Eliot Ness put Al Capone in prison. In Blues and Bullets, he runs a diner.
That is the hook A Crowd of Monsters built its five-episode noir around, and it is a good one. The developer shipped the first two episodes in July 2015 and March 2016, then shut down in 2016. Three episodes never came. What exists is a strange, handsome, unfinished thing — a detective story told in monochrome with occasional bursts of color, built on clue-hunting, witness-matching and shooting sections, and carried almost entirely by Doug Cockle’s voice work as Ness.
It scores 7.1 out of 10. That number is the published critic aggregate across eight outlets, and it is the right landing spot for a game this specific and this incomplete. The parts that work are genuinely striking. The parts that don’t are structural, and no patch was ever coming.
Trailer, via ACrowdofMonsters.
A Diner Called Blues and Bullets
The premise inverts the history it borrows. Ness is a retired cop now, running a diner under the game’s own title. Santa Esperanza, the city he once cleaned up, has degenerated into what the game describes as a cesspit of corruption. He wanted to spend his remaining days there, not thinking too hard about any of it.
Then someone tells him Al Capone needs his help. Capone’s granddaughter has been kidnapped. His former nemesis is the only man he trusts to get her back.
That is a sharp piece of alt-history construction. The man who jailed Capone becomes the man Capone calls. The game does not need to explain why the trust runs that direction — it just needs the two of them in a room, and it knows it.
Doug Cockle and John Guerrasio
Cockle voices Ness. Guerrasio voices Capone. The supporting cast is deep for an episodic adventure: Tom Clarke Hill as Milton, Jules De Jong as Delphine Dockers, Joseph May as Osmond Burke, Laila Pyne as Alice and the Little Girl, Kerry Shale as Dickinson, Colin Stinton as Jim Dockers, Bill Roberts as Nikolai Ivankov.
The Little Boy role changed hands between episodes — Jules De Jong in episode one, Alexa Kahn in episode two. That is a small detail, but it tells you how the production was running: a cast assembled across two episodes, with a recasting already logged before the studio closed.
Cockle is the spine of it. Ness is a man who has already done the one thing he is famous for, and the game is interested in what is left of him afterward. That is a better use of the character than another Untouchables story would have been.
Clues, Body Parts, and Witnesses
The gameplay loop is investigation. The player searches for clues to find leads. Clues include mutilated body parts. Clues can be matched to witnesses.
That last mechanic is the one worth defending. Matching a clue to a witness is a small act of reasoning — the game asks you to hold two pieces of information and decide they belong together. It is not a puzzle box. It is closer to the feeling of a detective deciding he believes someone.
Interacting with other characters plays a large part too. There are shooting sections as well, which is where the game is thinnest. An adventure game that wants you to think about who is lying does not obviously need a gunfight, and Blues and Bullets never makes a strong case that it does.
Monochrome With Tints of Color
The narrative is told in monochrome with occasional tints of color. That is the game’s signature, and it holds up. A diner, a rainy street, a body — all of it rendered in grey, with color arriving only when it means something.
It is the kind of choice that could read as a gimmick and doesn’t, because it is applied consistently across both episodes. The game looks like a noir and moves like one. Third-person perspective, single player, no compromises on the presentation.
The genres it stacks — adventure, fantasy, thriller, historical, mystery — are more than the game can carry. Fantasy is doing very little work here. The historical and mystery strands are the ones actually holding the thing up.
The Release Schedule That Stopped
Here is what shipped, and when.
| Episode | Release |
|---|---|
| Episode 1 | July 2015 |
| Episode 2 | March 2016 |
| Episode 3 | Never released |
| Episode 4 | Never released |
| Episode 5 | Never released |
The developer ceased operations in 2016. The remaining three episodes will likely never be released. That is not a delay. That is an ending.
Blues and Bullets is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux. It is a five-episode game with two episodes in it.
What the Two Episodes Get Right
Ranked by what actually holds up:
- The central relationship. Ness and Capone, nemesis to ally, is the reason to play this.
- Doug Cockle’s performance as Ness. He carries a retired man who thought he was done.
- The monochrome presentation with color used sparingly.
- Clue-to-witness matching, the one mechanic that respects the player’s attention.
- The shooting sections, which the game would be better without.
The order matters. The top of that list is why the aggregate sits at 7.1 instead of lower. A game with two of five episodes out and a dead studio should not be this easy to recommend, and the reason it is comes down to the first two items.
An Unfinished Story Worth Starting
The obvious objection is that Blues and Bullets is a story with no ending. That is true and it is not fixable. Anyone starting it now is starting something that stops.
But the two episodes that exist are coherent as a pair. Episode one sets up the kidnapping and the diner. Episode two continues the investigation and the cast expands. The mystery does not resolve, and the game does not pretend it will.
What the game gets right is tone and performance, and those are the hardest things to fake. What it gets wrong is the shooting, and that is the easiest thing to cut. The mismatch is the whole story of this release: a studio with a clear visual idea and a strong lead, running out of time before it could finish arguing with itself about what kind of game it was making.
The 7.1 is honest. It credits the monochrome, the cast, the Capone inversion and the clue work. It docks the shooting, the thin fantasy framing and the fact that three-fifths of the product does not exist. A higher score would be sentiment about what might have been. A lower one would ignore that Cockle and Guerrasio in a room together is worth the price of admission on its own.
Blues and Bullets is a noir that never got its last act. The two acts it has are worth your time, as long as you go in knowing the lights come up early.
7.1 of 10.
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