NoseBound review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Black-and-white detective mystery hits on its rich noir atmosphere but whiffs on increasingly surreal story and unpolished presentation

NoseBound may sound like a family-friendly adventure featuring a canine protagonist in search of their lost family, but it’s quite the opposite. You’ll want to keep your kids away from this gritty P.I. investigative adventure from Argentinian developer Quarantine Interactive, where blood frequently splashes across the screen and walls are plastered with nude paintings. The black-and-white noir style is its most impressive feature, but even for those who appreciate darker adult fare, this short Lynchian mystery doesn’t pack much heat, at least until some of its current technical misfires are resolved.

You play as Ray Hammond, 66 years old and a whoppin’ 191 centimeters tall. He’s a hardened private investigator in Deep Sleep City – a fictional version of New York in a 1940s-style era, based on the appearance of cars and public payphones – who is refusing to retire so long as there are bad guys to catch. One night he gets a call that sets off the events of the game. A man’s wife has been kidnapped, and a mutual friend put him into contact with Hammond. What follows is a linear progression through the city with a limited need to backtrack. It starts off as a cool and straightforward detective game with some very simple inventory puzzles and interrogations, but soon unfurls into a strange supernatural tale involving a mysterious cult that failed to make much sense to me in the end.

NoseBound uses a one-click mouse interface. Hover your arrow cursor over a hotspot and either it turns into a magnifying glass if you can only look at it, or it turns golden and starts rotating, which opens up a verb coin when you click, allowing you to choose the magnifying glass or a hand icon to either use the item or take it. Choosing the magnifying glass is accompanied by the sound effect of a pencil scratching on a notepad, which feels a bit out of place, as if Ray is writing his memoirs as you play. You hear a ringing sound, like an ice cube dropped in a glass, each time you successfully use the hand icon, as if you’ve scored a point, except for the fact this game doesn’t have a scoring system.

Taking place over the course of a single night, the scenes have a grainy appearance. It’s a largely monochromatic game but with the occasional color element for effect, like a neon hotel sign, a painting on a wall, or a burning candle. The locations are very atmospheric and detailed, with lots of background animations bringing the night to life, like moths flying around light sources, fog or steam drifting by, and a trail of cigarette smoke constantly accompanying Hammond. The edges of the screen are blurred, perhaps suggesting his love for alcohol and thus emphasizing his stereotypical private eye persona, as do the empty bottles lying all over the place.

Hammond’s animation makes him appear as if he’s a heavy drinker as well, although this doesn’t appear to be intentional. His feet seem to be constantly slipping as he walks, as if he’s not getting any decent traction on the floors, making his movements quite awkward. Then again, if I had to sleep on the office couch every night, I’d probably be walking funny as well. Hammond speeds up a bit if you can keep him walking, but irritatingly slows down again if you don’t click fast enough. And since you do need to move through some long corridors now and again, this quickly becomes tiresome, especially when running away with a bad guy in hot pursuit.

Very distracting are the big letters of the word “MENU” in the lower left corner, which only disappears during cutscenes. This leads to the options and save/load screen. NoseBound has an autosave function but also offers four save slots to store your progress manually, which comes in very handy since you can die if you fail to act fast enough in a couple of situations. You don’t need to use it, but you’ll probably want to position yourself a little closer to the point of no return instead of respawning back at the start of that location.

The game features typically dark detective story music, an almost unnerving style of jazz that seems inspired by Angelo Badalamenti of Twin Peaks fame, with slow trumpets and a rhythmic bass. I did have to twiddle with the audio settings to get it just right, though. You can adjust the volume of voices and sound effects, but not the music.

While Hammond’s voice actor fits the P.I. part perfectly, you’ll be hard pressed to find a non-playable character that doesn’t sound totally over the top. While the women are pretty much okay, such as a cleaning lady in an apartment building, a prostitute in a bar, and a receptionist, the men usually sound as if they are voicing bears or walruses in an animated movie. The only exception is the medical examiner at the police station. At least he acts like a normal human being, not exaggeratingly lowering his voice to sound gruffer. All the others, like the bartender, a cop, and some hostile cult members, only succeed in sounding unrealistically silly, as if they’re speaking through one of those voice transformers kidnappers use when they call to discuss the ransom. The cult members especially are supposed to come over as menacing, but it’s hard to take them seriously if they make you laugh as soon as they open their mouths.

NoseBound

Genre:	Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Crime solving, Noir
Perspective:	Third-Person
Gameplay:	Investigative
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low
Graphic Style:	Simulated realism

Even apart from the performances, the game suffers some inconsistencies in the recorded lines. You might have set the voice volume pretty high at the start of the game, but when Hammond opens up his desk drawer and you get a closeup view of its contents, the first time he describes something, the guy seems to be standing right next to your chair shouting in your ear. At first I thought this was done on purpose to fit the shift in perspective to a first-person viewpoint, but it happens with other lines of dialogue during the normal third-person investigating parts as well. Then there are the occasional lines that have some echo to them, as if they were recorded in a different, larger room than the others. In one particular case, I didn’t even fully recognize Hammond’s voice.

The subtitles, too, are riddled with sloppy errors. Certain words are randomly capitalized, whether nouns, verbs, or pronouns, while other words that should be capitalized are not, like the “I” pronoun. Then there are loads of punctuation mistakes, like questions ending in both a question mark followed by a period. There are also long pauses between two spoken lines, which often made me think the game had frozen. Even when someone stops talking, it takes a while before you can actively control the cursor again. The options menu states you should be able to manually advance the dialogue with the spacebar, but for some reason that didn’t work for me – though the developers have promised an upcoming patch that should take care of this and other issues.

NoseBound took me only three hours to finish even with some unnatural pauses. Its main objective is to locate both the kidnapped woman and the client himself when he goes into hiding after asking Hammond for help. There’s a constant threat of that mysterious cult trying to scare you off the case, and several times they’ll push you into a corner. You can die during these actiony bits if you don’t open your inventory fast enough to draw your gun and plan your escape from the approaching danger (I lost count of the times I had to redo one scene with a seemingly bulletproof bad guy chasing me through a building), but I still enjoyed figuring out the solution and had a great feeling of accomplishment afterwards. 

Action sequences are rare anyway, as for the most part the game is content to rely on quite straightforward puzzles. Mostly they involve talking to other characters to unlock the next location. There are only a couple of inventory puzzles, like the obligatory fixing of a fuse box. There are also two codes to crack, but the way to go about it is too overly explained. For one of them I even found extra information on how to figure it out AFTER I’d already opened the safe, and for another you just have to use basic arithmetic.

You’re clearly supposed to follow the leads from one location to the next, exploring each location and asking people for information before going to the next, with no need to backtrack. A familiar occult symbol appears on the map as you travel from location to location, including your office, an apartment building, the police station, a bar, and a brothel. You can move on without finding everything, though, so all locations remain available. (The story will eventually take you back to some of them automatically.) The way the game is programmed, however, brings forth some issues with backtracking to find things you missed. For instance, because I didn’t see a necessary inventory item in the apartment building during my first visit, I had to search all locations again, with no clue that the apartment was where I needed to return. Then, once I found what I needed, I stepped back out into the corridor only to suddenly find the door behind me strapped with yellow police tape with no possibility to enter again. So how did I get back out without breaking the tape, exactly?

In another example, after a specific cutscene I was supposed to go back to my office. Not immediately realizing this at first, I backtracked everywhere looking for something to help me progress. Except when I went back to the last location I visited and tried to leave again, the same cutscene played out once more, with no possibility to skip or fast-forward.

Unfortunately, next to all these technical flaws, the story itself just didn’t gel with me. Weird stuff suddenly happens pretty early on, particularly after a visit to a strange fortune teller, and Hammond is just a tad too deadpan about it all. He’ll acknowledge the weirdness but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. There’s a lot of exposition when the kidnapping case reaches its conclusion, some scientific mumbo-jumbo which I guess might be theoretically possible and pretty much turns this into a sci-fi game, but I found it all too convoluted to really appreciate the narrative and simply take it all at face value.

Final Verdict

In development for nearly a decade, NoseBound attracted my attention as a classic detective noir mystery with a distinct graphical style, but its limitations make it feel more like a carnival funhouse ride where you’re stuck on rails most of the time. While I largely enjoyed the setting, the main character, the easy user interface, and even the trial-and-error survival parts, there was no real challenge, the flaws kept piling up, and the story just wasn’t engrossing enough to allow me to look past them. What’s worse is that the ending made me feel as if I was watching a convoluted David Lynch movie. The game was originally announced as episodic, but with no sign of a cliffhanger or more to come, it seems this will be the first and last Ray Hammond story – but perhaps not quite the end, as I sincerely hope the developers are able to patch most of the technical issues and let the better parts of this currently rough-edged mystery shine through. 

Johnny played NoseBound on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.