Nine Noir Lives is an upcoming point-and-click adventure game being featured among the games at LudoNarraCon, and it has a demo currently available. It is a noir detective game in which you play as the feline private investigator Cuddles Nutterbutter investigating a new case that could lead to conflict with the powerful crime families the Montameeuws and the Catulets.
That sentence should give you an impression of the game’s tone. You have a cast of cats with plenty of cat-themed names to go around, and it definitely is a comedy despite being a noir mystery at the same time. Characters use “whiskers!” as an interjection, and the word “cucumber” is shocking profanity, which I assume is a reference to people scaring their cats with cucumbers. The demo features full voice acting, including the reactions whenever you inspect items. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but Cuddles’s delivery on some of the lines definitely won me over by the end of the demo.
It is a point-and-click adventure game in which you’ll investigate environments, talk to characters, and gather items in order to solve puzzles. Nine Noir Lives uses the style where you can switch what type of interaction you’re using. In this game, your options are to look, use, or lick. Yes, lick. You can try all of these options on everything, with a reaction from Cuddles to all of them, so of course I spent a significant amount of time attempting to lick every object and character in my path. Whether Cuddles flatly refused to do it (if he started licking his employees, the other employees might consider it special treatment) or went through with it and reported back what it tasted like, the results were always funny.
Anyway, aside from licking things, there is a lot of funny dialogue in general. Cuddles comes across as though he’s exasperated with every situation he’s forced to deal with, while his assistant Tabby is patiently putting up with his quirks in turn. The demo ends before the case actually gets going, so I don’t have much of an idea of where the story is going, but it at least sold me on its humor.
The gameplay, likewise, is a little unclear at this point. There are a few points where you need to find items to give to someone, and one part where you write down a phone number (which uses symbols instead of numbers) and have to dial it correctly, but the demo doesn’t have a whole lot in the way of actual puzzles. At the same time, there is a “story mode” difficulty option in which you’re given puzzle hints in your notebook, so I assume there will be more significant puzzles later on.
The demo for Nine Noir Lives left me with two final thoughts: it’s going to be cute, and it’s going to be funny. I might not know how the story and puzzles will turn out, but the amusement from running around licking everything is enough to tell me this comedy noir adventure is one to keep an eye on.
