This is a thoroughly mediocre game that is probably most appealing to those who are already fans of the comic.

I came in knowing nothing about the IP other than that it existed, so something to consider.

I also just realized the subtitle makes no sense. It doesn’t relate to the story in any way?

I’ve been dying to talk about this for months now. This is the banner that shows up for this game in Steam:

1. Why is he batman
2. Why doesn’t he have a nose

These questions have been haunting me. Seriously, where is his nose?? It’s furry art, it’s supposed to be more like a snout, even.

This was initially just something frivolous that irked me about the poster, but it turns out there’s some bizarre design decisions that make their way into the game.

Like, for some reason, all the other characters have animal heads and look like normal furries, except Blacksad, who looks like a guy with black paint on his head. There’s not even any fur texture or anything, his skin is totally flat and like, shiny, while everyone else has these really elaborate character models — it has real “Idris Elba is a cat the color of human skin” energy. And it’s worse because, despite the area of Clown White around his mouth… it really just looks like a guy in blackface. The whole game, it’s just a guy in blackface walking around, and aside from the uncanny horror it just looks so awful in the context of the rest of the game.

You have these really very nice looking animal characters and there’s just this pinheaded guy in face makeup and a cat headband and it so instantly breaks immersion. I really don’t understand how this could have happened. The rest of the game is actually quite nice looking, so I almost wonder if it was an odd attempt to attract a more general audience? Like they were hoping a more humanoid character would have wider appeal, and ended up in uncanny valley by accident?

Speaking of Lindsay Ellis videos about the perils of adapting musicals into movies, I want to quote the from later in that same video where she discusses the Les Mis movie:

When philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, ‘the medium is the message,’ what did he mean by that? Simplistically, it’s the idea that you can only receive an idea or a story through a medium, be that medium a poem, a novel, a film, a stage show, or even just the act of talking. It is not the idea or story itself that is being expressed, but a medium that is expressing it, therefore the medium should be the focus of study. According to theater scholar Linda Hutcheon, while no medium is inherently good at doing one thing and not another, each medium, like each genre, has different means of expression and so can aim at certain things better than others.

Things being adapted into and out of film, whether from books, television, musicals, or games, is usually where we start to think about stuff like this. We’re all familiar with the great scene in a book that doesn’t work in a movie, or the musical that doesn’t work when it’s not being performed live. And of course, games being made into movies is something that has a notoriously bad reputation, while most movie-based games are considered shovelware. Much of the time, the techniques that are so effective in one medium fall flat in another.

Continuing to quote Ellis:

Quoting film scholar Robert Stemmle, film clearly has resources that the stage can never have: the power of the close-up that gives the micro-drama of the human countenance, and the separate soundtracks of film that permit voiceovers music and the non vocal to intermingle. Linda Hutcheon adds that, when we sit quiet and still in the dark watching real-life bodies on the stage our kind of identification is different from when we sit in front of a screen and have their reality mediated for us by technology.

I bring this up both because that’s one of my favorite video essays go watch it, but also because this is the first time I’ve ever played a game that was so obviously helmed by people that were used to the language of comics and struggling to translate that into a game.

There’s so many ways this manifests, from small things like the game zooming in on faces of 3D models for reaction shots that 3D models cannot provide, to the decision to interlace one section with flashback sequences that require long loading screens and very little player input, to the extremely long cutscenes with drawn-out panning shots over scenery that would look great in a pencil drawing but are just chaff in a gameplay scenario.

One of the biggest issues is clearly that the environments were designed in 2D, and then instead of interpreting them in 3D, the game instead fixes the camera angle and attempts to force you to navigate a 3D environment as if it were 2D. Rooms were set like stages, with clutter in one end and blank space toward the camera, the exact way you’d compose a panel in a comic. But when you’re then requried to navigate that as a 3D space, you can’t actually reach anything, there are empty spaces that for some reason you can’t walk through or into, furniture repeatedly gets in the way of interaction points, and it’s often impossible to feel like you’ve gotten a good look at the whole scene. Blacksad also moves extremely slowly, with no run button, making walking around a nightmare.

Another problem is scene transitions. The game favors very abrupt scene transitions that function like chapter-end cliffhangers, which is probably how the comic works. But the thing is, games are interactive. You can start a scene in media res in a comic because the guiding intelligence knows what needs to happen. You can’t drop a player into a scenario in the same way. The game would repeatedly shunt you into environments without telling you why you were there or what you were trying to accomplish, and there was no quest log or journal. Just for one example, at one point you’re like, “Okay let’s go to the bad guy’s hideout.” Then you’re just there, and Blacksad keeps referencing some ‘plan’ they have, but I don’t know what that plan is, it was made offscreen, so I can’t act on it and have to run around desperately trying to find interactable spots and like, hoping they’re right? The very first thing I did was go up to the door and try to open it, only for Blacksad to go, ‘That’s not the plan,” BUT WHAT IS THE PLAN. You can do this in a comic because the scene continues without the player, but when the player needs to guide the scene, you have to provide some indication of what they need to do.

A related issue was dialogue trees. The game really committed to completing scenarios over dialogue options. By which I mean, you’d often be in the middle of a conversation with someone, and then accidentally choose a dialogue option that, without any indication or player input, would catapult you to a completely different location in order the see the consequences of the dialogue option play out in a long cutscene. Sometimes you’d be stranded, with no way to go back and finish out the dialogue. An example: early in the game someone asks you to get them food. Shortly after, you go to a diner to question someone. While at the diner, I noticed I had a dialogue option to order a burger, so I thought, oh, let me do this now so I don’t forget and have it for the guy. But instead of me ordering the food, finishing up talking, and then going to turn it in, hitting the ‘order food’ option triggered a crazy long scene where I got the food, went back and gave it to the guy, then followed up on what he told me, and by the time I was able to wrest control back and return to the diner to finish talking to the person there, like 45 miuntes had passed. And that was one of the times I was able to go back and see what I’d missed! Sometimes you’d accidentally select the thing that closed out that section of the game and too bad if you wanted to know what else there was.

In fact, little player input existed in this game. You rarely had downtime to think about what to do next or choose something. There was a mechanic where you could make deductions based on evidence, and the game would notify you when you had enough clues to make a deduction… but you needed control of the character for that, and because the game was like 80% cutscenes, I’d routinely have 4, 5, 6 deductions pile up and just no chance to make them. More than once, I clearly missed dialogue and plot choices because I hadn’t made a deduction, but also I knew the information and the game hadn’t given me control back so I could play it! The player honestly didn’t even have to be here for this game, you’d lose literally nothing by watching an LP and would probably gain because you could fast-forward through the long silences and slow pans over inanimate objects.

Because hot damn was this game full of long, drawn-out sequences of characters sitting in silence. I shouldn’t have to explain this, but the reason this happens in comics is because to convey movement and animation takes several panels, so you can use dialogue-less scenes to great effect to focus on movement and body language. But these things happen simultaneously in games, and movement isn’t unique or evocative — you need something other than characters just gazing out windows or quietly sitting to keep someone’s attention.

It was just a bad game, because it clearly wasn’t designed as a game. Frankly, this should have been an animated movie or a visual novel.

The other big adaptation issue was that the game didn’t bother to characterize or explain long-running characters. Aside from this leaving me wondering who the fuck these people were and how they were related to each other, it left the comic characters feeling really bland and uninteresting, especially Blacksad himself, who had zero personality. If you already knew how he was ‘supposed’ to be you could map it really easily onto such a blank slate, but this isn’t something that a newcomer can do, though admittedly it’s unclear how much of a general audience they thought they were going to have here.

This had this weird effect where the most engaging and sympathetic characters were the side characters, because they needed to be fleshed out within the context of the game, so they were the most interesting and complex because the game actually bothered to characterize them. This made the game very uneven in terms of quality. At times the story was quite good, when we were experiencing the relationships of these side characters and thinking about how they might be motivated, but then we’d lapse into these extremely long, boring sequences were it was just Blacksad reciting detective tropes, and I’d start to think, “Oh god, I can’t take this anymore, this is so boring, maybe I should just quit.” The result is that the Blacksad parts felt like they got in the way of the good parts. And to make it worse, the fact that I had to hold on to deductions forever meant that I was virtually always way, way ahead of the detective, which made a lot of the slow walking around annoying environments so he could catch up to what I’d known forever feel extra futile.

The story here is solid, if cliche. The beginning was extremely slow, and the boxing premise insanely overdone — Murder, She Wrote was poking fun at this cliche like 40 years ago — which was to its detriment, because once we got into the midgame the story did pick up, and I really liked the side characters once they made their way onscreen. I also think the ending was really good, and it was pretty much the only time I figured something out at the same time as Blacksad did, which was great. But man when this is slow it really grinds to a halt, and it starts slow.

The game also makes some bizarre claims about the genre. Like, there’s this one point where the narration goes, “Usually noir mysteries have a happy ending,” and like… what the actual fuck are you talking about. Being bleak and nihilistic is literally their defining feature. What books and movies are you seeing that have happy endings??? All the weird metacomments were like this, ranging from bizarre to flat-out wrong. The wild thing is that this isn’t even about reading, just watch a movie? I mean, I know it’s all functional literacy, but god it’s depressing. Sometimes the questions about story I see people asking in Steam threads are so obvious and basic you wonder how people can function day-to-day. This is not normal!

Ugh. Anyway, while it was bad as game, overall I would call this mediocre — the story was solid and mostly bogged down by its tie to an IP (which is why I haven’t done any other IP games, tbh), and if you’re attached to the IP I would think you’d actually quite enjoy it. The plot wasn’t original or compelling, but it kept me interested enough to see it through to the end, and I genuinely think the side characters were great. If it appeals to you’d I’d say watch an LP.

However…

The racial metaphors here were incoherent. Trying to create an analogue to human racism in a world where most people are multicolored is nonsensical, and the game couldn’t even articulate who was ‘black’ and who wasn’t in any meaningful way. Like, the reason racism ‘works’ in real life is because it’s simple: we are all brownish, and the lighter shade of brown, the ‘better.’ You can literally teach a child to be racist in this way. But in a world where people have feathers and fur and spots and stripes and can be grey and dark brown or dark red… it’s meaningless. I’d even call it virtue signaling, appropriating a real issue in a flimsy way to make it look like the game is about something more meaningful than it is. It makes less than zero sense.

More importantly, though… the one guy who is subject to anti-black racism and is canonically African is… a gorilla. I shit you not. It was… I honestly didn’t play with the sound on, so I can’t comment on whether he spoke in AAVE, but yes the black guy is a literal monkey. This is why I brought up Blacksad looking like he was in blackface earlier, there’s just clearly a lot ignorance about race stuff going on here. I felt like that clip of Harry Connick Jr seeing a surprise minstrel performance, I was like, I know Europeans have hangups but someone should have caught this.

Concerningly, there’s later on a German doctor who you find out came to the US fleeing the nazis and… he’s a rat. I don’t know if this is meant to imply he’s Jewish in the same way the monkey meant a black person (IIRC the character’s first name is Joshua, which…), or is just some weird thing where Germans are rats for having been nazis, but in light of the gorilla character it definitely makes me wonder. The fact that to me the game seems to think it’s saying something antiracist makes me think this is just an incredibly Unfortunate coincidence, but there’s really no way to know and that in and of itself is disconcerting to me.

So, yeah. I want to say this is an above-average game that, while shitty from a gameplay perspective, does have something to offer in terms of story, but… *waves at all that*. Ugh.