Tails Noir: Preludes - Completed

Truly, really, super-short post today and I mean it (Maaaan!) Lots of annoying things kept getting in the way of sitting down to write so it's too late to do anything much. Still, I don't want to skip a day and luckily I have one very quick and easy option backed up, ready to go, which is that

I finished another game!

Yes! I know!  What the hell is happening?

I think I mentioned in a post a couple of days back that, having knocked off Crowns and Pawns, I might go back to another game I'd left off half-way through and try to finish that next. The game in question was Tails Noir: Preludes, a prequel to the excellent Tails Noir.

I finished the original and I could have sworn I wrote about it but there's no Label for it. Except, yes there is. Only when I played it, it was called Backbone and the prequel was called Tails: The Backbone Preludes. Both games have apparently been renamed since. (In fact, the url for the prequel on Steam still refer to the original title, although the one for the first game doesn't.)

Anyway, Backbone or Tails Noir or whatever it's calling itself today is excellent and I highly recommend it. And now I can confirm that the prequel is also very good indeed and I recommend it too.

Except I wouldn't fully recommend it to someone who hadn't played the first game. I wouldn't not recommend it - it's a complete game in its own right and I think it can be enjoyed for what it is - but it really exists mostly to explain and elaborate on the motivations, actions and backstories of characters in the earlier game. (There's also a Prologue, basically the first chapter of the main game, which is free on Steam and acts as a kind of demo.)

I don't consider much of what comes next to be a spoiler but I'll leave that thought out there just in case...

The main reason I would be a little wary of recommending TN:P as a standalone experience is that it doesn't really have an ending. Well, it has lots of endings since it's one of those games you can replay many times, making different choices to see what happens, but given that the future for all the characters is set in stone by way of the original game, all you're ever going to get with the prequel are beginnings.

Or, more likely, possibilities. It's as though you're seeing alternate timelines in the past, all  of which are going to lead inexorably to the same future. 

None of which diminishes the immediate impact of the stories you hear, all of which are very "noir" indeed. The game is not a laff riot. 

I won't go over the milieu, characters, mechanics or aesthetics again. The prequel is extremely similar, not to say identical, in all those respects to the first game and if you want to know what I thought about all of that you can read it here. The prequel has more of the sense of a series of inked vignettes than the enmeshed but ultimately coherent storylines of the older game but other than that it's very much business as usual.

Both games are fairly short in absolute terms and also exactly the same length. And I mean exactly. They each took me 4.9 hours to complete. 

That's just for a single playthrough. Many people will multiply that run time by at least as many times as there are characters, looking to find out what happens if they make different decisions along the way. 

I hardly ever play any "choices matter" games more than once, which is why I prefer "choices don't matter" games. Tails Noir: Preludes is very likely to be an exception. The moment I finished I immediately wanted to go back and replay two specific sections to handle things differently, which is very much not a reaction I usually have and a big plus point in the game's favor.

Anyway, for once I'm not going to go on at inordinate length about it. I really don't have a lot of time to post today. For once I really am going to keep it as short as I said I would. 

Having wrapped up two games I left off playing part-way through more than a year ago, I feel like I'm on a bit of a roll. I can think of another I left in a very similar position and a couple more that I started and then gave up on quite quickly. Instead of buying anything new just now, something I keep thinking about doing, I might see if I can't clear up one or two more unfinished titles first.

If so, next up is Lake. That's on Prime Gaming so I can't say exactly how many hours in I am but How Long To Beat has it at only six hours for a non-completionist run and I surely must be quite close to that already. 

Maybe I can finish it before the weekend...