Games worth discovering

TAILS NOIR - SO MUCH MISSED DETECTIVE POTENTIAL

25 View2024-08-30

Tails Noir

Developer: Eggnut

Publisher: Raw Fury

Released: June 8th, 2021

Price: 24.99 USD

What makes a great detective game?

Detective elements, thrilling story, choices, multiple endings.

It's a simple question, but it appears to have no response when you try to ask the devs directly. Tails Noir, formerly known as Backbone until the unavoidable name change, is a Dark Noir detective narrative driven thriller starring anthropomorphic animals in a future dystopian society based in the city of Vancouver.

It claims to be a detective game, and it does an excellent job for the first two hours of the intro, leading you on like a fool until you eventually reach the point where you can no longer refund the game, they sideline you with a complete 180 of the narration, gameplay mechanics, and it just feels like a complete waste of your time.

Issue with the story

It deviates

Given that I am opposed to you playing this game, I will just give you a spoiler of what it is about. Carnivores and herbivores coexist in civilization. Carnivores dominate society, especially a council of ape men and other beasts such as Cheetah.

You are Howard, a private investigator who is recruited by the wife of a missing person case that the authorities would not take on for obvious reasons; they are being blackmailed and are involved in the entire case and want to cover it up.

It get brushed as the drunk man scenario, but in fact, a hidden group collaborates with the government to abduct and collect organs and body parts from all herbivores in order to feed the council and themselves with the fresh exquisite flesh of their population. They are all trapped within a gigantic dome that is sealed off from the rest of the world told that nothing survives out them, making it a processing plant.

2 hours in

Everything gets thrown out the window. The story falls apart, the detective nature and covert operations in quest of leads and comprehension go utterly unnoticed from this point forward. You find yourself somehow eventually in a scientist's laboratory; touch an alien species outside the confines of this dome, and the game flips 180 degrees and transforms into a knockoff of Disco Elysium until it is over.

It is as awful as it sounds. I was really getting into the story until it suddenly ceased being a story. It became political and philosophical, with barely a single inch of narrative telling remaining focused on the investigative components. It's like they had a great narrative idea but didn't know how to finish it. It appeared that the writers had forgotten how the parts were intended to go together like a jigsaw puzzle and the story ended up making little sense because they were smashing the pieces in the wrong locations ultimately breaking the image along the way.

Presentation

Absolutely beautiful

The use of lighting and pixelated images in a tense, dilapidated world of dark noir had me hooked to my seat. It appeared to be on the verge of becoming one of the best hidden gems of 2021, which is why I am less hopeful about many of the games that I pick up and evaluate. It helps me feel less devastated when it ultimately fails.

You may have a fantastic story with a strong base to build on for the first 2 hours, as well as the greatest visual presentation you can manage, but if none of it lasts, it feels like a terrible waste of developer and writer talent. It looks like it would have taken a few more years of careful attention and modifications to set it on the proper track.

Gameplay

It's more visual than anything else

I expected more important stuff to take control as a player. Trying to assist residents in locating their loved ones, as simple as lost kittens, or the cliché of seeking the locations of husbands because the wife believes that they are cheating. The first chapter had both stealth and puzzle solving, which are generally the only time you ever see it save for one or two sections later on. It becomes less of a game and more of a speak to a specific person to gain access a location. It's quite linear, making it feel more like a visual novel than a detective game which makes more sense.

Conclusion

One of the few games to make me angry

I'm a big fan of detective noir games, or anything with exciting storylines and player-driven progression. I do enjoy visual novels, but this game was not promoted as such. It was originally marketed as a story-driven detective game which it should have stayed as, but it failed to live up to expectations. No choices you ever made mattered.

Once the prologue is over, which is literally the best thing you can experience, it spends too much time rationalizing whose actions are awful when we are technically all the same in some very poorly done philosophical turn around.

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