Discworld Noir

Moby ID: 1411

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Critic Reviews add missing review

Average score: 81% (based on 40 ratings)

Player Reviews

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

Very good, if derivative and cliched, adventure.

The Good
You know what? I don't even like adventure games that much. I know I've reviewed quite a few, but it's because I love the storylines and the characters. If I haven't cracked a puzzle after twenty minutes, my knuckles are white and I'm looking for a walkthrough. The second time through these games is always the best, when I vaguely remember all the solutions. If I hadn't had a walkthrough to this game I'd have bitten a chunk out of the table by now.

Discworld Noir is an homage to all those Raymond Chandler novels, all those labryinthine plots, all those "Lishen buhster! Ya lookin fa trouble?!" accents. This is both a curse and blessing, but more on that later. I do like that world though; I went into the game feeling good and I came out feeling good...ish.

Discworld Noir's biggest asset is it's script - that is, it's dialogue. There is a lot of talking in this game but it's often brilliant. Sharp, dry humour is the order of the day, with that kind of post-adolescent nuance that 'Monty Python' had that makes the Discworld books so attractive to a certain kind of teenager. Characters in the game are brilliantly realised, often appearing deceptively complex. Personal favourites include Death, whose humour is dry as a bone (ha ha!!! I'm so funny!), and Carlotta's butler, whose passive aggressive demeanour I find endlessly amusing. The voice acting is also good considering the credits imply that only four people are responsible for all the characters. Despite the sometimes irritating deliberate slowness of the delivery and the occasional hearing of the same voice for different people, this is quite a feat. Although I swear at some points in the game, Lewton's voice is replaced by another actor's.

The graphics are good, if dark. The character models are also quite impressive, though hardly original. In fact, the most original thing about Discworld Noir is the way the usual object-orientated method of puzzle solving is dropped in favour of a clues-based system. Every time your character hears something interesting in a conversation, he writes it down, and you can then ask anyone you want about it. Genuine satisfaction arises when you successfully figure something out by asking the right people about the right things. Also, half way through the game, something...happens to your character, providing another new puzzle-solving system, and one which I found very enjoyable and perhaps underused.

The Bad
I know I've already described this game as cliched and if you see this game as a parody then you may wonder how this can be so. The thing is, film noir is so unbelievably well known and ingrained into so much of what we see that even when something comes along that takes the piss, it seems unoriginal. Discworld Noir, like SO many films and television programmes, takes off 'Casablanca's' two most famous scenes. It also references Lauren Bacall telling Humphrey Bogart how to whistle in 'To Have And Have Not'. Your character, Lewton, is a complex character for a computer game, but he's existed for over half a century in film, books and television. An unshaven pathological drinker in a fedora and raincoat, one of the only guys in the town with a soul but has been left bitterly hurt by women...yadda..yadda...you KNOW the guy already. You KNOW that the woman who's leaning on his desk at the beginning is a femme fatale who is secretly no good. It appears that games don't have enough clout to create an original story style, but are instead happy to take off the styles of famous books and movies. Take "Mafia"; whilst a very fine game, the story is basically a cross between Godfather and Goodfellas, but about 1/100th as good or believable. Whilst film noir is recreated much better in Discworld Noir than the world of Italian gangsters is in Mafia, it's just been done before. I don't really consider the game a parody as it seems to take it's subject matter too seriously; it's more of an homage except it doesn't change anything. "Blade Runner" is an homage to film noir and look how original that world is (was, for it's time). This is more like a direct rip-off and the developers don't seem to care. Still, why should they? Lots of people will buy this game BECAUSE it resembles all that Raymond Chandler stuff.

Other, more actual game-related problems include...

Whilst the character models are nice and pretty, being pre-rendered, they move like puppets underwater. You can see their polished polygon arms moving in their specific routines and it is surprisingly effective to begin with due to the skill of the animators, but if you concentrate on it, it starts looking very unnatural at times. Lewton, however, is modelled in real-time and moves much more fluidly but this serves to highlight the difference between him and everyone else.

Further on the point of unoriginality, the music in this game is good but totally bland. It really got to me after a while. I love jazz, it constitutes over half of what I listen to, but Discworld Noir's soundtrack I didn't like. It's got all those soft, mysterious sounding saxophones and that subdued piano but it's got no tune and no soul. It's generic. Like a lot of the game.

The plot is always interesting but for some reason doesn't grab you. Maybe because it flies off the handle after a while and becomes convoluted, but maybe because you don't empathise with any of it. I never really understood Lewton's motives to keep investigating other than, as he says, "because too many people told me not to".

Finally, the notepad with all your clues on it becomes a real hassle when you have to turn 12 pages to find the one you want. This is primarily why I said I was glad to have a walkthrough because it can get seriously frustrating otherwise. And also, (and this one is a real crime), the game is unable to find your saved files from the second CD. So when you've got half-way through the game, from then on you'll have to eject the second CD, put in the first, load the game, load the saved file, eject the first CD, and put in the second. Unbelievable!



The Bottom Line
One of the best non-Lucasarts adventures there is. When I completed this the first time, I considered it second only to Grim Fandango. I'm always on a high after I finish something though and the flaws are more obvious this time round. The world of Discworld Noir is so familiar that it has to work damn hard to surprise you. It does a few times though, if you stick with it and overlook the twists that you were expecting since the moment the package arrived in your house.

Windows · by Shazbut (163) · 2004

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

An interesting Trilogy

The Good
Discworld Noir has great scenes and puzzles, and can leave you thinking for quite a long time, even off the computer. The characters are very funny (my favourite was MoonCalf) and very detailed. It is a very easy game to use, and it's quite interesting how you can change from Human to Wearwolf. The keyboard shortcuts also come in very handy.

The Bad
Although the characters had great personalities, and the settings were really gloomy and cool, the animations tended to be a little too edgy and "clay figure" like. Some of the puzzles were VERY hard, and some objects are very hard to find, scanning of the screen is a must.

The Bottom Line
You are a detective, who has to investigate a series of bizarre murders happening around the glum city of Anhk-Morpork. What you don't realise is that all these murders are linked somehow, and you become one of the hunted. You meet an array of characters from trolls, wearwolves, talking dogs and dwarfs, each with it's own personality and humour.

Windows · by Hilary Richardson (12) · 2003

Innovatively Uninteresting

The Good
Okay, now if I say this game is boring, then that should qualify under 'against' section. Well, it's not that boring, it's just uninteresting. And innovate at that the best it could be. It just keeps making the game more and more interesting to you, changing the plots, adding nice twists and turns, adding interesting characters, suspenseful atmosphere, but but somehow, with all that effort, it just doesn't hook me right. But otherwise, I can't say I didn't have fun at all while playing it.

Right, so, the game has been set in the world a bit different than what we are used to see when it comes to noir things. It somewhat resembles a dark creepy eerie town where you will soon learn that nothing is impossible, and nothing happens as you expect. The city's called Ankh-Morpork (I guess Ankh because it can be considered a port to some point), and for a long time there is no rasistic things going on, and I'm not refering to different color, but rather to different races. So, humans, trolls, vampires, zombies, demons, werewolves, dwarves and other... something, they all live in symbiosis more or less. Of course, with creatures like those involved, they had to make a compromise in the law book, so they had to qualify murder as non-crime. Well, not always, it depended who and where was murdered.

You, with a background story that broke your heart, are the first guy ever to try to settle in the PI waters. Counting on restless and countless murders to get some case, you opened your door to everybody with a deep pocket. It's not that there is no law at all, there are, and they're called the Watch, but they just don't prove useful when it comes to solving plots, unravelling mysteries and saving the planet, or maybe they're just not paid enough. Lewton, PI, on the other hand, has nothing else to do, so he takes any case that will help him pay the rent (oh, how cliché).

Now, good thing about this game is that is has nothing to do with any of the two "Discworld" titles that were made before it. I know, I know, I didn't notice this game for far too long just because I thought it's all from the same chalice, but it's not. First two are more childish and much alike "Simon the Sorcerer", only not as good. This one is more serious, with typical PI phrases, eerie places and a bowl of suspense.

Music in this game is rather excellent, only there is not much of it in the entire game. Either I became deaf, or this game has no more than couple of songs in the entire playing period. Well, among those little bunch, it even has a vocal one, hehehe, and for those who have manuals, there are even words and notes for it. Graphic could also be considered well done, especially since it all looks as if it's using 256 colors. Well, maybe it does, I dunno, but places, rain&storm effects, and lighting effects are rather well done for something that looks as it lacks colors. Unfortunately, I can't say much about the characters, I mean, if they wanted them to look like that, then they were good, but I always tend to have normal looking human figures. As for the werewolves, dogs, trolls, demons and gargoyles, they were excellent made.

The Bad
Sound is... well, almost terrible. And I'm refering technically only. It has noises, and that's not acceptable for such a new game. I mean, even older games like "Indy IV" or "GK I" that used *.voc files for speech were like entirely clear in the game. Anyway, if you don't make it too loud, you may be able to skip the annoyance, at least you have both speech and subtitles in the game, which, by the way, I love to see in the game. As for the characters' speech, I don't consder it much good, either. I mean, it's somehow hollow, and it somehow clearly shows as if the conversastion was made that each of the characters was talking for itself, and they just mixed speech, not even trying to spot the right balance of conversation between the two (or three).

Controls should also be better handled. I mean, it not hard to master at all, but it takes an awfully lot of time using them as they invented it. I hope they didn't try just to prolongue the game by adding that. Sure, it's commendable to play full-screen without any menues, buttons or anything around or outside the frame, but commands just seem a bit too slow. And no, my computer wasn't slow for playing this plain adventure, with 384MB of RAM and 1GHz CPU, and solid 52x LG CD-ROM this should've all worked a bit better. Well, the game is from 1999, so if we take-out the time it was in development, they probably started making it two years earlier. But hey, I'm not complaining... that much, I could play with such interface, I'm just saying I've seen much better with some other adventures. This sure beats the crap outta that sticky "Myst" interface which was sad fact to be called an interface in the first place.

On the technical side, there are two things that are rather annoying. First one is that you always need to start the game with CD #1, not matter you stopped somewhere on second CD, and that switching CDs usually exits you back into windowses by minimizing the game window, so you have to click on it again. I really don't see the point of making that, and if they programmed such a fine game, I don't think they had lack of knowledge to fix that, either. And secondly, the game doesn't have usual subdirectory in 'Programs' pop-up window where you can click uninstall icon. No siree. You need to input CD #1 again, and click uninstall form there, and then wait and wait until it reads whatever its reading from a CD first. Well, we can't have 'em all, huh? Yeah right ;)

The Bottom Line
Detective game at its best, with half included things at its worst. Good enough to make you finish it nonetheless. Can't say it's addictive, but maybe I've just played too much adventures to be impressed anymore, hehehe. But it sure beats those "Discworld" games with which it only has title in common. And no matter what I said above for and against, I still think this is a pretty fine game, and glad to paid for it 35 bucks, even though so recently... ouch! :)

Windows · by MAT (240759) · 2012

Dark, atmospheric and ironically funny

The Good
Discworld Noir's is a great detective mystery with more unexpected twists than your average rollercoaster. The plot is great, and never predictable, and although Pratchett himself didn't write much of it, his humour shines throughout. It isn't slapstick comedy as in the first 2 Discworld games, but that doesn't mean it's not there - sarcasm and irony are used often, if you pay attention.

Graphically, DW Noir is simply amazing, one of the most gorgeous and atmospheric adventure games there are. And of course, who could forget the sound? Mellow jazz is usually played, and the sound effects are top-notch too.

The Bad
Um. Pass.

The Bottom Line
Absolutely amazing. Play it if you're a Pratchett fan, or an adventure fan, or if you just like having fun.

Windows · by curacao (283) · 2001

Contributors to this Entry

Critic reviews added by Patrick Bregger, kelmer44, Gonchi, Jeanne, Scaryfun, mikewwm8, Plok, vedder, Alsy, Tim Janssen, ti00rki, deepcut, Klaster_1, jean-louis, Emmanuel de Chezelles, Karsa Orlong, lights out party, Parf.