wobbly shelf causes it to crash to the floor. When you find a phone number on a discarded napkin, you get to dial it using a rotary phone, the environment steadily fragmenting around you to the sound of gentle chimes. Soon after comes the bang: a cylinder of light flaring out from a gun pointed at the big-haired dame whose door you’ve just barged down.