Discworld Noir

Moby ID: 1411
Windows Specs

Description official descriptions

Ankh-Morpork is a city surrounded by darkness, where the cold river Ankh flows, where it always rains, and where dwarves and trolls co-exist with secret societies, religious fanatics, stupid police captains, and bar pianists. It is also where a bitterly sarcastic sharp-eyed private investigator named Lewton tries to earn a living solving bizarre cases. A mysterious woman named Carlotta hires him to find her lost lover. Wandering through the dark city and gathering evidence, Lewton has to solve the case, confront a sinister conspiracy, and once again become torn between love and despair.

Discworld Noir differs from other Discworld adventure games not only thanks to its more serious tone and much darker "film noir" atmosphere, but also because of its gameplay. Instead of inventory-based puzzles there are clues, which Lewton writes down in his notebook and which should be then used whenever there is a connection between the clue and the situation in question. Most of the gameplay is thus dedicated to detective work in conversations; but the usage of the right clues at the right place is still comparable to inventory-based puzzle-solving of other adventures. Graphically, Discword Noir features three-dimensional character models and pre-rendered backgrounds.

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Credits (Windows version)

104 People (90 developers, 14 thanks) · View all

Designed By
Produced By
Executive Producer
Script By
Voice Of Lewton
Other Characters Voiced By
Animation Director And Senior Animator
Technical Art Director
Background Design And Concept Art
Art Director
Character Design
Character Models
Background Artists
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 40 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 91 ratings with 7 reviews)

Dwarves and trolls in a tedious film noir

The Good
Discword Noir takes a fantasy setting - with dwarves, trolls, and what not - and mixes it with a film noir. I like stylish experiments, and this is definitely one of them. What's more, the setting is surprisingly organic and no aspect of it feels out of place. The result is a convincing detective mystery, complete with a heart-broken, ironic, bitter PI, mysterious femme fatale, shady organizations, and all the other ingredients of the genre, thrown into a fantasy world where anything can happen. Magical creatures frequent piano bars, and your fedora-wearing, dark-suited detective visits a temple that is home to a cult of a really existing deity.

The gameplay system is somewhat interesting. Instead of the usual inventory-based puzzles, the main focus of here is clue-gathering and conversations. Interrogating suspects opens ways to new locations and brings new clues, so conversations become an integral aspect of the gameplay. The clues you gather are the main gameplay tool in Discword Noir. You'll need to "use" the clues written in your notebook on people and objects you notice in the game world. Basically, it works almost like thinking aloud. You are trying to solve a detective mystery, so you'll have to think logically about the clues you get.

At one point, you'll be able to control a wolf in the game. You will see everything the way a real wolf would - your vision is blurred, but you can obviously smell things much better, and will have to use that to your advantage and solve puzzles that were impossible in human form.

Discword Noir has good atmosphere. An exquisite, fine melancholy accompanies the player from the beginning to the end. There is a feeling of loneliness and despair, but also soft sadness. The humor of the game is sophisticated and subtle, sometimes almost grotesque, with a lot of bitterness and irony. The graphics are kept mostly in dark colors, and the music is appropriately jazz-like. There are some really weird tunes to be heard in the game, almost as sophisticated as its dialogues. The story is strong, and the detective mystery line is surprisingly satisfying, with a few well-placed turns and twists.

The Bad
Discword Noir is a British game, and its humor is colored by its national origins. I know many people who prefer the dry wit of Albion to the more naive merriment of the New World. Personally, I can't always follow British humor, and a lot of their jokes are lost on me. This happened quite a few times in Discword Noir, when a conversation was clearly intended to be humorous but I failed to see the point. Lack of simplicity in dialogues is another potentially undermining aspect - sometimes I wished those people were speaking more plainly. Almost all the characters in the game try to sound smart and often use peculiar words and phrases that don't always fit the situation at hand.

The atmosphere is not always perfectly conveyed. It may sound like a strange complaint, but I'd prefer American voice actors in a game that imitates a chiefly American art style. The protagonist's voice, for example, is too distinctive with its underlying brashness to fit a low-key PI. Similarly, the jazz music is too sophisticated and mellow at once, lacking rhythmical consistency and simple swing of the style's homeland - being a jazz musician myself, I determined its European origins right away.

A significantly bigger problem is the gameplay. The clue system works well in the beginning, but quickly becomes exhausting and thoroughly unexciting. You'll have accumulated so many clues over the course of the game that resorting to a desperate "use every clue with every object" style of playing turns into the optimal solution. While I've rarely seen an adventure game that doesn't become cumbersome as it progresses, I wish they would simplify the process in this one: feverishly hunting for hotspots and browsing through endless pages of recorded information can really get in the way of the suspenseful investigation - not to mention that it's much less fun than combining items.

Like most adventure games of that barren time period, Discworld Noir sorely lacks interactivity. There are hotspots on the screen and you can click on them - this pretty much sums up the level of skill and involvement needed to complete the game. Following the sad, degrading simplification that befell the genre during the multimedia era, Discworld Noir keeps the player at a distance, refusing to open up its world and communicate.

The Bottom Line
Plowing your way through the tiresome clue system is not very exciting, particularly in a game with such limited interactivity. Discword Noir is an interesting stylistic experiment, but it's also a simplistic and average adventure game.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2016

You can't just go around killing people whenever you want to. It's not polite.

The Good
This game was delightfully funny with its tongue-in-cheek kind of humor. I haven't played any of the other Discworld games, so I'm sure some of the jokes got by me, but there were plenty of things to chuckle about anyway.

If you've always wanted to know what to say to your favorite monster, you'll learn while playing Discworld Noir. Ghouls, goblins, werewolves, zombies, golems, vampires and dwarves lead ordinary, everyday lives (such that it can be in a place called Ankh-Morpork). Talking to them is loads of fun. My favorite character of the bunch was DEATH, complete with his dark cape and scythe. Listening to his replies had me in stitches. And I loved the spoof on Indiana Jones!

The story is engaging and keeps you interested with its twists and turns. It is not any different than some others - the case ends up much more complicated than the beginning missing persons case. Conversations are the key to everything in Discworld Noir. Luckily you can enable subtitles as well as spacebar through the dialogs if you want.

I applaud the voice actors and actresses for their outstanding performances throughout. You could tell some of them played various characters, but not many. They all had the most wonderful inflections and gave real personalities to each and every character they portrayed. (When the vampire, Samael, sings, listen to the lyrics of his song. They're delightful!)

The music was of the standard P.I. type such as you might hear in a Mike Hammer episode. It was mood enhancing and dramatic when needed. Sound effects were appropriate, too - rain falling, thunder and lightning as well as crashes and bangs.

The graphics are done up in cartoon style. The characters are depicted somewhat funky, in a cute sort of way. The graphic world and the characters blended well together to make the whole thing believable. You can brighten up the scenes with the "Gamma Correction" option, which is nice because they can be a bit dark.

The Bad
I had a bit of trouble getting the game to run. It wouldn't play at all on my Windows XP laptop, and played poorly on my desktop computer with Windows 98 installed. It kept asking for a file that didn't exist (dsetup.dll). Cancelling out of the error message let me open up the closed window again and play. Disabling all other programs running in the background (especially anti-virus) helped some of the problems I encountered - which were stuttering speech and music and a temporarily frozen cursor. (Too bad no patch was made which might have solved those problems.)

Conversations are so important in Discworld Noir, but the interface they designed to use was cumbersome. Finding topics in the PI journal by turning page after page after page was tedious to say the least.

The Bottom Line
I was persistent enough to finish Discworld Noir, suffering through the bugs and quirks, because the story was so good. It wasn't a short game either, and I enjoyed myself with it for about 5 days (playing almost constantly). It's a very good adventure game, and could have been great if the technical side had been more user friendly. As it stands, it is still a worthy play for any of you who enjoy adventure games.

Windows · by Jeanne (75956) · 2005

Decent game with bad interface

The Good
1999 saw the release of two adventure games that blended Film Noir with other genres. Grim Fandango was a fantastic mix of Film Noir, art deco and Mexican Day of the Dead. Discworld Noir blends Noir with medieval fantasy, which is perhaps a little less original but still entertaining. There's just something funny about a private eye in a trench coat and fedora working a city of pirates and dwarves and trolls. The voice acting in Discworld Noir is thankfully excellent (there's a lot of voiceover) and the artwork and overall atmosphere is dead-on Film Noir. As far as actual gameplay, the game introduces an innovative dialogue system that lets you use the notes you've taken in your detective's notebook to question NPCs.

The Bad
I realize and appreciate the fact that everyone has a different sense of humor. That said, I have to confess that I didn't find much of the humor in Discworld Noir all that funny. It's not that it's tasteless or offensive or anything...it just falls flat. It falls short of being groaningly un-funny and settles into a place where you can comfortably ignore the fact that the jokes even exist.

The interface is clunky and really shows the game's roots as a PSX title. The traditional inventory-interaction of almost all adventure games is present, but calling up your inventory and interacting with objects is a bit of a pain. The most frustrating aspect of Discworld Noir is that it requires the worst kind of screen trolling (moving your mouse around the screen looking for objects with which you can interact) - the hotspots don't stand out or change color or glow in any way when you mouse over them. There is a (plain white text) popup label for each item, but they are extremely easy to miss.

The Bottom Line
Bottom line: it's no Grim Fandango, but the story is cohesive and compelling enough to keep you interested and some of the puzzles are pretty good.

Windows · by Kurt Sample (1071) · 2001

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
'no US release' ? Rola (8485) Mar 29, 2015
Awesome stuff Unicorn Lynx (181780) Feb 23, 2009

Trivia

References

  • In the middle of the game, you meet a red-haired archaeologist girl, who carries a lot of ammunition, wears shorts and is called Laredo Cronk...
  • Some of the detective things in this game are taken from Murder, My Sweet (1944), a P.I. Noir movie with Dick Powell playing Philip Marlowe (later a remake with Robert Mitchum was made, the title was renamed to Farewell, My Lovely, though). Lewton says "If I'd always knew what I said, I'd be a genius." which is exact phrase from the fore-mentioned movie. Also, there is a detective Nulty in both game and the movie, with same attitude of main character towards him.

References: Casablanca

There are plenty of references to famous noir films in Discworld Noir. Many of them allude to the classic Casablanca. For example, the game's romantic ending mirrors the ending of the film to the point of directly quoting the dialogue. Just as the heroes of the movie agree that they will "always have Paris", Lewton assures Ilsa that they will "always have Pseudopolis Hotel".

The demon pianist Samael is named after Sam, the pianist from Casablanca. There is the following dialogue in the game:

Lewton: Play it again, Sam.

Samael: You know what? No one's ever going to believe you said that.

As fans of the movie would know, the line "Play it again, Sam" was never actually said in Casablanca, but has become erroneously associated with it.

Ilsa Varberg is named after Ilsa Lund, the heroine of Casablanca. Lund and Varberg are both cities in Sweden.

Release

The game was only released in Europe because the US branch of GT Interactive had financial problems and collapsed, dashing hopes of a US release.

Awards

  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/2000 – Best Adventure in 1999

Information also contributed by Macintrash, MAT and Unicorn Lynx

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Zhentarim7.

PlayStation added by Macintrash.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Patrick Bregger.

Game added May 4, 2000. Last modified March 6, 2024.