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Frustrating and Fanciful Fairy Tales for a New Generation - Tales Noir Review

7K View2022-07-17

If nothing else about it stands out, let it be known that Tales Noir at the very least has a killer concept. This new auto-play-centric, gacha-enabled MMORPG from developer Pixel Rabbit is built around the idea of a kingdom where fairy tales and fantasy stories like "Little Red Riding Hood," "Sleeping Beauty," and Alice in Wonderland are all happening in the same magical world. But these are also more twisted versions of these beloved children’s stories, and somewhere in this realm, dark forces are conspiring to make things even worse.

Thus is born what the game’s opening refers to as “the anti-fairy world.” It’s a slick way to repackage stories we’re all familiar with for a slightly older audience. And while it’s been done in other other mediums before (Once Upon a Time, Grimm, Wicked, and so on), it’s less solidly explored in gaming. Think of Tales Noir as Fables meets World of Warcraft.

Or at least, that’s what Tales Noir aspires to. As with the rougher take on classic tales presented here, the reality behind the magic isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.

Tales Noir begins, as most MMOs do, with character creation. There aren’t a ton of options, which I discovered later is because the developers have chosen to hide most of the character customization—even basic stuff like more eye and hair colors—behind unlockables that you can grind or try to pull from the multiple gachas available here. An inauspicious start, to be sure.

Then again, your created character has a similarly unfavorable beginning. After choosing from the limited cosmetic options and picking one of the game’s five classes (hunter, assassin, knight, sorcerer, musician), your hero wakes up with a bad case of amnesia and the harsh discovery that his or her castle has been destroyed. If you want to rebuild the castle, you’ll need to journey across the land solving problems and collecting the castle crystals that were stolen by whoever wrecked your home.

Like many mobile MMORPGs, a lot of the Tales Noir experience is defined by excess. There are a million things to see and do, and the user interface is absolutely crammed full of buttons to click on, many of which will demand your attention with a big red dot whenever there’s something “new” to look at. Never mind that most of the time that “new” stuff is just new packages to spend money on in the store.

However, Tales Noir deserves major credit for one piece of its design that is not overdone: The tutorial is swift and smooth, and it gets players into the flow of gameplay very quickly. It may sound small, but this is a genre that often holds back for way longer than necessary, slowly introducing new mechanics and systems. Tales Noir just gets on with it, and within an hour of play, you should have a good sense of what the game is all about, even if some small bits and pieces remain to be unlocked as you level up.

And what is the game all about? Tales Noir follows the most basic and by-the-books approach to mobile MMOs. You talk to NPCs; you accept quests; the quests tell you to go to a specific area and either kill an enemy or collect an item; then you return to the NPC, get a reward, and move on to the next quest in the chain. And, as mentioned earlier, all of this can be accomplished with more or less zero input from the player thanks to the “Auto” button that will ferry your character between quest locations and engage enemies all on its own.

One of the only places in Tales Noir where “auto” isn’t really sufficient to get the job done is in its numerous brief dungeons and other group activities. While I wouldn’t call them challenging, exactly, the boss encounters play out sort of like miniature versions of World of Warcraft raid bosses, with big telegraphed attacks that must be avoided and set-piece moments where adds get pulled into the fight, or where the party has to turn its attention to an item in the environment that is generating invulnerability for the boss. If you’re running a dungeon you’ve overleveled, you can probably leave things on auto and be fine, but if you’re attempting content at or slightly above your level, it requires more attention from the whole party to succeed, which I appreciated—even if the other party members I got matched up with didn’t always seem to have received the memo.

The only other thing that gives Tales Noir an edge over any other generic mobile MMORPG is the aforementioned story setup, and to be fair, that is a significant edge. Tales Noir's zones are colorful and entertaining to explore—entertaining enough that I was actually pushed to turn off “auto” and look around on my own and felt rewarded for it. On top of that, the warped versions of fairy tale characters that populate the world are charming, even if the writing and voice acting land more in the so-bad-it’s-good realm. Even tens of hours into the game, I remained eager to see how certain characters were interpreted, and the twists are often memorable.

Naturally, those strange versions of beloved characters are where Tales Noir slips in its biggest gacha elements. I’m not against gacha mechanics in games—just read last week's collection that I helped write if you need proof!—and I appreciate that the primary form of gacha here is tied to side characters. Obviously I wanted to pull down some of my favorite characters; for example, I was stoked when I got this game’s take on Aladdin, long before ever encountering him in the story. But basically you choose three of the fairy tale characters to “equip” as partners at any one time, and you can summon them in battle to do special abilities. They are cool but far from game-changers, and the game seems to provide plenty of currency for free gacha pulls regularly.

The high point of Tales Noir’s early game is almost certainly Jade Forest, a moody, almost swamp-like area where a settlement of humans and a colony of werewolves are constantly on the brink of conflict with each other. This is the setting where Tales Noir places its take on Little Red Riding Hood. Your character is sent to investigate a recent spate of attacks on humans in the area.

In a burst of inventiveness that I never would have expected from this type of game, this whole series of story quests actually plays out as an investigation, with you meeting and interrogating the subjects, digging for evidence, and putting the pieces together. Who’s the real culprit behind the attacks? Is it the werewolf chief, who openly boasts about how much he despises humans? Is it the human sheriff, eager to escalate the cold war in the forest into an excuse to exile the werewolves once and for all? Could it be Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, who seems to be hiding some dark secrets behind her cheery exterior? Or perhaps it’s Red Riding Hood herself?

The best part is that it all comes together in a finale where you need to pick the culprit based on the clues you’ve uncovered. No auto-play here! I don’t know how the game handles it if you pick the wrong answer—maybe it gives you a debuff for the subsequent boss battle or something?—but I loved that it’s structured as a mystery and actually follows through with the logical conclusion of that kind of story. I'm sure very few players would have been surprised at a significantly less ambitious version of events.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, that Tales Noir can’t maintain that pace. The game puts a number of roadblocks in the way of player progress. Most notably, there’s a hard cap on how many experience points a player can earn each day. In my first day playing Tales Noir, I was able to level from 1 to 29 across a couple of sittings, maybe three or four hours of play total. Once I hit level 29, though, I realized that my experience bar stopped moving. It wasn’t until I started digging around in the character menu that I discovered I had reached the XP cap for the day, so any content I did after that point would no longer contribute to the growth of my character.

Being stuck at level 29 was especially frustrating because Tales Noir also has level restrictions on progressing the main quest. When I finished that great Little Red Riding Hood questline, I was informed that I couldn’t take on the next story quest until I hit (you guessed it) level 30. When I logged on the next day to start getting experience points again, I found another annoyance: Most of the game’s methods of grinding out levels outside of the story involve group content, and to be honest, there just aren’t enough people playing. I ended up sitting in dungeon queues for sometimes ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, waiting for others who were trying to hit level 30 to join me.

This may be the most words I’ve ever written about a game on TapTap so far, save for maybe Diablo Immortal, and that speaks to how torn I am about Tales Noir. On the one hand, there’s so much about this game that feels generic and in keeping with the worst stereotypes of mobile MMO design. On the other hand, it’s got such a strange, fun little world and such an unconventional approach to some of the most conventional characters in all of fiction. On the one hand, it’s yet another auto-play grinder full of ho-hum kill-and-collect quests; on the other hand, it has moments of genuine surprise in its quest design that verge on legitimate brilliance.

On the Google Play page for Tales Noir, it says the game is currently in “open beta.” However, it’s not marked as early access, and there’s no indication that progress will be erased for the "real" launch, so I’m treating this as a full, scored review. That said, if this is genuinely just a beta, perhaps that’s where hope lies that the people behind this game can smooth out some of the rough patches, tweak the system-level problems, and put in more of the wild, imaginative content that gives the game such compelling flashes of character. It’s clear that some of the folks who have created Tales Noir are dreaming of something bigger than just an everyday mobile MMO cash grab. Against all odds, and to the credit of their creative vision, I want to believe in that dream as well.

SCORE: 3 OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Legends of Idleon. Tales Noir is completely different from Legends of Idleon in terms of style, scope, and just about everything else. But if you dig what’s probably the best auto-play MMO on the market right now, you might just find something to enjoy in Tales Noir’s take on this much-maligned and oft-misunderstood sub-genre.

• Fairy tales, and especially post-modern twists on them. If you can’t get enough of seeing new takes on classic characters like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid or the Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel, Tales Noir should absolutely satisfy you.

💬 If you’ve checked out Tales Noir, let us know what you think in the comments. If not, let us know your favorite fairy tale characters who you’d love to encounter and team up with in a video game!

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