YMMV / Blacksad: Under the Skin

• Adaptation Displacement: Much like Sam & Max and The Wolf Among Us, Blacksad is probably better known as "that one Adventure Game" by general audiences rather than being based on a comic book (excluding France, Belgium and Spain, naturally).
• Animation Age Ghetto: Some reviewers were put off by the mix of Funny Animals with mature noir themes and unable to take any of the story seriously because of it.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The writing, Film Noir aesthetic, and Story Branching were well-received, but the gameplay is much more contentious. The point-and-click and investigative sections are solid, but there are multiple times the game tries to be action oriented and these don’t work well in practice. The game also had numerous technical issues at launch which exacerbated these problems.
• Fake American: In the French dub, Philippe Peythieu does a rather unconvincing Texan accent as Farnham which only gets more distracting as the character gets more and more intoxicated.^note He also delivers a better performance portraying Jimmy, which is closer to his usual roles as Butt-Monkey characters. Jérémie Covillaut (Blacksad) then follows with an equally poor accent, though close the Peythieu's performance which might have been the intent.
• Moral Event Horizon: Mitchell killing Brunhilde and her father by burning them alive is what sets him worse than any other villains in the game.
• Obvious Beta: The game was originally meant to launch on November 5th, 2019, but was delayed by for the sake of technical polish. Yet, it accidentally launched on PS4 and Xbox One on November 5th anyway, and the experience for those who got it too early obviously wasn't great, with even the reviewers' copies suffering from issues like audio bugs. After numerous patches on all consoles the game would remain in a buggy state with textures not loading properly and frequent crashes. Fortunately after more patches, the game now is in a mostly stable state with its worst glitches generally being minor texture bugs.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Aside from some bugs and an over-abundance of quicktime events, the game is seen as a quality point-and-click game with an engaging story and nails the aesthetic and characters of the comic.
• Player Punch: Preventing Mary's death results in a different cleaning lady named Clarice Freeman getting killed by Randall Leigh. To further salt the wound, Blacksad finds out that Clarice was a mother of two young girls.
• Popular with Furries: It was to be expected considering the source material and its already sizeable fanbase. Much like the original, most of the Self-Fanservice is directed at the male characters.
• Porting Disaster: The game was progressively patched on PC and consoles after a very rough launch, but the Switch port specifically remains in a nearly unplayable state even with a whopping 10 Go update. That game frequently crashes and textures rarely load correctly which is very distracting considering the large amount of detailed photographs, paperwork, and environmental clues the player is supposed to investigate that only appear as jumbled messes of pixels.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The game received some criticism for lifing nearly all of its game mechanics from other popular detective games like L.A. Noire, The Wolf Among Us, and Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games. All of the borrowed elements are functional but dumbed down compared to their inspirations, and the game as a whole feels like less than the sum of its parts.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Stone vs. Yale match is hyped up the entire game as a major plot point, with Blacksad directly influencing it throughout the story by betting on the winner, finding compromising evidence on the fighters and their sponsors, and even advising both combattants directly which includes them taking Super Serum or even Throwing the Fight. One would assume that it is linked to the "Your Blacksad" morality stats in direct correlation with the "profitability" meter (as in "will you fix the match to make a huge profit or take the high road") but in the end the match and the fighters' decision are left unresolved on purpose which makes it not only frustrating and anticlimactic but also makes a lot of the player's decisions feel completely useless.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The "Your Blacksad" feature, a rather extensive Karma Meter that even shows you if the case is profitable or not, is in practice completely useless and has no impact on the game's narrative or its mechanics. Only the player's actions directly impact the story (not once is a path locked because you acted too much a certain way prior for example), and in the end it is merely a glorified stats screen that does not even impact the ending.

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