Fantastic Noir

Being a private Dick in this town was hungry work... and he was all out of bananas. ^note It should be noted that she's the private investigator, he's a comic artist.

"The Butler Did It! With a death curse! From space! Take him away, Troll Patrol!"

A sister trope of "neo-noir" or cyberpunk, fantastic noir is a relatively small subgenre that blends the setting, characters (it usually stars a Hardboiled Detective who sometimes doubles as an Occult Detective), and plot structure of a Film Noir mystery story with the more colorful elements of fantasy and Science Fiction. The genre seemed to arrive all at once in The '80s and remains strong today, with the publication of such books as Anonymous Rex, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, Sweet Silver Blues, Stalking the Unicorn, and The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse.

Compare Cyberpunk, Dark Fantasy, Dungeon Punk, Urban Fantasy. Androids and Detectives and Vampire Detective Series are specific variants.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Big O: Roger Smith is a hardboiled private investigator in a futuristic City Noir city. His Sassy Secretary is a robot. He also pilots a Humongous Mecha to fight monsters.
• Both Ryohgo Narita's works Baccano! and Durarara!! sort of fall under this trope. They both have several Film Noir elements (such as organized crime and private eyes) that are often integrated with supernatural elements (the former has immortal characters and the latter features a Duallahan as one of the main characters).
• Darker than Black is a gritty detective story about sociopathic superhumans.
• Both Devilman Lady and DEVILMAN crybaby, Psychological Thriller anime adaptations of the Devilman manga franchise, could qualify as such.
• Pluto, an Astro Boy story arc reimagined as a hard-boiled noir tale. The detective is a superpowered robot out to find out why his fellow super robots are being murdered one by one.
• The Witch and the Beast has witches, magic and other fantastical creatures set in an Art Deco-inspired world with MagiTek. All of the characters wear appropriate period clothing of the 1920s to 1940s and smoking is prevalent everywhere. The plot is also centered on a dark and gloomy mystery with various conspiracies and sub-plots spread throughout the setting. It is Fantastic Noir to the tee.

Comic Books

• Absalom features an alcoholic Defective Detective who is charged to uphold the pact between the British crown and the forces of Hell.
• Pictured above is DC's Angel and the Ape, which is about a beautiful human Hardboiled Detective and a gorilla comic artist in New York City. Given that they're in a universe where all the other DC characters exist, the most "fantastic" aspect is probably that people don't freak out when they see Sam walking down the street (there are other intelligent gorillas in The DCU, but the most famous one is Gorilla Grodd, a supervillain... and Sam's grandfather). This is eventually explained as Sam having a psychic power that causes people to see him as human.
• Astro City sometimes drifts into this trope, such as in "The Tarnished Angel" storyline, which follows a retired Chrome Champion supervillain as he investigates a string of murders targeting his fellow villains.
• Batman stories will sometimes contain elements of this, particularly in Detective Comics.
• One Beast Wars: Uprising story is written in the style of hard-boiled noir stories, following a cynical detective as he investigates a strange case. Given that all the characters are robots that turn into cars and vehicles, it qualifies as this.
• Black Magick: Rowan Black is a police detective in Portsmouth, a town in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She's also a practicing Wiccan, with real magical abilities, though she keeps this fact private from her fellow officers. And somebody has just started hunting witches...
• Blacksad is a series of noir stories based in the U.S. around the 1950s, but in a World of Funny Animals, with the animal usually being related to the character's profession and/or personality (the chief of police is a German Shephard dog, a hitman seen in the first issue is a snake, etc.). The hardboiled detective protagonist, John Blacksad, is a black cat.
• Cyrus Perkins and the Haunted Taxi Cab is about a man whose taxi is haunted by the ghost of a boy who recently died in the backseat. Cyrus needs to help him solve the mystery of his murder so he can find peace and move on.
• Daredevil becomes this during one of the volume 2 storylines involving a drug that grants superpowers to people, which leads to the titular hero stopping the distributor of it.
• Fables is a Fairy Tale noir series about a werewolf (or more accurately, a wolfwere and The Big Bad Wolf himself) whose job is to keep the peace among his fellow Fables and keep them from killing each other, as well as keeping things in Fabletown from spilling over into the mundane world.
• Fatale is set in the 1950s, with a bunch of detectives investigating a series of ritualistic murders, with a supernatural Femme Fatale at the center of it who's fighting demonic eldritch forces.
• The Goon takes a Fantasy Kitchen Sink approach, but the core of the story's aesthetic comes from 1930s crime pulp. The two main characters are a pair of cartoon gangsters taking on zombies, robots, mutants, vampires, and more.
• Hellboy involves the title character investigating supernatural mysteries and occurrences, and Mike Mignola's artwork helps give it that noir feel.
• The Human Target (2021) is framed through the lens of a traditional detective noir mystery, but all of the suspects happen to be members of the Justice League of America. The protagonist, Christopher Chance, has no superpowers whatsoever, but his partner and local Femme Fatale, Tora Olafsdotter, is An Ice Person, he gets regularly harassed by Guy Gardner, an abrasive "cop" of the Green Lantern Corps, and the mystery is trying to find out who tried to kill Lex Luthor — a well-known supervillain — and ended up fatally poisoning Chance instead.
• Jessica Jones, particularly in the original MAX run Alias, which was dubbed "Comic Book Noir" by Jeph Loeb in the introduction to the first trade paperback.
• The Marvel Noir line, including Spider-Man Noir, has this feel, especially for Spider-Man. Iron Man Noir is a bit misnamed, since it's more of a pulp action story.
• Powers involves two homicide detectives who investigate cases involving superheroes and supervillains.
• Jeff Smith's RASL is a science fiction series with significant noir influence. RASL's an art thief on the run from his past, but he's running to Alternate Universes — and that's just the beginning.
• Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard-Boiled Shaman are classic noir stories following a jaded detective solving mysteries. The twist is that the "detective" is a shaman in the Siberian Taiga and his cases involve keeping peace between mortals and the Spirit World.

Fan Works

• The Bolt fanfic "Bolt Noir" by Plonq is a spoof of Film Noir style mystery films and TV shows. After watching episodes of Peter Gunn, Bolt imagines himself as a detective with a needy dame for a client (Mittens) and a helpful sidekick (Rhino). There's no murder to contend with, however — just a hankering for cat treats and a point to prove.

Films — Animation

• The Animatrix: In the short "A Detective Story", a private detective on a seemingly routine case starts to discover that his entire world is a lie.
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is basically a Whole-Plot Reference to Out of the Past, but with Batman instead of Robert Mitchum.

Films — Live-Action

• Anon (2018): Of the Cyberpunk variety. The world is a place with a corrupt police force, the entire world under surveillance with their own eyes, privacy extinct, and everyone seemingly living drab meaningless lives with the protagonist no exception. Furthermore, there's a serial killer on the loose that the government doesn't care about the murders of due to them being more interested in how they're spoofing the system.
• Downplayed in Atlantics. The setting is mostly Like Reality, Unless Noted, but a major subplot is a police officer's attempts to solve a series of seemingly impossible crimes, which are eventually revealed to be supernatural in nature and involve ghosts possessing people to start fires and extort money.
• Preeminent on the SF side, Blade Runner. In a future City Noir city, a hardboiled detective complete with a Private Eye Monologue tracks down rogue androids.
• Cast a Deadly Spell. Phillip Lovecraft is a detective who doesn't use magic in a world where everyone else does. Also its sequel, Witch Hunt.
• Cool World features an animated/real-life blend with human detective Frank Harris trying to catch doodle (cartoon) Holli Would.
• Dark City (1998) initially seems like a normal Film Noir, but then The Reveal happens and it shoots straight into this trope. Also something of an Invoked Trope, since the Strangers seem to have consciously modeled the fake City Noir that humanity inhabits on the sort of cities you see in old detective movies.
• The Exorcist III blends some classic murder mystery elements into the Demonic Possession story you would expect from the franchise. George C. Scott's Hardboiled Detective Anti-Nihilist protagonist is a classic Noir hero.
• Lord of Illusions is an adaptation that Clive Barker did base on his Harry D'Amour stories. Here, Harry is an Occult Detective who has been involved in exorcisms and has to stop an Evil Sorcerer from returning from the grave.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu is a Film Noir set in the Pokémon universe, so it applies for this even if you leave out the fact that one of the detectives is a talking Pikachu.
• Repeat Performance from 1947, probably the Ur-Example. The main character is a woman who murders her husband on New Year's Eve and wishes for a chance to relive the preceding year to avoid making the mistakes that led to that moment.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Eddie Valiant is a private eye in a version of 1940s Los Angeles where living cartoons exist and work alongside humans.
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) acts more as a spiritual successor to Roger Rabbit than a direct adaptation of its source material. Set in a similar world of cartoons and humans, the film sees the duo as a pair of Animated Actors on the titular series who must make amends when one of their co-stars is kidnapped.

Literature

• The Anita Blake series starts out as this and still has elements of it in the later works.
• Anonymous Rex. The detective Vincent Rubio is a velociraptor in a world where dinosaurs aren't dead but are in hiding.
• Azoth Express combines the classic mystery on a train with fantastic elements, starting with the detective himself, who is a wolfman.
• Tad Williams' Bobby Dollar series is about an angel advocate caught between the forces of Heaven and Hell.
• Bone Song is a detective/conspiracy novel which takes place in a City Noir where humans live side by side with mages, witches, zombies, wraiths, cat folk, gargoyles, and other fantastic creatures.
• Bubbles in Space: The series is a combination of cyberpunk dystopia and noir detective series with many references to classic Noir detective fiction. Our protagonist, barely-functional private detective Bubbles, has a cybernetic arm and frequently solves cases related to everything from AI to cloning.
• City of Devils and its sequels Fifty Feet of Trouble and Wolfman Confidential, are noir mysteries crossed with a Monster Mash. The cops are all werewolves, the studio heads are crawling eyes, the machinists are gremlins, the blue-collar folks are zombies, the actors are doppelgangers, and so on.
• Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. adds horror motifs and a hefty dose of humor into the mix.
• Dirk Gently by Douglas Adams' series is a parody of this genre. Dirk Gently doesn't believe in the supernatural, but he's happy to pretend he does in order to fleece people who do, and then it turns out that the supernatural does believe in Dirk Gently.
• Discworld stories involving Sam Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch tend to edge into being these, especially The Fifth Elephant.
• Vlad Taltos in the Dragaera novels is an (ultimately former) human assassin in a fantasy world where elves are in charge and narrates in a hardboiled First-Person Smartass tone. The plots of all of the novels involve mysteries solved through detection, and Vlad has the traditional Sassy Secretary in two nontraditional forms, his Dragaeran (elf) sidekick Kragar and his pet jhereg (more or less a Shoulder-Sized Dragon), Loiosh, a sapient animal that snarkily communicates with Vlad telepathically.
• Many of The Dresden Files books, especially the earliest ones — Hardboiled Detective monologue running smack up against wizards, faeries and vampires. Results in many tons of awesome.
• Brian Parker's Easytown take place in 2060s New Orleans where the city has embraced technological vice like sex bots, virtual reality porn, and designer drugs to appeal to the tourists while keeping it segregated in a specific crime-ridden part of the city. Zachary Forest is the one honest cop in the city who later becomes a private detective and treats it as his personal beat.
• Alex Bledsoe's Eddie LaCrosse books are basically hard-boiled detective novels in a Sword and Sorcery setting.
• The Elemental Assassin novels are about a magic-wielding Professional Killer who operates out of a Wretched Hive in a version of modern-day earth that includes elementals, vampires, dwarfs, and giants.
• Even Though I Knew the End is set in 1941 Chicago and the detective, Helen Brandt uses magic spells to investigate crime scenes and track leads to catch the White City Vampire who is killing people and using their blood for Blood Magic and the killer is an angel trying to get back to Heaven.
• A Fable of Tonight series by Mike Resnick, particularly Stalking the Unicorn. Many of the stock noir characters are given a fantasy twist. For example, John's partner, who often acts as The Watson, is a famous semi-retired monster hunter, his "secretary" who also plays the part of the classic Femme Fatale is a Cat Girl, and John's persistent enemy and local crime boss The Grundy is a demon.
• Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann (part of the Moreau Series) is a near-future murder mystery tale featuring anthropomorphic animals, genetically-altered humans, and aliens. The hard-boiled detective protagonist is an anthropomorphic tiger.
• The Garrett, P.I. series is practically a Trope Codifier for this one, telling hard-boiled detective stories in a world of classic fantasy races.
• Gun, with Occasional Music is a hardboiled private eye novel set in a future where Uplifted Animals are common, and the PI's role as the outsider who asks the uncomfortable questions is exaggerated by the circumstance that in this society asking a direct question is a major social taboo, so all questions are uncomfortable; police and detectives have Inquisitor's Licenses permitting them to ask questions in the line of duty, but they tend to make people uneasy all the same.
• Robert A. Heinlein's works:
  • The novella "Magic, Inc." directly deals with an investigator's pursuit into the workings of a sinister organization, in a parallel version of the modern urban world where magic is commonplace — including flying carpet taxicabs.
  • "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" surrounds a man-and-wife PI team investigating the titular character, although the magic in that story is more of the divine sort. (Sort of.)
• The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin takes place in a Clock Punk world where nursery-rhyme characters are real and toys are alive, but only in Toy City. The protagonist ends up getting recruited by a jaded, hard-drinking private detective who just happens to be a teddy bear to solve a series of murders, including the bear's late partner, Wee Willie Winkie.
• In The Imaginary Corpse, the debut novel from Tyler Hayes, detective Tippy, a stuffed triceratops, is on the trail of a Serial Killer of imaginary friends. It contains many of the noir trappings, but with an extra layer of heart and hope — a hard-boiled detective who hits the (root) beer hard, in the Stillreal, where imaginary friends go when they are no longer needed.
• Joyland by Stephen King blends this with Magic Realism as it's about a search for a serial killer at a haunted amusement park.
• The League of Magi novella Coldheart, in the collection of the same name, is a noir story that uncovers monsters, mages, and possessed people.
• Mr Blank and the sequel Get Blank feature aliens, chupacabras, brainwashed super-killers, pretty much every conspiracy under the sun, and a few garden-variety unkillable mobsters.
• Nerve Zero's Idriel Ramirez spends his time in a noir plot, despite being in the distant future on a false planet with no gravity.
• Kim Newman:
  • "The Big Fish" takes an unnamed 1940s gumshoe, heavily implied to be Philip Marlowe, and pits him against the Esoteric Order of Dagon.
  • In a sequel, "The Trouble with Barrymore" (part of the Seven Stars sequence), the same gumshoe gets involved in the hunt for an Artifact of Doom.
  • "Castles in the Air" has the Anno Dracula counterpart of the same character on a missing person case connected to a vampire cult.
  • Something More Than Night is set in 1930s Hollywood and has a private eye (with the assistance of Raymond Chandler himself) investigating a case that involves psychic powers and inadvisably-applied mad science.
• Simon R. Green's work, particularly his Nightside and Hawk & Fisher novels, has elements of this.
• Noir Fatale by Baen Books, focusing on stories containing noir aspects and Femme Fatales, with various genres added into the blend from pure fantasy to science fiction.
• Nursery Crime blends fairy tales with a Police Procedural/'70s-style Cop Show aesthetic. To a degree, Thursday Next qualifies, too.
• Obsidian & Blood by Aliette de Bodard is a noir mystery trilogy in the Aztec Empire at its height.
• The Resurrected Man by Sean Williams is a noir detective story set in a futuristic world with teleporters, artificial intelligences, and brain uploading.
• C.T. Phipps: Several of his series deals in this.
  • Agent G is the story of a professional assassin and cyborg who works for Murder, Inc.. He finds himself A Lighter Shade of Black than his employers but can't turn to the authorities or anyone else to do better. Femme Fatale characters aplenty.
    • The Cyber Dragons Trilogy appears to be a science fiction action thriller but the protagonist soon finds themselves wrapped up in conspiracies, detective work, and dark pasts they want to forget.
  • The Bright Falls Mysteries is inspired by the works of David Lynch despite being set in a town full of werewolves and spirits. Jane Doe is an amateur detective in a town utterly filled with secrets, lies, and real world evils alongside the supernatural ones.
  • Morgan Detective Agency is a series about a Hardboiled Detective who just so happens to walk the beat of a city filled with supernatural horrors. Ashley Morgan is a Broken Ace and struggles to rebuild herself after her trauma as a vampire's slave.
  • Red Room is a spy story about a morally ambiguous conspiracy that keeps the world ignorant of the supernatural. Its protagonist is an assassin that is aware the organization may do more evil than good. It also ends with the hero dead and most of the cast.
• Shadow Police: Occult Detectives patrol a horrifying hidden London.
• Shadowrun has Nigel Findley's Dirk Mongomery, a Private Investigator in over his head in two novels, 2XS and House Of The Sun. Both are set in a Genre-Busting world of Cyberpunk, Magitek, and Noir.
• A Study in Emerald has Sherlock Holmes in a world ruled by the Great Old Ones. Sherlock Holmes isn't noir, technically speaking, but this short story is a near-perfect snapshot of this subgenre.
• Simon Kurt Unsworth's Thomas Fool series follows the titular character, an "Information Man" (essentially a police detective) employed by Hell's bureaucracy.
• Undead on Arrival: Noir with Zombies.
• The anthology Weird Detectives is all about this.
• Who Censored Roger Rabbit? has human detective Eddie Valiant solving crimes in a world where cartoon characters are living, breathing people (some of whom happen to work in comic strips, television, and movies) discriminated against by the more numerous humans.
• The Witcher is a Standard Fantasy Setting with an outcast professional being dragged into doing the dirty work of powerful people while trying to cling to his sense of decency.

Live-Action TV

• Andor has this feel, with the first arc following a morally grey Anti-Hero on the run from the private security force of a MegaCorp.
• Angel is very much this, especially the first four seasons when the eponymous vampire runs his own private detective agency.
• Daredevil (2015) starts off leaning towards more mundane noir (bar the presence of Matt's super-powered radar-like "vision") and gradually introduces the more fantastic Marvel Cinematic Universe elements like the Japanese gangsters actually being undead ninjas, and a Chinese drug baroness who's possibly from an extradimensional city of mystical kung-fu masters.
• The Defenders (2017), which is a crossover of the Marvel Netflix shows, is also fantastic noir, as those two syndicates are actually part of the same organization, the Hand.
• Fringe has a noir-style detective story with definite fantasy elements in the episode "Brown Betty".
• True Detective may or may not qualify depending on where you fall on the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane fence. Either it's just a typical detective story, or it's a Cosmic Horror Story about dysfunctional detectives coming into contact with Lovecraftian horrors beyond their understanding.
• Twin Peaks combines — among other genres — a murder mystery with some Mind Screw supernatural events. Although not much happens in a big city until the third series, there's definitely a noir sensibility right from the start, perhaps most noticeably in the jazzy soundtrack.

Podcasts

• Blake Skye Private Eye starts as your typical noir story but then takes a turn into Cosmic Horror, complete with old forbidden tomes, costly spells, and eldritch beings.
• The Juno Steel storyline of The Penumbra Podcast is a noir story set centuries in the future in Hyperion City, the largest city on Mars. Some cases are more traditional, while others deal with things like mind-reading pills, bionic eyes, and ancient alien superweapons.

Tabletop Games

• 'Chronicles of Darkness is made for this trope. Most of the gamelines are very suited for Gothic Punk noir, with Hunter: The Vigil probably being best for it (due to the Badass Normal nature of the PCs), and Demon: The Descent going straight into cyberpunk territory with an even more noir-influenced style. There's also a historical supplement for Mage: The Awakening called Mage Noir'', set during the immediate aftermath of World War II, which aims to evoke classic noir and goes into detail on how the war affected both the Sleeeping and Awakened worlds, for good and for ill.
• City of Mist has all the trappings of Film Noir (the main characters are detectives, play largely revolves around solving cases, and sessions even start with a voiceover monologue by the players), but with the twist that the people involved have magical powers.
• Deadlands Noir is a spinoff of the original Deadlands; as you might guess from the title, it's meant to evoke classic noir. Player character options include "grifter" (think Addiction-Powered wizard) and Mad Scientist, and multiple published adventures involve Voodoo Zombies.
• Eberron is mostly known as a Dungeon Punk setting, but its basis in New Weird "pulp fantasy" means it can readily support this playstyle as well. Indeed, the setting is often described as "noir-inspired", and there's even an in-universe term for detective analogues: inquisitives.
• There's a noir sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition which discusses how to mix noir themes with superhero protagonists, although it leans pretty hard on noir "thematic purity" in the process.
• The style is workable (albeit spookier) in Ravenloft, if one stays in the more urbanized cities.
• Shadowrun in general lends itself to this style of campaigns, being set in a world that blends Cyberpunk with magic.
• Urban Jungle by default is just noir in a World of Funny Animals, but the "Occult Horror" and "Astounding Science" supplements allow one to run a Lovecraft Lite or Alien Invasion campaign.
• Wretched New Flesh:Postcards From Avalidad is an indie OSR RPG described as future-noir. Characters are usually investigators of some kind in a fictional, near future Moroccan city-state dominated by various corporations producing biotech implants and psychic power inducing drugs. There is also an element of horror, as most of these advancemets are the result of secret alliances made with supernatural creatures straight out of a Clive Barker novel.

Video Games

• Alone in the Dark (2024) is set up by its previews as a horror mystery game. The player faces a cast of monsters while solving a mystery with a jazz soundtrack.
• Invoked by one NPC in Baldur's Gate III: Malta, a cat in the titular city. Talking to him with the Speak With Animals spell has him narrate your encounter in the style of a Hardboiled Detective.
  Malta: It was another day in the city of lies. Baldur's Gate - where the people begged for justice...until they starved.
• BioShock Infinite qualifies with its Steampunk flying city that the jaded private-detective protagonist didn't even know existed. The Downloadable Content Burial At Sea (a Stealth Prequel to the original BioShock) is even more this, especially in the first chapter, which heavily emphasizes the Hardboiled Detective aspect.
• Disco Elysium: A Defective Detective faces conspiracies, mysticism (maybe), and his own crippling flaws in an eerie Constructed World where various continent-sized isolas, each made up of separate oceans, islands, and nations, are divided by growing regions of pure nonexistence which can only be traversed by specially designed airships.
• Discworld Noir is a more humorous take on the entry, as you'd expect from the source material.
• The Dishonored series is perhaps the definitive video-game embodiment, combining Diesel Punk, Urban Fantasy, and Lovecraft Lite:
  • Dishonored is set in a dark and gritty setting, and Corvo is on a quest for vengeance against people who betrayed him. He's the "fall-guy" and patsy who's in over his head. The Daud DLC is even more noir-esque, complete with First-Person Smartass narration, a Villain Protagonist uncovering a mystery, and an unexpected and shocking betrayal around the corner, with the villain being a Femme Fatale witch.
  • Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, has a pair of reformed criminals pulling a series of heists to unlock artifacts to Kill the God of their world, the Outsider.
• El Paso, Elsewhere is a very deliberate homage to the original Max Payne, and its story centers around a love story between an Occult Detective and vampire turned sour, as the latter tries to end the world through a ritual and the former tries to stop her.
• In contrast to the Weird West aesthetic of Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4 has heavy film noir overtones, especially in the Far Harbor expansion. One of your companions is even a Hardboiled Detective, and you can play as one yourself.
• Grim Fandango is LucasArts' take on the noir genre, as set in a Land of the Dead inspired by Mexican folklore and Aztec Mythology. Especially Year 2, which has Manny doing his best Humphrey Bogart impression while investigating what is effectively a murder mystery.
• The Journey Down crosses an otherwise typical Hardboiled Detective story with heavy doses of Afro-Caribbean culture and imagery, alongside Steampunk technology and, by the time of Part 3, ancient Magitek.
• Katana ZERO, the tale of a Hitman with a Heart caught up in a Government Conspiracy who just happens to possess time-warping Psychic Powers.
• The Shared Universe of Project Moon's games (Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina, and Limbus Company) all have this as a unifying quality, blending Cyberpunk, Dungeon Punk, Urban Fantasy and New Weird all in a blender and putting it in a corporate dystopia of intrigue, murder and grit where the secrets runs thicker than the blood, and if the various supernatural horrors don't kill you, the Wings of the World most certainly will. Predictably, it's also firmly on the 'cynical' end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, being a Crapsack World where the best you can hope for is a broken arm and Bittersweet Ending.
• Mass Effect 2 has noir influences all over it, right from the introduction of the Illusive Man and Miranda. But it's especially prominent in pretty much everything you do on Omega and Ilium. Both places are corrupt hotbeds of organized crime and gang violence lit up by neon lights. As one character puts it, Ilium is basically "Omega, just with fancy shoes".
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is described by its Introduction video as a “Lucid-Noir” game. The trailers indeed present a cyberpunk setting and an amnesiac young detective-in-training working with a ghost to solve crimes through supernatural methods.
• Primordia (2012) follows a pair of world-weary friends who’re forced to play detective in a City Noir, and qualifies as this by virtue of being set After the End with a cast made up entirely of robots.
• Like the pen and paper game it's based on, Shadowrun Returns blends Cyberpunk with High Fantasy concepts like elves and dragons.
• The Sinking City revolves around a hardboiled and mentally unstable Occult Detective with Psychic Powers investigating a city that has been flooded by perpetual rains and haunted by hideous monsters ever since a cult stirred an oceanic deity of the Cthulhu Mythos.
• The Tex Murphy series by Access Software stars the titular Hardboiled Detective in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco as he deals with mutants and aliens.
• The Thief series is a classic example of this and gets quite creative with some of the associated tropes.
• The Wolf Among Us is a noir tale set in the Fables universe, focusing on Sheriff Bigby Wolf as he tries to solve a series of murders.

Visual Novels

• Policenauts veers a little more towards Buddy Cop Show in some spots, but the central premise is very much a Miami Vice style neo-noir story in space.
• Snatcher, heavily inspired by the above-mentioned Blade Runner, follows the story of a hard-boiled detective and his Robot Buddy as they investigate a conspiracy involving cyborg monsters killing and impersonating the citizens of a neon-drenched Mega City.

Web Animation

• Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar Redux features neo-noir lighting mixed with Cyberpunk and horror elements.

Webcomics

• Problem Sleuth mixes this with a World of Chaos and a flavorsome combination of awesome and weirdness.
• Walking in the Dark fits this perfectly. Ben Westford is a vampiric tabloid reporter/detective in a '30s-style city; he spends his nights solving supernatural mysteries along with his sidekicks, an overenthusiastic Tengu, and a journalism professor-turned-witch.
• Girl Genius brings in this trope with the side story featuring Ivo Sharktooth, Private Jäger, who is hired by Agatha and Vanamonde to investigate the theft of a trophy.

Web Videos

• There Will Be Brawl is a mix of Watchmen, The Silence of the Lambs, and many others all in the Nintendo universe.

Western Animation

• A few episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door use this genre, especially with Numbah Two playing the role of the detective. Given the strange happenings the KND deal with on a normal basis, Hoagie's cases will often include cases such as the murder of a Rainbow Monkey or a series of pink-eye infections caused by the school nurse so their eye crumbs can be used as crust for her desserts.
• Gargoyles strays into this sometimes, usually if the episode in question features Broadway (who's a fan of Film Noir) or Matt Bluestone.
• Episode 50 of Samurai Jack, "The Tale of X9", distinctly follows this route despite it set in the far future. X9 is a robotic assassin wielding a laser Tommy and driving a hover-Hudson who, by gaining sentience, grew disillusioned with his job and was the first of Aku's robots to quit. The episode begins when Aku forces him out of retirement to fight Jack, X9 knowing he won't make it out alive.

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