Highlights

  • Spider-Man Noir's popularity has increased recently, especially due to his appearance in Into the Spider-Verse.
  • Marvel's Spider-Man and its sequel include Spider-Man Noir costume skins, showcasing the character's unique aesthetic.
  • Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions demonstrated the potential for a standalone Spider-Man Noir game with brawler-style stealth gameplay.

Spider-Man Noir, the black-clad wall-crawler who dons a trenchcoat and a fedora and belongs to a black-and-white continuity in the 30s with all the sumptuous trappings of that era’s grim and gritty aesthetic, has only recently had the popularity he deserves. To be fair, every nook of Spider-Man lore that Into and Across the Spider-Verse have touched has become a popular take, and Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man Noir will likely be the iteration fans immediately think of for the multiversal character for the foreseeable future. However, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions’ Spider-Man Noir walked so future iterations could run.

Marvel’s Spider-Man and its sequel are the latest games to include a Spider-Man Noir costume skin, and they are both incredibly unique. The original game’s Noir suit actually does emulate Shattered Dimensions’ Noir, lacking a coat and having more of a serious tone in its depiction, while Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s Noir suit unsurprisingly leans on the hype of the Spider-Verse movies with an identical adaptation of the character, complete with a Rubik’s Cube he solves while plummeting in an idle animation. Still, Shattered Dimensions demonstrated how the character could fulfill an entire standalone spin-off with extraordinary stealth gameplay.

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Shattered Dimensions’ Noir Spider-Man Deserved a Standalone Stealth Game

Spider-Man Noir’s Stealth-Oriented Gameplay is Tense and Visceral

Shattered Dimensions’ Spider-Man Noir stealth was intense in how sequences were strung together, but where they became visceral and gripping was in how white-knuckle and brutal Spider-Man’s attacks were. Spider-Man hasn’t always been averse to slamming his fists into an enemy’s face, but Shattered Dimensions’ Noir truly subverts Spider-Man’s ‘punches pulled’ motif to dish out satisfying finishers.

The sound design really helps carry these attacks and makes each punch, wall-slam, or spray of webbing heavy and meaty, which is important when 90 percent of Noir’s gameplay revolves around seeing these same stealth finishers. It’s ironic, too, that Noir has some semblance of ordinary combat outside of stealth even though that straightforward combat is only performed in a few sparse sequences beyond actual boss fights.

Stealth on its own is no passive, pacifist matter, though, and having Noir be purely stealth-oriented would’ve been a fair choice since Ultimate, Amazing, and 2099 all feature far more combat anyway. Maybe a full-length game exclusive to Noir’s gameplay would mandate more ordinary combat to not have it be 8–10 hours of stealth alone, but such a game could certainly do well if it met the standard of Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.

A Spider-Man Noir Game Could’ve Had a Feature-Length Undertone of Grit

The Great Depression-era aesthetic of Noir’s sequences in Shattered Dimensions is by far the game’s most remarkably unique feature. Each level marinates well in a filmic, grainy filter and is exceptionally dark, playing into the stealth aspect with tons of shadows for Spider-Man to maneuver through, whether he’s navigating a circus or an alleyway.

In particular, this aesthetic is terrific for how gruesomely it portrays Spider-Man villain bosses in each level, such as Hammerhead fitting perfectly into its 30s gangster and mobster atmosphere or Vulture as a grisly, cannibalistic creature of the night who ate Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. If this Spider-Man was given his own game, seeing how that story could be fleshed out more granularly would be great and it would also be neat to see what other locations players could experience.

Thankfully, Shattered Dimensions offers enough of a distilled adventure for Noir that perhaps a standalone game would’ve been redundant if not unnecessarily long. That said, it would be fantastic to see this brooding, old-timey Spider-Man and be part of his authentic 30s continuity again in the future.