Tails Noir (Xbox Series X)

It’s easy to get wrapped up in a game’s conclusion and let it change how you felt about the game in general. It could have been an excellent experience until a weak end makes you suddenly declare the entire game was mediocre, but while some story-based games do need to ensure they have a proper follow-through, a game is more than just its final few moments. Tails Noir (which was originally named Backbone at the time of this review’s publication) ends up in an odd situation though, this detective narrative starting off with more to it than just the plot before it thins down and drastically changes its direction well before the finale comes. Taking only a few hours to complete it also ends up feeling like a story that isn’t fully told in regards to both plot paths it attempts to follow, so finding the measure of its quality ends up a more complex task than simply saying its ending is unsatisfying.

 

Tails Noir begins with a good deal of promise, set in an enclosed city where humanoid animals live together but hardly in harmony. Certain animals like apes sit high atop the societal food chain and a culture of prejudice presses other creature types like rodents into working class jobs in poor conditions. While the characters you will speak with in Tails Noir are assuredly the animals they seem to be, their problems are unnervingly human, tales of desperation, corruption, and unfairness infecting this somewhat bleak world. You are Howard Lotor, a raccoon who is trying to make a living as a private detective, but the crushing weight of the world is certainly pressing down on your shoulders. You’re not alone in your work at least, an amicable beaver named Anatoly being both your taxi driver and a bright light of optimism as he drives you around town and a fox author named Renee providing help as your latest case takes an unexpected turn. Originally employed to investigate a potentially unfaithful otter, Howard stumbles across something darker and further reaching than he could have ever expected, his attention quickly turning towards this new, far more important matter. It’s not so simple as him wanting to do what is right either, the jaded detective unsure if he even has the stomach or sense to even work on this more serious matter, but he sticks with it, starting to learn more about the underside of the city while he hopes he can achieve at least some meaningful change with his work.

In the game’s early moments, Tails Noir does a wonderful job setting its tone. The city is grungy but feels lived in, meticulous pixel art adding plenty of minor details and the buildings you pass feel like more than mere facades. Someone might have their window open as they idly live life, there being no interaction with these people but it helps build a picture of a living city. In general, the setting of Tails Noir gets a lot of interesting build-up, the map you can look at in Howard’s apartment piquing your curiosity before you visit the important districts that don’t all lean into the rainswept city street aesthetics that kick things off and set a noir tone. A great deal of thought was put into how this city operates and there are some people you can interact with whose purpose is just to build up the personality of a part of town. With the stakes of Howard’s new investigation basically being the state of animal society, you are given a clearer picture into how people suffer while also not lazily painting anyone even mildly affluent as beyond hope. It’s a complicated town hosting a complicated case, and had Tails Noir stuck to the major focus on traveling to different parts of this city to unravel the truth that will shake it up, it would definitely be easy to praise the game formerly known as Backbone for the artistry of its backgrounds and the well established world it constructs.

 

However, the game’s first chapter feels quite different from the others. When you’re just starting out, you do have to put some actual legwork into getting clues and finding your way to places you aren’t welcome. If you need to get into a club, there are a few options for ways to get past the bouncer. Later, you can choose how you want to play a rivalry between a rude news stand owner and a plucky young boy selling snacks illegally to get what you need to continue your investigation. Even when you’re exploring an indoor space, sneaking by people who would raise the alarm if they see you becomes an important element, it often an easy bit of sneaking with the immediate chance to restart if you fail, but using distractions or picking your moment adds a little life to the investigation. There’s even a fairly good puzzle involved in figuring out a key code, but all these elements that could make for a thrilling detective adventure start to bleed away once you learn what the game’s main story is going to be about.

Early on Tails Noir does have you making dialogue choices that can influence how things unfold even though the narrative’s path overall is determined to unfold in certain ways. Some of the things you say during a conversation are mostly just to build up your own version of Howard, the player able to decide if he’s hopeful, snarky, or negative in response to things to help build up the personality you find fitting. This can influence some actual progress as well, like whether you try to treat a shopkeeper you’re grilling for info nicely or if you feel you need to get rough with someone to get the truth. However, more and more the actual impact and variety in these dialogue choices starts to wane. You can still decide how Howard reacts to things, but you’re often just talking your way through the action that is going to reach its destination regardless of your input. It’s never completely rid of some more meaningful interactions where the outcome could split despite not having wide reaching ramifications, but soon the story shifts from its intriguing main track onto something that starts to deemphasize a lot of the interesting elements at play. A lot of the work put into establishing the society and even those moments where you might review clues with Renee to better ensure there’s a good understanding of the investigation at hand end up feeling for naught though as this focus starts to get shoved aside in favor of the narrative taking on a new direction.

 

While Tails Noir’s story shift still has its roots in the investigation you were engaging with, it also starts to lose its touch as many of the plot threads become irrelevant or become confused by plot twists that don’t have the time to properly show their importance or implications. Rather than exploring the tale it was telling, Tails Noir gets wrapped up in its new direction, one that doesn’t even culminate into something satisfying as the game’s story ends without resolution to many of its original questions or even the new ones it has brought up with its tonal shift. If Tails Noir had continued on after then this new side of the narrative could be better weaved into the work you were doing beforehand, but in its effort to have dramatic swerves it ends up throwing out a lot of its most compelling elements. Themes are tossed aside since you no longer are given the means to explore or experience them and Tails Noir starts puttering around trying to tie sloppy ribbons on certain aspects of the story so that it can at least claim to have not cut off too early. Your actions during this section feel like they’re just pushing forward towards an unclear direction, effective somewhat because Howard himself is disoriented by the change-up, but you end up shambling to a final destination that feels like it clips the story short rather than expanding on ideas done earlier in the material. It is not a matter of deliberate bleak implications that take prominence in this later but still decently long portion but that so much of the character work and world-building is lost in the drop-off into a less compelling and sloppily explored direction.

THE VERDICT: Tails Noir begins with gorgeous hand-drawn pixel art in a world that gradually establishes its society and people well, your actions as Detective Howard having some variety to them as you engage in some clever investigation work. From there though the decline begins, your choices becoming more a means of guiding Howard’s reactions to the heavy case he’s found himself tangled up in, but it’s not just a matter of focusing the spotlight more on the narrative. Soon the game becomes less focused on carefully establishing its world and story, rushing through swerves and introducing a shift in the plot that feels like it squanders the work the early game put in. You spend a good amount of time marching forward without much meaningful input through this final portion as well, hoping that it will provide some payoff to what’s been established, only for the game formerly known as Backbone to go out on a whimper that seems focused more on tone than actual substance.

 

And so, I give Tails Noir for Xbox Series X…

A BAD rating. Tails Noir’s dramatic turn away from where it put all its work towards a new direction didn’t have to sink the ship. There are even a few efforts after the big shakeup that do try to provide some connection to the main mystery, but the answers become confused as they are out of focus and you’re presented information that feels weak since it isn’t given context or lacks the build up to really sell it. Tails Noir feels like the deeper in you get, the more apparently rushed its development became, the game slicing away ideas like puzzle-solving and sneaking around in favor of just pushing you through its waning concepts. It’s not such a sharp decline that the game feels like it’s fully lost its way, but the game that so meticulous crafted its environmental art stops putting enough heart into its story to make it feel worthy of being backed up by such sights. Had Tails Noir better married its two major directions it could have still carried on with its tone and messages, but it drops things off with a finale that raises less interesting questions than the investigation it abandoned. Perhaps a sequel could try and clean things up one day, build up the game’s later moments to better fit into the plot and continue to build on all that early work to establish a setting and society. Instead it feels like the game is constantly losing steam, and rather than clinging to an effective opener, it can only sustain the story so far before it becomes more important to acknowledge the ineffective direction it went in.

 

Tails Noir was supposedly in development for about five years, but while a long development time could mean it had room to be worked on, it can also mean that the project wasn’t coming together and things had to be shed in order to get the game out before it development became a greater quagmire. The game’s opening gets so much attention, perhaps too much time spent on this proof of concept before the follow-through proved more daunting since it is easier to plant fascinating seeds than it is to tend them carefully so they truly bloom. Tails Noir ends up confused about its own meaning as it can’t spend the right amount of time lingering on ideas of societal divide, systemic prejudice, and the true power of an individual voice, especially since it drops so many of these ideas and themes only to pay them a bit of rushed lip service along its new, less captivating path. Tails Noir’s narrative spine could have integrated the same ending and made it more effective if it bothered to better meld the story that came before into its muddled later portions. While it has a pretty face, the rest of its form is too loosely defined and so that backbone is left without the skeleton it needs to create a full-bodied narrative.