Review for Blacksad: Under the Skin. Game for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 14/11/2019
Over the past decade we have seen the rebirth (and perhaps even death) of graphic adventures thanks to the late Telltale Games, which has made some remarkable games also based on Western comics, such as The Walking Dead and Fables (with The Wolf Among Us). Also Microïds - Anuman Interactive actually: Microïds is just his own brand - he tried it with Blacksad: Under the Skin, taking advantage of the license of the comic published by Dargaud, which belongs to the same conglomerate of the French software house.
Blacksad is a refined comic series furry created by the Spanish artists Juan Diaz Download (lyrics) and Juanjo Guarnido (drawings and colors), but first published in France (by Dargaud), which constitutes its main market. The events, exquisitely hardboiled, take place in XNUMXs New York and revolve around the character of John Blacksad, a private investigator with a dark past. Currently the series consists of five volumes (also available in a single volume), but the sixth and seventh should be on the way, at least in France.
Blacksad: Under the Skin is also the result of a Franco-Spanish collaboration: the development was entrusted by the French Microïds to the Spaniards of Pendulo Studios, fans of Blacksad and experts in the field of graphic adventures (they are the authors of the series Runaway, in order to understand each other). Pendulo Studios worked closely with Canales and Guarnido - who worked as consultants - to achieve a good level of adherence to the comic series.
On the level of the story, this translates into a episode completely unprecedented, which can be placed between the second and third register (as can be deduced from some small textual references), but in any case to be considered not canonical; on the other hand, this last notation is quite superfluous, since Blacksad is not characterized by a strong “horizontal plot”. The basic idea was to create a work that was Blacksad, but at the same time did not "interfere" with the comic: not surprisingly, only five of 35 characters (Blacksad, Weekly, Pierman, Ostiombe and Smirnov) are old acquaintances .
also the issues are unpublished: this time John will be grappling with a case of corruption in the world of sport, which in the XNUMXs was growing exponentially thanks to television. The plot and the script, although not the work of Canales, are absolutely up to the situation, without making Blacksad suffer the change of medium; considerable attention to the original material, which consists of quotations (the first, right at the opening, is taken from the third table of the first volume) and references (for example to Arctic Nation, which is about in the second volume) Pendulo Studios' sincere admiration for comics.
Molto less adherent to the original work is necessary visual impact. The graphic sector is entirely polygonal, but it could still have kept a cartoonish aspect - or at least, more cartoonish than the screenshots you can see - if it had been enriched with certain tricks and refinements, unfortunately absent. The color palette, while not unpleasant in itself, is not very close to Guarnido's fine chromatisms. In the opinion of the writer, the only way to transpose the aesthetics of Blacksad into a video game is to do something similar to the work of CyberConnect2 with Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, exponentially increasing the resolution, goes without saying; already a cel shading could prove difficult to manage.
Instead, for reasons that are quite mysterious to me, it was decided to create a polygonal engine with a decidedly "harder" look than that of the comic strips. This choice, perhaps inopportune on an aesthetic level, has even turned out to be fatal on the technical one: Blacksad: Under the Skin is one of the hottest games you can get your hands on this year. In addition to a level of detail that is not exactly current gen, the game suffers from serious flaws, including a considerable difficulty in loading the textures, polygonal interpenetration and lip sync problems. But this is nothing: the real cross is constituted by the numerous bugs and glitches. Without consuming thousands of characters in listing all the ones I have encountered, I limit myself to observing that I never ended a game session because I wanted to, but because of a freeze. Currently, two patches have already been released on Steam and PlayStation 4, the last of which should arrive on Xbox One shortly; the Steam version should also receive a third dedicated to the frame rate. The fact is that, to make the game really usable, they have to patch them under the bridge ...
In terms of gameplay, Blacksad: Under the Skin does not differ much from the stylistic features of the genre, as they have been "revived" by Telltale Games at the dawn of this decade that is now coming to an end. We have the "usual" mix of exploration, Quick Time Event and multiple choice dialogues, enriched with investigative elements that recall the adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Frogwares (for example, the mechanism of deductions) and LA Noire.
Nothing to tear your hair about, in any case: the Quick Time Events are not very complex and quite trivial, exploration is partly undermined by technical flaws and not all choices seem as "impactful" as one might expect (I can say why because of the aforementioned freezes I have often faced the same sequence twice, Ed), but this is a "defect" shared by many exponents of the genre. Overall, it would be a very enjoyable game, if it were easy to play ...
Blacksad: Under the Skin is a beautiful graphic adventure, but it suffers terribly from the bugs and glitches that make the gaming experience a test of patience. After a few patches it could become a great game.
► Blacksad: Under the Skin is an Adventure type game developed by Pendulo Studios YS Interactive and published by Microids Anuman Interactive for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 14/11/2019
