Genesis Noir

Genesis Noir is a point-and-click adventure game, played out across a number of vignettes. The player is prompted to move their character or interact with the scene through various on-screen prompts.

Genesis Noir plays as a metaphorical narrative between a film noir-style detective movie and aspects of the creation and potential destruction of the universe. It plays out the events of the Big Bang as a metaphor for a broken romance between No Man (representing time) trying to stop Golden Boy (representing energy) from killing Miss Mass (the mass of the universe).

No Man, a watchmaker, has fallen into depression after breaking up with Miss Mass, a nightclub singer. He tries calling her and hears her crying for help, and racing to her apartment finds that she is about to be shot by Golden Boy, the saxophone player from her band. After touching the spent bullet casing with a strange spiral marking, No Man finds he can pause time, and determines he can stop Golden Boy's bullet by creating a black hole. He then proceeds to track down more of the spiral symbols through events that would occur without the black hole and turn them golden; these are told through various vignettes that follow the creation of the universe and stages of life on Earth to obtain these.

According to the creative lead Evan Anthony, the idea of Genesis Noir came about around 2013 after he and Jeremy Abel, the game's technical lead, had read Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. They spent about two weeks in 2014 to create the initial prototype for the game. The prototype got a positive response from other members of the indie game community, leading them to plan out expanding the game. The early prototypes for the game was created in Unity which had various animation issues, leading to the development team to switch to Unreal Engine in 2015. They continued to work part time on the game through 2016, after which they had enough personal funds to continue full time development on the game.

The game was originally announced with a teaser in February 2017. A Kickstarter for Genesis Noir was launched on January 17, 2018, with a funding goal of $40,000. The game was originally set to be released in fall 2020, but was delayed to early 2021.

Genesis Noir received "generally favorable reviews" on Metacritic, ending up with a score of 77 based on 18 reviews for the PC version and a score of 81 for both the Nintendo Switch as well as the Xbox One version.

Malindy Hetfeld of Eurogamer praised the game's visuals, writing that "The art style itself may not look like much in still images, but brilliant whites, beautifully smooth animations and occasional yellow accents combine into something overall quite memorable. There is simply no other game that looks like Genesis Noir right now." Hetfeld also enjoyed how the game taught the player using visual cues instead of tutorials. "It never tells you what to do... You're completely left alone to work out how to proceed, and the fact that this is even possible with zero hand-holding feels like a substantial game design achievement to me."