Noice - Itch Game of the Week

A little cinematography goes a long way

Noice is a game by Henning Steinbock and can be found at time of writing at this page.

From it’s opening moments Noice is disorienting. As you can see above the game’s graphics are made up of a bunch of white points that come together and make up three dimensional objects. Those points can be distorted, as you can see at the game’s title screen they are stretched and pulled in a ripple effect like you’d see on the surface of a pond. It’s somewhat of a nauseating effect that keeps the player from settling into the game, an effect that prevents the player from grounding themselves.

Noice then carries this feeling through into the game proper. The most telling example is the game’s extremely exaggerated camera angles. The game can rapidly shift from a traditional (yet very tight) third person action camera angle to one which frames a doorway instead of the player. After that the player find themselves with a top down, fixed camera view akin to early 3D games such as Resident Evil. Then a box is dramatically framed in dutch angles and so on and so forth. It gives the game a real sense of fluidity that a more neutral camera wouldn’t be able to achieve. But it’s a disorienting fluidity that plays well into Noice’s somewhat horror vibe.

Just the fact that Noice sits askew on the screen is such a distressing trick. While the large black bar on the right is used as a kind of inventory and thus serves a purpose, it goes a long way to make the game seem like it’s resisting against the player.

I’m not sure Noice is finished, I can’t get past a moment that asks the player to “drive”. I’m not sure there’s any more game past that, it might simply be a little unfinished jam project. If that is in fact the end the game is only a couple minutes long. But it’s certainly cool for what it is.

Noice was the game of the week for January 29th, 2018.