![]() With one hand, he does the interviews, collects the evidence, and holds to the best standards of “good police” like that film’s Ed Exley with the other, he recognizes that threats and illegal violence get results, and he’s willing to pursue them (or at least threaten them) like the film’s Bud White. In many ways, he’s a combination of the two protagonists from 1997’s throwback noir L.A. He’s a by-the-book careerist who wants to crack the hard cases and move up in the world. Cole Phelps is so sharply drawn that it’s painful. You come into contact with them through your own character, though. Even games with fairly large animated and voice acted casts, like the recent The Last of Us Part 2, look humble compared to the horde of character actors you come into contact with in L.A. I also struggle to think of another game that could be said to actually have a wide cast of side and bit characters, afforded almost entirely by the MotionScan technology that the developers deployed in order to capture real-time performances from a huge array of recognizable actors. While the Mafia games have carried the flag for “historical” 20th century games, they are decidedly more action-based than the slow and careful investigation and interview mechanics of L.A. ![]() What’s striking about it ten years on is how fresh those simple ideas still feel, plodding pace and all. Noire sells itself entirely on its storytelling and its mimicking of a time and place within a very particular genre, and if you’re not on board for any of those things it very quickly becomes a struggle to play. Former Marine-then-cop-then-detective Cole Phelps always grated, and the game’s plodding pace that takes on the beats and forms from its 1950s setting was a hard hump to get over. I’d played the game to various stages of completion before, but always bounced off for various reasons a few investigations in. ![]() I didn’t have very many expectations when I sat down with 2017’s slightly-augmented Remastered Edition a couple weeks ago. ![]()
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