Blacksad Under the Skin

My first hour with Blacksad: Under the Skin had me completely sold: a hard-boiled feline detective, an angry rhino smashing through his office door, a suspicious hanging over a boxing ring, and a jazz soundtrack that sets the mood without effort. This is a third-person adventure where you walk crime scenes gathering evidence, have tense dialogue exchanges with a cast of anthropomorphic 1950s New York characters, and periodically trigger a Deduction Mode that asks you to string facts together into logical conclusions. When that system clicks, and you feel the pieces of the case snap together inside Blacksad's head, it genuinely delivers the detective fantasy. The story itself, an original case set in the same universe as the Eisner-winning Spanish comic series by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido, holds up across its roughly ten-hour runtime. There are twists, there are loan sharks, there are six possible endings, and the corruption at the center of the boxing world feels appropriately grimy and grown-up. Barry Johnson's voice performance as Blacksad is a standout, conveying weary charisma across timed dialogue choices that the game tracks and references later, making conversations feel like they have real stakes. The mechanics beyond dialogue are where things get messier. Movement is handled via direct character control rather than traditional point-and-click, and the result is sluggish navigation through scenes where hotspots require Blacksad to stand at precise angles before they register. There is no command to highlight all active interaction points, so expect to shuffle the detective in slow circles around a room hoping a prompt appears. The QTEs that handle fight sequences range from fine to genuinely broken, with inconsistent timing windows that felt like a hardware problem until I confirmed they were not. At launch these issues were severe enough to earn mixed critical scores even while Steam players, many returning after patches, pushed the rating to Very Positive territory. The gap between critic reception and player reception is real, and the context matters: playing a patched version today is meaningfully better than the day-one chaos. Visually the game is uneven in a way that reflects its budget. Blacksad himself is beautifully modeled, but secondary character faces can look stiff or clip during the lengthy conversation scenes that are half the game. The boxing gym, Sam's Diner, and a handful of other early locations nail the watercolor-and-hard-lines feel of the source material. Later environments look more rushed. The jazz and period crooner tracks, however, are consistently good, and they do a lot of heavy lifting for atmosphere. The built-in Progress feature, which generates a comic book summary of your choices as you play, is one of the cleverest recap systems I have encountered in an adventure game and feels like a genuine love letter to the source material. Who should play this: anyone who enjoyed Wolf Among Us or L.A. Noire and can tolerate some rough movement controls for the sake of a story that earns its mature rating. Fans of the original comic series will find Pendulo's handling of the characters respectful and sometimes inspired. Newcomers to the world should have no trouble following the original story. Who should skip it: players with zero patience for fiddly hotspot hunting or QTEs that occasionally refuse to register input. The game does not have enough action to satisfy players looking for gameplay variety, and the pacing drags in the middle chapters. But the core mystery, the protagonist, and the atmosphere are genuinely well-constructed for what is essentially an AA noir adventure with real ambition behind it.

Alex · Scout Team

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