While the dialogue starts off with a hiccup, too overwritten and full of Film Noir cliches in the opening section, it soon levels off and you begin to admire the quality of the writing. But while the choice of animal-headed characters seems gimmicky at first, it becomes vital as the relations between the species – insects being segregated into The Hive predators still bruised from losing the Great Meat Wars – become core to the story. It’s something that you soon come to terms with, but it was definitely an initial break in our case. Lemurs, macaws and zebras lounge around seductively, their heads effectively grafted onto smooth human bodies, with all the curves and legs that brings (there are going to be some odd sexual awakenings based on this game, for sure). You’re going to have to overcome a bit of a kink here: Chicken Police sexualises them, and it becomes a fundamental plot point as the game veers into themes of sex workers. Kerri Shale is blistering as Sonny Featherland, and he anchors everything with a gravelly stoicism. Chicken Police sounds great too, with voice actors that get the reference material. The black-and-white filter on everything is crisp and wonderfully lit, giving the experience a stylised look that is more Sin City than The Big Sleep, but stopping short of its splashes of colour and hyperactivity. Developers The Wild Gentlemen have opted for a mixed media approach, combining photographs and 3D models to create a world that feels near-photorealistic. Visually, Chicken Police – Paint it Red is slick and sensational. That’s largely it: Chicken Police – Paint it Red isn’t interested in innovating with its mechanics particularly, and instead focuses on its visuals and storytelling. The game is broken up into five of these chapters, and each ends with an Investigation, where you’ll pause to literally string together suspects and motives, in a kind of end-of-term test (it doesn’t really matter if you forgot key events: there’s no punishment for failure here, and you can trial-and-error your way through it). Your case file will thicken as you discover more from these conversations, unlocking more areas to visit from the game’s map, and progression through the chapter. As with any Detective Noir, the case begins simply, but soon doom-spirals into intrigue, violence, double-crossing and tommy gun bullets in your sedan. She wants you to both protect her and find out who’s doing this.
Into your apartment saunters a seductive goat called Deborah Ibanez (yep, a seductive goat, you’ll have to get used to it), who works for a Miss Natasha Catzenko, a cat-fatale who owns the city’s popular Czar Club and has been receiving death threats. You play Sonny Featherland, a veteran detective (and chicken) who’s 121 days from retirement and serving a suspension. Less conventional, however, is switching out humans for anthropomorphised animals (although Blacksad and Zootropolis beat them to the punch), delivering a world where species tensions are barbed, threatening to rip through society. It’s a reasonably straight Film Noir, in that it’s told in delicious black and white, lifting details from America in the ‘40s, and telling a conventional detective yarn with it. And now we have Chicken Police – Paint it Red (dear god, the title is unforgivably bad, but don’t let it put you off). You can see Noir surfacing in other genres, in examples like Blade Runner and Batman.
Like the Western, Film Noir hasn’t gone away, even though we’ve moved further and further from eras they’re based on.
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