The Escapist Goes Dark

I have a dark spot in my soul reserved for love of the noir genre. The hard boiled detectives stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon inspired countless books, and detective comics. Doyle and Hammett may have passed on, but their legacy lives on in book, films and video games. The latest issue of the Escapist, “Dark and Stormy Night” plumbs the depths of noir in games and their place in the industry.

In “Girlfriend, Rat,” Russ Pitts interviews Swedish game designer Jonas Ferry and gets his input on his noir title, One Can Have Her. Anthony Burch praises the nonlinear noir game The Last Express and takes a look at the genre as a whole in “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”. In “The Illuminated One,” Kieron Gillen highlights the importance of lighting as a mechanism in next-gen games. Allen Varney approaches the world of party games and exposes a potentially untapped segment of the game market in “Murder Parties.” And in “The Thin Man,” Shannon Drake delves into the world of Sleuth.

I’m especially looking forward to reading “Murder Parties”. We often get together with our friends who are mostly gamers and board games, card games and party video games are always a hit. We’ve enjoyed the Call of Cthulhu and the 221-b Baker St. Sherlock Holmes board games and I can imagine that our group would really enjoy a noir mystery party game. There is nothing like trying to discover who among you is a murderer.