Nirvana Noir, Feral Cat Den’s surrealist neo-noir adventure about parallel universes, is now fully-funded on Kickstarter, and is barrelling towards its stretch goals. After a brief taster of the game via LudoNarraCon 2024 on Steam, its success feels very well-earned – and should spell greater things to come for this sequel.
Following on from the events of Genesis Noir, Nirvana Noir sees our protagonist No Man traversing dual universes defined by a catastrophic event – one universe is known as the Black Rapture, the other is the Constant Testament. One version of No Man is tasked with building a clocktower monument to the skies, while the other must infiltrate a strange, hyper-coloured cult. Both work across dimensions to stop an event called the Bigger Bang.
“A watchmaker who stared into his future and saw the Big Bang – a cosmic gunshot aimed at his lover and the birth of a new universe. No Man was faced with an impossible choice: to travel through a dying universe in order to save his lover, or walk away into the lonesome night. No Man chose the impossible. No Man chose to live a double life.”
Read: Nirvana Noir preview – An abstract visual feast
In this surreal adventure, you will travel both worlds, encountering all manner of strange and bizarre circumstances. Your interrogation of a butcher will turn into a sausage-making wordplay mini-game. Finding a light bulb for your clocktower involves a puzzle of logic, wits, and a giant statue.
What is most exciting about Nirvana Noir is its devotion to defying convention. Even in the game’s LudoNarraCon 2024 demo, the bones of these ideas were clear. Nirvana Noir requires you to be clever and inventive – to investigate your surrounds, and to understand every part of the game as connected. Dialogue boxes can be wielded as weapons, and a conversation can be a war, as the game unravels a complex, emotionally-charged story about love, loss, and the universe.
All this to say, Nirvana Noir is a game worth supporting – and not only because I personally want to see what Feral Cat Den’s planned stretch goals are, and how they’ll add to the game. We need more stunning, creatively-minded games out there, and in tougher economic times, smaller developers rely on the support of their audience base. Nirvana Noir deserves a chance to realise its full potential – and with greater support, it can achieve even more than this goal.
