Blacksad: Under the Skin (2019)

This is one of those games that you knew nothing about, but that you are happy to have found.

What caught my attention in the first place? It was on sale, there was a cat, and it was about a detective. Great combination for me.

The fact that all characters are animals is amazing. I loved the designs, how they made each species anthropomorphized (did I write that correctly?). Another thing, I like some sports, especially I like combat sports, and this one starts taking place at a boxing gym. That really caught my attention. You begin investigating the suicide of the gym owner, which looks kinda fishy, and the disappearance of one of the star athletes of the gym. I won't spoil it, but the plot does thicken a lot! Your decisions will guide some of the outcomes and which pieces of evidence you have to work with.

The art of the game is really good, although graphically it is not outstanding. Nevertheless, that doesn't bother me at all. The script is witty and clever, and it does give you plenty of options to shape your character. The NPC's are memorable, not only because they look like animals, but because they do have their strong personalities and traits. If you enjoy your jazz, your in for a treat because that is what all the soundtrack is about.

I would give the game 5 stars (that's how much fun I had playing it), but there were some annoyances with the movement of the character and how to investigate spots. It was very clumsy, the movement was very slow, and I would get stuck very easily. Besides that, another game mechanic that got a little out of hand by the end of the game was the deductions system. As a detective, you can make deductions based on clues that you gather. Sometimes, these deductions were very clear, but others... I just had to guess or look for it online. They could have been made clearer. I enjoyed the mechanic where you use your cat senses to read into the people you were interviewing, thus finding more clues or making them talk more easily.

In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with the game. Would give it 5 stars if the movement of the character wasn't so clumsy. Give it a try if you are into crime noir!

A coworker turned me on to the Blacksad graphic novels, and I immediately had to own them all. Juanjo Guarnido's artwork in particular is just mindblowing on a technical level, as a reader I can just swim through those panels.

So even though I'd heard Under the Skin described as "a Telltale game but worse," I thought I'd be able to look past some flaws to spend more time in that world.

I was not:

• While the character models are true to the comic, everything feels so matter-of-fact in its presentation. I really wish they would have used more painterly textures or stylized shaders to better approximate the feel of the comics. This dissonance gets especially uncanny when in-game elements are juxtaposed with painterly artwork: This world's posters, magazines and newspapers feel so much more alive than its 3-D occupants.
• This generic appearance undercuts the game's attempts at recreating film noir tropes. The lighting lacks the contrast that would make it evocative. The cut scene camera will linger on a face or a figure in a way that should make me feel something, but just draws attention to the awkwardness of an idle animation.
• The soundtrack is lovely and completely on point, often saving the scene. But then the characters talk, and... oof. The English cast are all experienced voice actors, so this almost certainly isn't their fault, but every line feels quiet, monotone and disinterested. It's a similar vibe as Tobey Maguire's voice acting in that first licensed Spider-Man game.
• Finally, John Blacksad controls like a sack of potatoes, which is especially maddening when the initial environments include ten times as many partial baseball cards and unfunny bathroom graffiti as they do meaningful discoveries.

If you like Telltale-esque games and you're especially forgiving of earlier ones, you might find something to like in here. But if you're a fan of the Blacksad comics and you're expecting that love to carry you through, I think you're probably in for some disappointment.

Blacksad, that is the original comics, is probably the reason there are so many noir games about furries. Backbone is just one example. Taking place somewhen after World War 2, we play as a private detective from New York. A boxing champion went missing, and his manager apparently committed a very inconvenient suicide.

Of course there are racial jokes, about a wife of a rhino “tearing his horn off” for being unfaithful. And the fact that Blacksad is a black cat.

The problem with presented dilemmas is that you, as a player, don’t have a skin in the game. You’re offered a bribe, but you can’t spend that money. You’re threatened with beatings and death, but you know your character can’t die. So, you can be as honest and blunt as you’d like. It won’t change a thing.

The game is made beautifully. Not LA Noire, of course, but still very impressive camera work, well written and all voiced dialogs, all that stuff. I don’t like how cats look basically like humans with cat ears, but that’s the original style.

Didn’t expect to enjoy this game so much. Voice acting is absolutely brilliant, as well as the writing. And there are new mechanics added from time to time. At one point, you’re given a flashlight, to highlight objects in the dark. At another point, you need to try and remember what happened in the past to get the right answers for an interrogation. And the baseball question game, when only the person with the baseball can ask the question is interesting as well.

There’s an interesting episode, when you see a person about to be executed by a mob boss, and you can try and prevent this. But first, you discover that he threatened a widow. Then you learn that he did so by almost drowning her son in the toilet. So by the end of it, you may decide not to save him at all.

Certainly better than Chicken Police, LA Noire or Backbone, and on-par with Wolf Among Us.

The story was surprisingly ruthless. I certainly didn't expect the German doctor or how that episode turned out.

Monkey Craigg sacrificing himself was extremely well directed, when a lot of motives come together: his baseball glove that he uses to stop the fan, and him dying to a heart attack as he imagines that he plays his last game.

I will start with the only good things that this game has (in my opinion):

1. Plot: a black novel is always very entertaining. Nice characters too
2. BSO: the best thing in the game.

Negative aspects:

1. A lot of bugs
2. Problems with the controls: sometimes it is very complicated to face and get the x symbol to
3. The volume goes up and down without you pushing any buttons.
4. The objects you want to observe are all blurry, why oh why?
5. Errors in the game that kick you out very often.

I will give it 3 starts because yeah, it has a lot of problems... but it is still nice to play.

Even if we consider that I knew nothing about Blacksad as a character or as a series/comic, I still enjoyed the story quite a bit. What caught my attention was the artstyle and the characters of course, but the rest of the product (mainly the story and the "world" it takes place in) obviously didn't disappoint either.

However, the game has sooo many technical issues, bugs and glitches of all sorts. Enough to make the whole experience a lot less enjoyable, especially because sometimes the situation forces you to reset the game entirely, if it doesn't crash on its own.

A big shame for sure, because the story and the characters were handled pretty well. But everything else, from the controls to the movement, was just a never-ending mess full of bugs and glitches.

I saw an ad for this game on YouTube and while the 50's film noir setting appealed to me, I wasn't a fan of the anthropomorphic animal characters. I didn't want people getting the wrong ideas about me, ya know. Still, it was on sale this week and my love of film noir outweighed my dislike of furries, so I gave it a shot.

Blacksad was developed by a Spanish team and they wear their gameplay influences on their sleeve. Blacksad plays like the Frogware Sherlock Holmes games with a little bit of Telltale and classic adventure games in there. You steer Blacksad around world spaces looking for clues and interrogating suspects. As you collect clues, you can piece them together to create hunches. As a fan of the Sherlock Holmes games, it felt natural to get into the gameplay and I'm glad to see it being imitated. You even have an ability to stop time so you can examine someone's body language and surroundings. There's also quite a few QTEs in this game, which gives me a Telltale game feel. Unlike Sherlock, Telltale, or even LA Noir, where you can't really die and any dialogue you chooses usually still gets you to the same outcome, this game has some trial & error like older point'n'clicks. You can pick the wrong dialogue option and get a bullet for your troubles. That can be a little annoying sometimes, especially in regards to QTEs. There were a couple times I felt I hit the button in time only to fail it. My reflexes may be getting slower, but I think the game has a slow response time to inputs as well.

There were some other techincal issues with this game as well, and those are what held this game back from being 4 stars. I get this is a AA developer, and I have a soft spot for them, but if you try doing too much too quick in this game it's prone to freezing and soft crashes. On one occasion the game hard crashed and corrupted my save file, meaning I had to start from square one, and that almost made me walk away from this game. You only have one save file at a time, so I recommend regularly uploading your game to PS Plus or a USB to avoid my fate.

Blacksad is actually a Spanish comic books series. You don't need to have read the books to understand this game. I hadn't but I was able to follow this self-contained story easy enough. Doing some research, I realized there are plenty of little nods to the comic series in the game. The world Blacksad inhabits is an exact copy of 1950s America, except everyone is animals. It did raise a few questions for me. This world still has the race problems of the 50s, but how do they tell who's white and who's black? Blacksad is a black cat, but no one ever treats him like a black man, and what about creatures with grey, brown, or mixed fur colors. On top of that, Blacksad mentions a distrust of reptilian people. It would make more sense to change the racial sides from black & white to mammal & reptilian. This game is also based on a gritty, realistic world, but animal people always look a little cartoony. It can be a bit jarring seeing all these grisly murders happening to Zootopia characters.

I'm also pretty sure the creator of the source material is of the furry persuasion. Where as in, say, Sly Cooper the characters are a stylized & purposely cartoony, Blacksad characters are those type of anthropomorphic characters where they have human features except their heads. The men are all chiseled and the ladies look like regular people with a set of cat ears. I mean, you do you, but I would've enjoyed this game a bit more if it just had real people, but I guess the animals make it stand out.

Cartoony furries asides, the graphics of this game are passable. The developers put love into recreating 1950s New York and most the character models are interesting to look at. Some of the lip syncing is off and one horse NPC has really ugly looking eyebrow movements. Also the lighting in this game is a little bland. That's usually not something I even pay attention to, but with film noir, lighting and shadows are a big part of the aesthetic. Some of the cutscenes do have classic moody lighting, my favorite is the poker game, but walking around areas are usually blasted with light and the developers were unable to program a shadow for your character when you're under street lamps. I get it may be a limitation thing, but I wanted more style from this game. Also, a black'n'white filter was sorely missing. I'd've used that in a heartbeat. At least I can say they didn't skimp on the music. Lots of great jazzy noir tracks.

Now, onto the story, this game's bread & butter. I was surprised how much heft this story had. I've gotten used to Telltale games that are four short episodes, or even in LA Noir you were working different cases ever other hour or so. Blacksad is focused on one case that starts out small & straightforward but gets more complex as you dig into the evidence. What starts as a suicide and missing persons case leads you to secret lovers, bookies, famous athletes, WWII veterans, and German scientists. The story is able to switch from all these big points while keeping focus and that's an achievement. Certain characters and leads are dropped naturally as new leads come up. At the beginning there was a moment I was confused on where my next move should be and the game devolved into clicking everything.

There's apparently 6 endings, I don't know how much they all differ, but in theory you can follow different hunches through the case and come up with different results. Spoiler blur ahead for the ending, you find a German scientist who created a drug to help with his daughter's degenerative disease, but it also works as a super soldier serum, or in this case super athlete. So, he starts selling illegal steroids to make money for his research. Now, being a noir story which lives in shades of gray, I figured they'd give you the tough choice of whether you want to be lawful and send him to the clink, dooming his daughter, or sympathetic to his cause even if it's illegal. Nope, cause in the next 5 mins, both he and his daughter brutally burn to death.

In the course of your investigation you come across a variety of characters and the voice acting is surprisingly well for a budget game from a foreign country. Blacksad's voice actor is going for a sort of Doug Cockle voice. There's the murder suspect's daughter who's your sorta love interest, a waitress who means well, but you can't trust, a mob enforcer who you have dirt on, and an aging baseball star who meets a fittingly noir, bittersweet end. My two favorite characters you encounter are the mob boss, Desmond O'Leary, he's a smooth talking shuckster that you can't trust as far as you can through him. He has his own twisted sense of morality in how he conducts his business, and I have a love for that archetype. The other character I enjoyed was Smirnov, the police chief. He's a character from the comics and an old friend of Blacksad and I love their dynamic. While Blacksad is a little more looser, being a private eye, Smirnov is a straight laced police officer, but he's got a dry sense of humor. Smirnov is the friend Blacksad confides in and their relationship explores the subtleties of male friendship. Every scene he's in is a good scene. The writing in this game is very strong, I think the original comic author helped pen the story. Blacksad is self aware of his hardboiled status, often making mention to film noir and detective books. There's a couple fun moments where you can drop some badass, cheesy lines.

Also, if I may nitpick, there is a moment where Blacksad lights Smirnov's cigarette. Now, in film noir you only light a lady's cigarette, cause it's used as a connotation for sex, cuase the Production Code wouldn't allow much else. And I think the game gets this cause Blacksad also shares a cigarette with his love interest and a famous tennis star... Maybe they were trying to insinuate more between Blacksad and Smirnov...

All in all, I am glad I decided to pull the trigger on this game and give it a try. The 50's noirness you are drenched in outweighs the awkward furriness. With the good writing and memorable characters, I would love to see another entry in this series since Wolf Among Us is dead and Blues & Bullets never got finished. Maybe get some of the technical kinks worked out. Heck, I may even give the comics a read.