Bogart Game: Face Noir
I was half way through my first cup of coffee when she walked in. Face Noir. The kind of dame who makes you want to drop everything, starting with that photo of the little lady back home that leans, nicotine-stained, at a corner of the desk. A sweep of the arm clatters it into the drawer, her face scarred by splintered glass. Face Noir points in my direction, clicks her fingers and begins to speak. For some reason I'd expected a German accent but the lady is Italian. I expect a tale of woe - the souse of a husband with no brains at all, or too many brains in all the wrong places - but she loses me. "Few years had been enough for people to show their real side: false, mean and, above all, open to bribery. But the one thing I would have never imagined is how far corruption had gone; so far that somebody would actually try to bribe God." Oh.
There's so much to say but time is short, so let's cut straight to this:
"God Created Man. Man Has Corrupted God. The great depression has affected everybody."
I tend to think of noir as essentially godless but Face Noir casually suggests in a headline that God is not only definitely the creator of man in this world, but also that He is struggling a little with the depression. Can the banks foreclose on Heaven?
The headlines are all good value and thankfully they don't spin so fast that they can't be seen. I'm a big fan of "CRIME IS INCREASING - The murder rate is going up". Just in case anyone thought the noirface crimes may in fact be low-level corporate fraud or people shoplifting cans of Tizer.
It's a point and click adventure, as you've probably guessed, and it has been available in German and Italian for some time now. Phoenix Online (The Silver Lining, Cognition) are publishing the English translation and it will be out on July 18th.
The logo rings a bell. A diving bell.
