Blacksad: The Furry Detective That Got Under My Skin
The hardest part of writing about a detective game is deciding how you’re going to go about it. As I sit here at 1:30 in the morning, staring at a Word document and the Steam library page for Blacksad: Under the Skin, I have no idea what I should do.
I don’t consider myself a software reviewer. I am fascinated by game design, but the technical aspects of that field are a hobby to me at best and an arcane mystery at worst. I’m a story person. I love telling stories. I love seeing how other people tell stories. But how do you talk about a story when the ending of it is both the culmination of all the work you do while playing, a true conclusion, and something that you could, with one sentence, ruin for anyone else who may ever want to experience what you just have?
There isn’t an easy answer.
One possibility is to say to hell with it and write a review. I’ve done it before, though I loathe to do so. There are enough of those and more than enough writers too—as evidenced by my incredibly deep inbox of rejected pitches to just about any outlet you could name. If I write something like that, it will say nothing of value, and I might as well have not written anything at all.
The other possibility is to go into a narrative analysis. To clearly demarcate when and where information that will spoil that narrative will be revealed. At which point I have written for people who either must skip around the thing or are interested enough by a particular game to want to know how someone else feels about it.
Sometimes, though, neither of these options is attractive. Instead, it feels like a frustrating exercise in creating something that will never be what you want it to be. It will torture you through the entire process, taunting that in someone else’s hands, this idea could have been done so much better.
Maybe it would have been published.
Maybe it would really touch somebody.
Maybe it would put some kind of esoteric “value” on the life you have spent studying, making, and obsessing over words when you are unable to find it within yourself.
That is what it is like to play Blacksad: Under the Skin.
Blacksad is one of three games that summon forth the aesthetic of “furry noir adventure,” alongside the acclaimed Backbone and the less acclaimed but incredibly titled Chicken Police – Paint it RED. Each tackles its subject matter through a wholly different kind of gameplay and each finds its successes and failures tied with that decision. In Blacksad’s case, Pendulo Studios has made the leap away from the traditional adventure games of their oeuvre and landed headfirst in a solid attempt at crafting a modern cinematic adventure ala the releases of the original TellTale Games.
Adventure games are no stranger to detectives and one of the seminal titles of the genre also happens to star anthropomorphic characters. From an outside perspective, Blacksad looks fascinating and full.
After playing through the game, I can safely say it is definitely the former and definitely not the latter.
Blacksad follows its eponymous detective as he attempts to unravel the mystery of a local gym owner’s apparent suicide. Along the way, he encounters a crime lord, several national athletes, the chief of police, and so on. The constant drip of characters large and small evokes the ensemble casts of the game’s source material—or it may be more accurate to say its source material’s source material. Thankfully, the work of the voice cast manages to make these characters mostly likable and believable even when the script is doing them no favors. Particularly deserving of the spotlight are Barry Johnson as the titular character, David Coburn as police chief Smirnov, and Marvin Parks as the gruff former boxer Jake Ostiombe. Though I would not count every performance among the best, especially considering the past work some of the cast has done in the industry, no character felt out of place to me as the player. When compared to some of Pendulo’s earlier work, this is perhaps where some of the clearest progress in their development process has occurred.
I commend the team for trying a different style of adventure game. The cinematic adventure is the lynchpin of the genre and has been for a decade. But though the studio is attempting this style for the first time here, they are unfortunately working against the expectations that come from such a niche genre. When a mediocre action game comes out, it will see less scrutiny than a mediocre adventure game because, well, the audience for adventure games is smaller and can more easily compare releases as they aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. When compared to some of TellTale’s latter-day work, Blacksad falls short in multiple respects.
Though I am no programmer, I cannot help but call attention to the plethora of issues I had running the game. Blacksad, at times, felt like it was rattling along on broken axles. Crashes can occur at random without easy replication, meaning they’re a complete mystery to the average player (IE: me). What really stood out to me, however, to the point of distraction from the core of the game, was the audio.
Sound effect work is flat and generic. Voice lines frequently cut the next bit of dialogue off, even when it is spoken by the same character. Occasionally parts of the sound will mysteriously vanish, and I can’t tell if it’s a stylistic choice for a scene or just another bug. The sheer number of moving parts will almost always mean a detective game is a much harder production than a detective film, but when the audio work is so sloppy that it takes away from what has been done well in the production—again, the voice acting and the score—then there’s a problem that shouldn’t be swept away with a “Well at least you tried.”
I’m not a framerate snob by any means. I just like it to be smooth. If a game is locked to 30 frames per second yet maintains that, I’m happy. Blacksad does not maintain anything regarding a frame or a rate. While attempting to run the game in fullscreen, my lagging framerate was so dismal that I felt like I was watching the game on a delay as the sound marched on without me. Thankfully, swapping to windowed mode alleviated this almost entirely. The handicap is unappreciated.
But despite all of this, and this is what I really want to hammer in here, I did enjoy myself. Multiple times. Even after incredibly frustrating moments, the heart of Blacksad is such that I wanted to see it through. It is clear to me that the Pendulo team took great care in crafting the world of Blacksad, even if it isn’t always apparent from a technical standpoint. Characters are believable and the twisting and turning of the plot emulates the noir stories its hero points to so often.
As a detective experience, the game is well-rounded. Along the path from taking the case to solving it, Blacksad must work in disguise, infiltrate illicit businesses, and face so many possible beatings that numerous achievements are dedicated to them. While not every scene is a winner and the pace slows once the culprit has seemingly been discovered—on the whole the game is an adventure through and through: variety, character, and scenery.
I especially want to commend the camerawork throughout. This, to me, was most indicative of the team looking to detective films not only to direct their narrative, but how they presented the world they had built. Shots are often dynamic and sweeping or communicating the claustrophobic chill of being in hiding.
The central mystery of Blacksad is done well enough. It is not a frustrating story, nor is it poorly told. Though for those who have experienced a detective story before, parts of the narrative come across as paint-by-numbers facsimiles of other media. The fact is that because the story here is so unremarkable, a narrative analysis would be foolhardy. It would be like trying to do a close reading on a story in Asimov’s Science Fiction—you can do it, but there is very little reason to. Rather, the reveals are handled well enough that things don’t feel wrote or dull. And I must admit to more than one moment that completely surprised me and pulled me back into what Pendulo was doing. One in particular, toward the end, hit me straight in the gut thanks to its historical parallels that are particularly relevant in the 1950s America that the game is set in.
That setting is a mystery to me. Seemingly, most of the world as we know it is the same. World War II occurred just as it did in our world. The only true difference is that mankind is substituted for various anthropomorphic beings. This swap is interesting, but little is done with it. Of note is the fact that multiple characters are directly referred to both by themselves and others as black—including Blacksad, who is a black cat. This has similar connotations socially as it did in our real world’s post-War America, with white supremacists being at least acknowledged and the social difficulty of being black at that time paid some amount of lip service and being relevant to one semi-important plot beat. But it is ultimately an unexplored theme. I cannot help but wonder if the original comic delved into this more deeply and what we see here is a remnant of that, or if it is an incredibly lazy attempt to portray a harrowing experience in a video game where it is relegated to the backseat. Considering the game’s subtitle, too, makes this oversight even more of a mystery.
As I read over this to edit, I felt I had been particularly harsh of Blacksad. And while I do not think my criticisms are unwarranted, I think it is worth explicitly stating that I do believe Blacksad: Under the Skin to be a worthwhile experience. Its gameplay will feel instantly familiar to anyone who has touched a cinematic adventure game before, and the genre is welcoming enough that those who haven’t will be able to learn the ropes quickly—a mercifully optional tutorial is included for players especially ill-confident in navigating a game like this.
The reason I am so critical, I think, is because Blacksad feels like it is so close to greatness. When it shines, it really shines. Conversations flow well enough, even when audio hiccups make then sound off, and the mystery here is compelling enough to want to see through. During my playthrough, circumstances pulled me away from the game for roughly a month and yet, after all that time, I still wanted to see how the story concluded and what became of Blacksad himself. The game relies on the charisma of its main character and his supporting cast, perhaps too heavily considering the technical issues that are fairly obvious throughout, but it is not unwarranted in doing so.
When I think of Blacksad as a video game, a product to be purchased and played, I’m disappointed in its shortcomings. But when I think of Blacksad as a story, an experience alongside a stereotypically noir detective set in the prime era of the trope, I cannot help but heartily recommend it. Despite the issues, despite the threads left hanging here or there, John Blacksad’s investigation is more than worth the headaches it can cause.
Ultimately, just like trying to write about a detective game, writing a detective story is difficult. There are a lot of moving parts to be mindful of, even before it must be adapted into an interactive medium. But we tell those stories anyway, even when they don’t shatter the foundations of all that came before (or even anything at all). Not because we believe ourselves to be grander than we are, but because the need to tell them is so overpowering that when real writers step up to the plate, they will hit the ball. Even if it isn’t a homerun, it will travel.
The work will be done.
And if there is one thing I can say about Blacksad: Under the Skin, it is that the extensive team that put it together are all real writers.