New York-based designers Jeremy Abel and Evan Anthony have announced Genesis Noir. It’s a point-and-click style space exploration game inspired by motion comics and film noir with a plot based upon stopping the expansion of the universe in order to save a girl.
Genesis Noir will turn heads due to its stylistic black-and-white artwork, which Abel and Anthony developed after watching the short Alfred Hitchcock tribute film Umbro Blackout. Luckily, the game is more than just a good looker.
As with author Italo Cavino’s short ‘60s sci-fi stories in Cosmicomics, Genesis Noir takes a scientific fact and builds a whole imaginative story out from it. In this case, a confrontation among a love triangle formed between three cosmic beings in space leads to a gunshot, which turns out to be The Big Bang. As the universe expands, you’re tasked with stopping this great force of destruction and stop the Earth as it hurtles towards the fragile heart of your lover.
From this emerges your non-linear exploration of space and its planets in Genesis Noir. Interaction in the game is playful: you birth a star with a click, swipe to manipulate gravitational fields, and guide swirling particles in the cosmos. Despite this focus on exploration and playfulness, the game sits firmly in the point-and-click adventure genre, though you shouldn’t expect intense puzzles or dialogue.
You’ll still find items to pick up and examine, and will still have to interact with other character, though rather than talking to communicate the characters are portrayed in stylistic illustrations that focus on expressions.
You can see more screenshots and other media related to Genesis Noir over at its devlog. Abel and Anthony plan to have a couple of levels ready by early 2015 that they’ll use to pitch to publishers, Kickstarter, or failing those, will find a way to self-fund the game.
