#CHICKEN POLICE PAINT IT RED SKIN#
#CHICKEN POLICE PAINT IT RED CODE#
#CHICKEN POLICE PAINT IT RED SERIES#

Taking place in a noir-infused world of human-sized animals (not entirely unlike the hit 'depressed horse' Netflix series Bojack Horseman), this is a brilliantly-written and joyously rich piece of narrative gaming, trafficking in hard-edged detective noir tropes but with a marvellous sense of humour, strong characters and a grand sense of place. and have brought us the tremendously-named Chicken Police - Paint it RED!, a visual novel with adventure game elements that puts the noble gallus gallus at the very top of the pecking order. Thankfully, developers The Wild Gentlemen saw the potential of a poultry P.I.

They'd be perfect detectives, if not for the small obstacle of their inability to communicate in any meaningful way. They have that look in their eye, the slightly disdainful squint of someone who knows what you did and why you did it.

#CHICKEN POLICE PAINT IT RED CODE#

Handy Games provided us with a Chicken Police – Paint it RED! Switch code for review purposes.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)Ĭhickens know things. Chicken Police is an off-kilter approach to a well-worn genre, but it’s so well done that it’s worth playing if you’re any kind of fan of adventure games or visual novels. Instead, you notice that this is just a very good game. There’s something incredibly disconcerting about seeing an impala’s head on a woman’s body, or even seeing porcupines in raincoats, but it’s a mark of how well the game is made that it’s not long before you don’t even notice it. Just about the only issue I had with Chicken Police was the initial weirdness of seeing animal heads on human bodies. It’s supported by some very good voice acting, with everyone involved clearly being a fan of films like The Big Sleep and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Chicken Police was clearly written by someone who loves Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, because the plot - with its double-crossing dames and no-good hoodlums - is straight out of a hard-boiled mystery novel. You interrogate suspects, you investigate crime scenes, you carefully build up your case - there’s not as much action (the odd minigame notwithstanding), but the basics are all there. To some extent, the game is kind of like LA Noire, if that game had been populated entirely by anthropomorphized animals. It’s somewhere between a visual novel and a point and click adventure, as you follow private detective Sonny Featherland and his partner, Marty MacChicken, in a hard-boiled noir that takes them around the city of Clawville, investigating a case and meeting the denizens of that city’s seedy underbelly. More than that, though, Chicken Police is just a well-made game. Simply by virtue of the fact it runs fairly smoothly, Chicken Police has a leg up on its competition. Blacksad required patching just to get it to a point where it didn’t crash constantly, and even after that it struggled to do anything without painfully long load times and constant stuttering.

To some extent, this can be chalked up to the fact it’s not a broken, buggy mess.

#CHICKEN POLICE PAINT IT RED SKIN#

Now that I’ve played both Blacksad: Under the Skin and Chicken Police – Paint it RED!…well, I still don’t know if that’s enough to call it a whole genre, but it’s at the very least a subgenre.Īnd within that subgenre, it’s pretty clear that Chicken Police is the vastly superior of the two games. If you’d asked me a couple of years ago whether “film noir, but with animals” was a genre, I would’ve thought you were crazy.

Chicken police paint it red