X-Noir

It's been five years since Volrath and I actively worked on a project together. It's pretty hard to believe we've been inactive for so long. There were many reasons we went dark but that's for a different blog post.

I just moved back to my homestate where Volrath lives and we discussed working on another project together. I started playing through some of our old projects for inspiration. I hadn't touched or seen X-Noir since 2015 and forgot most of it. During my playthrough, Volrath joined in and we've been having a fun time doing a let's play together and voicing the characters just like we used to do whenever we playtested our games together.

We've been discussing doing a sequel of sorts to X-Noir for the last few years but other than a rough draft of the early game we haven't made any progress. It's been a long time since we've done any serious game make and it's honestly quite intimidating thinking of starting a new project. Playing through X-Noir again, I realized there was a lot of potential for a remake.

X-Noir is described as a "unique combination of logic-based investigations, action RPG gameplay, black humor and science-fiction." It's our most experimental project to date, and ended up being kind of a mess. The action combat is clunky and simplistic, as expected from an action RPG in Ace. The logic-based investigation sequences have a bit too much guessing, and there's a lot of needless back and forth around the city. The story is also a bit all over the place, especially in the beginning. But in the mess there is beauty.

Volrath and I take a very organic approach to game development. We draft a rough outline of the mechanics and story early-on for our games but we leave a lot of room for ideas to emerge later. In the case of X-Noir, we didn't really figure out the identity of the game until around Case 4. By then we had more confidence in the characters, story, and investigational sequences. Because we committed to having an action combat system, we still had segments where Eddie fought off enemies but these were given less focus. We realized the Anxiety mechanic was going nowhere and it just became a superficial aspect of the game.

I've had a lot of time to think about how I'd approach X-Noir if I did it all over again. I would ditch the combat completely, which tonally never fit with the game. In its place, there would be more focus on the Investigation and Interrogation sequences. The Ace Attorney series have been a big source of inspiration, as well as the Zero Escape trilogy, Hotel Dusk, and Danganronpa titles. Eddie was an attorney, and his best friend is a cop, so modeling the game after the Ace Attorney Investigation series would make a lot of sense thematically. I'd also like to rethink the Anxiety/Depression system to have a bigger impact on the overall plot.

Right now Volrath and I are just talking about it. We still have to complete our playthrough and decide if a remake of X-Noir is something we want to do. We fleshed out the world more in Labyrinthine Dreams, as well as the sequel that we're still planning, and it would make sense to remake the game that started it all. I know there isn't as many fans of these games as our titles in the Solest universe but I'm hoping there are still some subs here that would be interested in seeing us taking another swing at this strange sci-fi detective game.