Phelps – and partner Rusty Galloway – are given the option of two perps to pin the second case of the homicide desk on. It’s a bleak, depressing stretch of the game’s growing-ever-murkier overarching storyline. All of the bodies found during Phelps’ spell on the homicide desk are women, some of whom are found naked, all of whom have suffered cataclysmic injuries. Short, aged just 22 at her death in January 1947, was severely mutilated – and the same is true (mercifully, to a lesser extent) of some of L.A. A very real murder case, the Black Dahlia remains one of America’s most famous unsolved mysteries. Noire’s homicide section, spanning five murders that don’t initially appear connected but ultimately reveal themselves to be the handiwork of just a single individual who, in the game’s fiction, is the same guy who murdered Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia. Homicide, entirely expectedly, sees the game’s narrative take a decidedly dark turn – and this is your warning that spoilers follow. And not even when he’s promoted to homicide does the dealer ever really do him a disservice. Phelps can’t lose – not so early in the game as the traffic desk. Even when you mess up, the game rolls onward – the guy you had dragged into custody can clam up because your hand’s been shown to be nothing but twos and sevens, but however many lines of investigation hit dead ends, there’s always an opportunity for another shuffle of the deck. Noire, something that I’m only really appreciating on this fresh playthrough (case outcomes suitably forgotten), is that it doesn’t much matter that Phelps, under your command, can play bad cop at a time when a little understanding might’ve delivered a more useful statement. Indeed, frequently what looks for all the world to be the right move really, really isn’t. Noire simulates what it’s like to be human in high-pressure situations with surprising aplomb: some you win, some you lose"Īnd, sometimes, it doesn’t. You’re supposed to read your suspects’ faces, looking for giveaways of dishonesty, the game’s (still) remarkable MotionScan-captured performances full of the tiniest flinches and twitches. It’s here that Phelps’ intuition is first tested – and his ability to tell right from wrong, and support accusations with previously acquired evidence, is in the player’s hands. Once the former military man, not long home again after serving in the United States Marine Corps during the Second World War, has earned his spurs in the LAPD as a street-beat rookie (the game’s tutorial phase, essentially), he earns a promotion to the city’s traffic desk. Noire does its utmost to point the player, as Phelps, down the wrong path. It transpires that short-session play is, for me at least, the right way to pick apart the many and varied misdemeanours of the City of Angels’ criminal underworld.Īnd yet, L.A. And treating the title he’s the ostensible protagonist of (depends on your moral compass, really) as entertainment to be dipped in and out of, like a good book, each new case a fresh chapter of proceedings, has drawn me further into its murky world of 1947 Los Angeles than Australian studio Team Bondi’s one and only game ever achieved six years ago. I’ve been taking the life and times of Cole Phelps on the move, on commutes both lengthy and brief and to bed with me, playing until I’m nudged to turn off the light. While its appearance can seem compromised on the Nintendo hardware, especially when held up against the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the 2011-debuting game, released simultaneously a few weeks ago, the environmental pop-in, frame-rate dips and slightly sticky controls (okay, so they’ve always been rather imprecise), such shortcomings are forgivable given the platform’s play-anywhere flexibility. Team Bondi’s game is at its best when the player's messing up.
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