Nine Noir Lives

The point-and-click adventure never actually died. It just got small. After Telltale’s collapse took the “cinematic adventure” template down with it, the genre retreated to the place it came from — tiny teams, hand-drawn backgrounds, Adventure Game Studio and its descendants, a few thousand devoted buyers. Nine Noir Lives is what that scene looks like when someone takes it seriously.

Silvernode Games is two people. Two. And what they shipped on September 7, 2022 for $19.99 is dozens of hand-painted screens, a large fully voiced cast, an enormous script, an original jazz-noir score, and a lengthy achievements list. Do the arithmetic on that. Studios with twenty-person credit rolls ship less.

You play Cuddles Nutterbutter, a private investigator in Meow Meow Furrington, a city of talking bipedal cats where a routine favor from the Police Chief metastasizes into a murder that could shatter the truce between two crime families, the Montameeuws and the Catulets. If you groaned at those names, this game is not going to stop. If you smiled, you’re the target market and Silvernode knows exactly where you live.

Market positioning is the honest problem here. The game sits at a Very Positive rating on Steam across a small review sample, while Metacritic lands at 78. That gap is the story. Near-universal approval from an audience that wouldn’t fill a lecture hall, and a cooler, more scattered critic verdict — the classic signature of a genre piece. It satisfies the people who came for the genre and leaves everyone else checking their watch. This is not a crossover hit. It was never engineered to be one. It’s a specialist product built with more craft than most generalist ones, and it deserves to be judged on that basis — then held to it.

• The lick verb: Alongside look, talk and use, you can lick nearly everything in the world. It’s the game’s comic engine and, more surprisingly, a legitimate puzzle input.
• Two-cat party: Free switching between Cuddles and assistant Tabby Marshmallow, each able to reach people and places the other can’t — access-gating in the Day of the Tentacle tradition.
• Full voice cast: A large cast and an enormous script, all performed. Not a “key scenes only” compromise.
• Dozens of hand-painted screens: No tilesets, no asset flips, no procedural filler. Every room drawn.
• Fair-play puzzle design: Difficult without moon logic. Combinations resolve to reasons, not to lucky clicks.
• Original jazz-noir score: Written for the game, not licensed from a library.

The Verb Is the Whole Argument

Here’s what makes this game interesting to anyone who thinks about design: modern adventure games subtract verbs. The entire post-2010 evolution of the genre has been toward the single smart cursor — one click, context-sensitive, the game decides whether you’re looking or grabbing. It reduced friction. It also flattened the medium. When the game picks the verb, the player stops forming intentions and starts sweeping the screen for hotspots.

Silvernode went the other way and added one. That’s a contrarian bet, and it works for a specific reason: licking is a verb that only makes sense in this world, so every use of it is characterization. A human detective licking a doorknob is a bug report. A cat doing it is Tuesday. The verb generates jokes because it’s absurd and generates puzzle solutions because it’s diegetic, and those two functions reinforce each other instead of competing. It’s a small idea executed with total conviction — the difference between a gimmick and a mechanic is whether the designers trusted it enough to build puzzles on top, and they did.

The Gameplay Loop

Structurally, this is orthodox to the point of reverence. Explore a screen, exhaust the hotspots, collect the objects, combine them badly, combine them correctly, unlock the next conversation, repeat. There is no crafting tree, no timer, no stealth section apologizing for itself in chapter six. Silvernode identified the LucasArts template as a finished technology and built on it rather than around it.

The fair-play puzzle standard mostly holds, and that matters more than it sounds. “Challenging but fair” is easy to claim and brutally hard to hit, because the failure state isn’t a bad puzzle — it’s a player who stops trusting the game and starts brute-forcing the inventory grid against every hotspot. Nine Noir Lives mostly keeps you reasoning. Mostly. The design leans on a handful of steps obscure enough to invite brute-forcing, and that’s the kind of friction a small team’s first mystery can afford to trim.

The character-swapping is where the design earns the most pushback. By the game’s own description, Cuddles and Tabby exist so each can “reach places and people the other cannot.” That is access-gating, not interaction. It’s a lock-and-key system wearing a two-protagonist costume. The high-water mark for this mechanic is still Day of the Tentacle, where characters in different centuries acted on each other through causal chains you had to hold in your head simultaneously — a genuinely different kind of thinking. Here, the swap is mostly a question of who rather than how, and the game asks it often enough that shuttling between two cats reads as an errand rather than a puzzle. It’s competent. It isn’t the interlocking machine the setup implies.

Pacing: The Real Cost

Every criticism of this game converges on one point, and it’s the right one. The mystery meanders. The world-building is stronger than the plot it’s carrying — Meow Meow Furrington is a better creation than the murder that happens in it — and the middle stretch loses the thread of why you are doing any of this while the jokes keep landing.

Full voice acting makes it worse, not better. This is the counterintuitive tax nobody warns indie teams about: recorded dialogue cannot be skimmed. In a text adventure, a long conversation costs a fast reader forty seconds. Voiced, that same conversation is a performance you either sit through or click past, and clicking past voiced dialogue feels like throwing away the thing you paid for. With a script this enormous, the pressure to use it is enormous, and Silvernode used it. Several conversations restate a joke they already landed, then land it again. A ruthless editorial pass — cutting a meaningful chunk of the script — would have produced a tighter, better, and paradoxically funnier game. The material is good. There’s just more of it than the story can hold up.

The art is the reason to buy this. Dozens of hand-painted screens with a consistent palette — warm sodium light, wet-street blues, the deliberate murk of a genre that was invented partly to hide cheap sets. Silvernode understands that noir is a lighting philosophy, not a hat, and the backgrounds carry mood even when the script is coasting. Character designs commit to the bit: these are cats built like people, drawn with enough anatomical confidence that the sight gags read instantly.

The score is the underrated half. An original jazz-noir soundtrack is an expensive choice for a two-person team, and the alternative — a stock library loop — would have undercut every frame of that art. Instead the music does what a score is supposed to do: it tells you the tone is sincere even when the writing is silly. That tension is the whole appeal.

Technically, this is a 2D game of modest scope, and the design is light on hardware by nature — no shader-heavy spectacle, no sprawling install. The UI stays out of the way, which is the highest compliment you can pay an adventure interface: a verb set this small only works if it’s always visible and never in the path of the art.

Steam is effectively the only storefront that matters here, and it’s the game’s home. Mouse and keyboard is the native language of this genre and it shows. Point-and-click wants a cursor: precise hotspot targeting, fast screen sweeps, instant verb selection. Anything else is translation. On a handheld, a trackpad is the least-bad substitute, but a stick-driven cursor on a hotspot hunt where the targets are the size of a keyhole is a compromise by design — check the current Deck compatibility rating before committing to that as a primary way to play.

The achievement list is worth flagging as design, not decoration. In an adventure game, it doubles as a soft completion map, telling you the optional interactions exist without telling you what they are. Given a world built around licking things, that’s a productive nudge toward the content most players would otherwise walk past.

Nine Noir Lives is a specialist’s game made by specialists, and it should be graded on how well it serves the people it was built for — and for them, it delivers real craft. The art is beautiful, the score is real, and the lick verb is a charming design decision. Adding to the LucasArts verb set instead of stripping it down took nerve, and the payoff justifies the risk.

But the flaws are not the good kind of failure, and they add up. The murder plot really does sag, the script really does need a trim, and the two-character system promises an interlocking machine it never quite builds. For genre devotees those are tolerable costs; for most players they’re the whole experience. We rate it a mixed recommendation — easy to admire, hard to recommend broadly.

What lingers is the ratio. Two people, a hand-painted city, an enormous voiced script, an original score, and a new verb. Some studios with a hundred times the headcount shipped less that year and charged more for it. Admire the craft, savor the world, and forgive the case for wandering — if you’re the kind of player who can.