Face Noir
| Face Noir | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | Mad Orange | ||
| Publisher |
Phoenix Online Studios Daedalic Entertainment
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| Senior Developer | Gabriele Papalini Marco Sgolmin |
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| composer | Vincenzo De Filippo Silvio Relandini |
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| Erstveröffent- lichung |
July 31, 2012 | ||
| platform | Microsoft Windows | ||
| Game engine | Winter mute | ||
| genre | Adventure | ||
| medium | DVD , download | ||
| language | German, English, Italian, Russian | ||
| Age rating |
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Face Noir is a computer game from the Italian development studio Mad Orange. The thriller - adventure in film noir style takes place in New York in the 1930s and was released in 2013 for computers with the Microsoft Windows operating system .
action
The player takes on the role of Jack Maria Del Nero, a disaffected private detective and former police officer who is supposed to take compromising photos of the stepdaughter of a medium-sized company in his hometown of New York, who wants to avoid his maintenance obligation. After completing the job, Del Nero received an anonymous phone call at night asking him to come to the port immediately to meet Sean MacLeane. MacLeane was Del Nero's partner in the police force. Both were suspected of having ties to a Mafia clan - Del Nero was subsequently dismissed from the police force, but MacLeane had to serve a prison sentence and has since disappeared. In the harbor, Del Nero falls into a trap: he discovers the body of MacLeane, is knocked down by a stranger and then surprised by the police, who see him as the murderer of his ex-partner.
A stranger pays Del Nero's bail. From his former colleague Victoria, who is still in the police force, he learns that MacLeane was involved in criminal activities in Los Angeles and was in New York with false papers. Del Nero is investigating again in the port. He discovers a frightened girl named Emily in a warehouse, who had been hidden by MacLeane, who apparently sensed an imminent threat to himself. He takes the girl up with Greta, a friend of the pub landlady. He researches that MacLeane in Los Angeles was connected to the mafia organization "Black Lily" and that they are in a race with another organization called "Council of Five" looking for Emily. In further research, Del Nero takes on the Black Lily and her boss Marsetti, who has half the New York police on his payroll, including his boss and Victoria. A member of the Council of Five, however, assists Del Nero in his research.
The Black Lily can find and kidnap Emily and Greta. Del Nero confronts the gangsters in an abandoned airport. There he learns that the members of the Black Lily are only henchmen of a secret organization that Emily wants to lead to an unspecified purpose for which she was born. He cannot prevent Victoria, which belongs to said higher organization, from flying away with Emily, and is shot by Marsetti. In a kind of dream sequence he meets MacLeane, who gives him the opportunity to relive the last few seconds before his death. This time Del Nero can shoot Marsetti. Surprisingly, he can ally himself with a high-ranking member of the Black Lily who wants to thwart Victoria's plans. Together they set off for Damascus , Victoria's flight destination.
Game principle and technology
Face Noir is a so-called 2.5D adventure. For polygons composite, three-dimensional figures act before some hand-drawn, partly pre-rendered , mostly in sepia tones held and sometimes some animated scenes. In terms of controls, Face Noir is a point-and-click adventure : the player controls the character - mostly Del Nero, sometimes his ex-colleague Sean - through the game world with the mouse. With the mouse buttons he can initiate actions that allow the respective game character to interact with his environment. He can examine and pick up objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . Dialogues are controlled by a single choice selection of topics given by the game that fit the situation. As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked. An extension of these classic adventure game principles is the "thought inventory", in which information can be put together to make conclusions. The camera shows what is happening from a partially variable perspective. Initially, she has a permanent position. If the player moves a bit out of the picture, the camera moves along and focuses again. If the player leaves the current room, the camera is transferred to the new room and again assumes a fixed position there. Cutscenes are not held in game graphics, but present themselves as cartoon-like, unanimierte panels . The narrative structure is not linear: in order to give the player background knowledge about the events, he has to take on the role of Sean MacLeane several times and act out scenes in the past that lead to the scenario that Del Nero later experienced.
Face Noir was using the game engine Wintermute created.
Production notes
Work on the adventure began in 2008. The inspiration for the Italian authors Gabriele Papalini and Marco Sgolmin was on the one hand their shared interest in the noir genre and the 1930s, and on the other hand the desire to resolve a moral and financial crisis they perceived in Italy in the 2000s. and 2010s into a game. Papalini considers the adventure genre to be the most suitable for this because of its sustainable narrative structure. The working title of the game was Face Noir: The Cat with Jade Eyes , but the subtitle was not adopted for publication.
The product packaging included the game's soundtrack on CD . The German voice recordings were made in the sound lobby recording studio in Hamburg. After it was published as a real version in July 2012, it was published as a download via the digital distribution platform Steam in October 2013 .
A follow-up game called Face Noir II , which should continue the story from the end of the cliffhanger , was announced but never released.
speaker
| role | German speaker |
|---|---|
| Jack Del Nero | Andreas Otto |
| Sean MacLeane | Lennardt Kruger |
| Greta | Djuwita Müller |
| Howard | Joshy Peters |
reception
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Face Noir received mixed to negative reviews. The review database Metacritic aggregates 14 reviews with an average value of 59. The specialist magazine Adventure-Treff praised the story, atmosphere and the jazzy soundtrack of the game, but criticized the controls as being unstable. The magazine pointed out that the use of the 2003 Wintermute Engine resulted in an altogether old-fashioned technique. The German online magazine 4Players highlighted the story of the game positively - it was entertaining, offered sufficient depth of character and played with genre clichés with “sovereign self-evidentness”. The magazine complained about the linearity of the plot, too low a level of difficulty and the German synchronization, in which voices did not match the corresponding characters and did not convey emotions to the respective game situations. Overall, 4Players rated the game as an "uncomfortably bulky" adventure. The US magazine Destructoid stated that Face Noir was “such a serious attempt to retell the stories of (Raymond) Chandler (...) and Dashiell Hammett (...) that it is difficult not to yourself to be taken in by the world of a die-hard private detective ”. The magazine criticized "hideous" character models, questionable design decisions and numerous translation errors from Italian into English.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Adventure-Treff.de: Test. Retrieved September 12, 2019 .
- ↑ AdventureCorner.de: Mad Orange announces Face Noir development. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .
- ↑ ReviewFix.com: Gabriele Papalini CEO / Founder of Mad Orange Talks 'Face Noir'. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .
- ↑ PCGames.de: Face Noir: The Cat with Jade Eyes - Mad Orange announces a new adventure. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .
- ↑ AdventureCorner.de: Wochenecho No. 227. Retrieved on August 12, 2018 .
- ↑ Jonathon Wisnoski: Face Noir . In: Adventure Lantern . No. 45, August 2013, p. 16.
- ↑ a b 4Players.de: Face Noir. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .
- ^ AdventureGamers.com: Face Noir Review. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .
- ↑ a b Destructoid.com: Review: Face Noir. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .
- ↑ a b Metacritic.com: Face Noir. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .