Film Noir has never looked quite so bright. To Hell With The Ugly is a 1950s set point & click adventure game that also features turn-based combat and… a little bit of detective work.
I don’t know anything about Boris Vian, his pen name Vernon Sullivan, or the book that directly inspired To Hell With The Ugly, but it sounds like a ride. Its most commonly found description online declares that it “recounts the tale of Rock Bailey, a dashing 19-year-old lad determined to hold onto his virginity amidst the postwar jazz-club nightlife of Los Angeles-a resolution challenged by the machinations of the demented Doctor Markus Schutz, who has decided to breed beautiful human beings and found a colony in which ugliness is a genetic crime.” A little more probing reveals a world filled with “fist fights, car chases, kidnappings, and murders” — surely the ‘Four Elements’ of Film Noir.
To Hell With The Ugly begins with Rock waking up after being drugged and kidnapped outside his local jazz club. His memory is fuzzy and he can’t remember much of the night and so the game’s first objectives are for you to get back into the club, reconnect with your friends and find out if anybody knows anything. I played through the first chapter while at WASD earlier in the year and really enjoyed myself, not just because of the distinct, orange and red-led visual style but because of some of the great character writing. It’s clear that La Poule Noire are fully invested in the setting, as uncanny as it might seem.
The first screen has you moving between a handful of characters, chatting and solving some simple, point-and-click style conversational and fetching puzzles along the way. A couple of the characters, including the taxi driver who starts out as a saviour to the freshly conscious protagonist, feel built up enough that they’ll feature in later chapters, and once you do get past that first screen then, well, a lot of new systems are added in.
Before you get into the Zooty Slammer you’re accosted by a buffoon looking for a fight. This, and the fight that follows immediately afterwards, serves as your tutorial and introduction to the defending, attacking and special attack systems of To Hell With The Ugly‘s turn-based combat. The animation in combat looks great, and while the fight menus themselves aren’t anything to write home about, it feels as though you’ll be joined by others later, and that has the potential to really change things up.
Inside the Zooty Slammer, though, it all takes a big twist. There are many more people to talk to, you get an introduction to Rocky’s gang of friends, who are also incredibly memorable and really seem like a group who we’ll learn a lot more about as events continue to unfold, and then… you wind up having to start solving a murder. Somebody is dead and you can question everybody to find out more, you also get the chance to snoop around the murder scene, looking for hidden clues which then come up in conversation later on, and then again later when you meet the police detective who you’ll clearly be half racing-against and half working-with throughout the rest of the story.
I really enjoyed my time with the demo, and it ended at point where the story was really ramping up; I really wanted to keep playing. The Point & Click genre is one that’s perfectly compatible with detective-style games (just look at Discword Noir, and most of WadjetEye’s fantastic games catalogue), but To Hell With The Ugly‘s style and setting really, really make it feel like a great fit.
To Hell With The Ugly is expected to release on Windows PC & Mac later this year.
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