To Hell With The Ugly

I've spent time with a lot of small literary adaptations that quietly do something unusual, and To Hell With The Ugly is one of the stranger ones to land on my desk. La Poule Noire, the French studio behind the eccentric Edgar - Bokbok in Boulzac, has turned Boris Vian's 1948 satirical novel into a point-and-click adventure set in a hypercolourful 1950s Los Angeles, and the result is one of those games that defies a single clean recommendation. The thing nobody warns you about upfront is Rock Bailey himself. He is, by design, a gorgeous, shallow young man who flirts with everyone and means none of it, and the whole world bends around his cheekbones. Reviewers have noted the friction this creates: spending a narrative adventure inside the head of someone you actively dislike is a genuine obstacle. What softens it is the slow realization that the game knows exactly what Rock is. The story is quietly building a case against beauty-worship, absurdity tucked inside a kidnapping plot involving human experimentation and the disappearance of 1950s LA's most attractive residents. Stick with it past the halfway point, and the satirical intent sharpens. The art direction alone justifies the price of admission. Rather than leaning into the smoky monochrome of traditional noir, La Poule Noire drew from the original book's illustrations to craft a pop-art world that explodes with color, fully animated cinematics, and character designs that feel like they belong on a vintage pulp paperback cover. The closest comparison in feel and jazz adoration is Genesis Noir, though this game is more grounded and less abstract. The soundtrack - all be-bop and rolling double bass - is one of those scores that seeps into ambient memory. You finish the game and the music is still running. Gameplay is a sampler platter rather than a deep dive into any single system. Investigation segments let you rotate the camera around crime scenes, look under furniture, and drag-and-drop evidence to build deductions alongside Rock's journalist partner Gary. Combat swaps into ATB-style turn-based encounters where you select attacks and then hit QTE prompts to determine whether you land, critical hit, or whiff entirely. There is also light stealth, mostly hiding behind environmental objects when goons patrol nearby. None of these systems are complex enough to carry a full game, and the stealth in particular is rudimentary. But the runtime is tight enough, somewhere around four to five hours, that no single weak system outstays its welcome before the game shifts gears again. The ending is the one real warning to attach to any recommendation. Multiple critics and players found it divisive, even genuinely unsatisfying, and if you go in expecting clean noir resolution you may feel short-changed. Whether that reflects faithfulness to Vian's absurdist source or a structural stumble is up for debate. What I can say is that everything before the final stretch is handcrafted with obvious care, from the IGF 2023 nomination for Excellence in Visual Arts down to the way each environment feels like a stage set someone dressed by hand. For a five-hour game, the attention to atmosphere is unusually high.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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