Cyber Noir Stories: The Trunk
Cyber Noir Stories: The Trunk is a mixture of a classic point and click adventure and a decision-driven visual novel.
Slip into the role of Eve, a tough private investigator in the fictional city of New Cologne. On the one hand, the story lives from exploring Eve’s environment and interacting with it. On the other hand, the course of the story depends on what decisions Eve makes over time.
The Trunk aims to combine the puzzles und exploration of classic adventure games, the importance of making big decisions and the art of creating an immersive experience through the power of narrative.
Explore your surroundings! In order to solve puzzles, you need to be on the lookout for items that will help you in your mission. Sometimes you have to combine several items in your inventory before they can be of any use to you.
Use your communication skills like a real detective. Good conversations can bring light into some darkness – or influence the end of the story!
The special thing about The Trunk is the combination of the classic PnC Adventure look with the expressive dialogues in the Visual Novel style.
Sparingly placed Quick Time Events provide the necessary action in the plot like salt in a soup. Sometimes it’s not just about the head, but also about the reflexes!
Often there is more than one way to the goal. However, it does matter which one you choose. The Trunk comes with several different endings, so choose wisely!
Steam User 1
Let's start with the most important part: I've just finished the game and I feel satisfyingly entertained. I was looking for a quick dose of cyberpunk and point & click adventure and I certainly got my money's worth. Everything else I say should be viewed against that background, it's minor niggling and only intended to encourage the creator to create more and even better games in the future!
As a programmer who has dabbled in game-making myself I know first-hand the difficulties of making suitable art and I think the solution of having pre-rendered backgrounds and cel-shaded characters on top works surprisingly well, there's the usual issues with walkable areas and proper z-layering, but nothing I found too annoying.
The game is fully voiced and I applaud leaning into the VAs german accents by setting the game in Germany; However a lot of the minor character voices are synthetic (so probably "AI", but maybe one of the older voice synths) and they neither work particularly well, nor do I like seeing too much "AI art" (or something easily mistaken for it). I think the game would've been better served by simply not voicing those characters, plenty of adventures have taken that path before!
As for the storyline it's certainly suitably cyberpunk, though the ending is not to my personal taste in the genre. There are a few moments where NPCs are ridiculously dense and some where their personality seems to have gone through a big shift (Though it was telegraphed), including some lampshading of Bond Villain Stupidity only to do it anyway. There were a few moments where the PCs do things I would not have chosen, but I feel those were all well in-character; Yelling at the screen because the character is being reckless is par for the course, I think.