Nobody Wants to Die is one of the most visually stunning adventure titles to release in a long time. Just like Still Wakes the Deep, Fort Solis and other recent adventure games, it’s made with the aptly-named Unreal Engine 5 which has the power to literally bring extraordinary worlds to life right there on a player’s screen. Developer Critical Hit Games uses that power to great effect, showing players an incredible dystopian future where humanity has achieved a flawed immortality that conquers death, but they failed to overcome any of our other problems or curb humanity’s darker urges. The divide between the wealthy and poor has also expanded into an uncrossable chasm, which is aptly demonstrated in almost every scene. In fact, the setting, New York City in the year 2329, almost becomes a character of its own. It’s only overshadowed by the over-the-top, stereotypical and noir-heavy main characters, like the hardboiled detective James Karra who is the main protagonist here.
The opening scene conjures up thoughts of Blade Runner with a flying car that is hovering in heavy rain to let Karra and his wife watch an old black and white movie at a futuristic drive-in movie theater. The movie just happens to be a detective story, which Karra is really into, although his wife seems more interested in talking about other things. After some dialogue choices, the screen starts to fade to black other than these weird, glowing blue lines that spread out across the screen like veins. Karra’s wife disappears all together, hinting that she may not have really been there at all, although Karra is able to pop some pills and bring the rest of the world back into focus.
As weird as that opening scene is, it really sets the mood and hints at what is to come, both in terms of setting the story and also showing what the world is like in 2329. The key thing to know about the world is that humans have mastered a technology that allows their consciousness to transfer to a new body after they die, or when they are about to die. But there is a catch. Starting at age 21, everyone must start paying a fee to rent that new body that they will eventually need. If at any point they can’t pay the fee, their consciousness is yanked out and stored digitally until either they are able to pay or a cheap body becomes available, while their original body is put up for sale for whoever wants to pay for it. Signs and posters around the city advertise weekly auctions for those looking to move into a new body. While this functionality makes everyone immortal, it also indebts them to the consciousness transfer company for the rest of their multiple lives, condemning many people to poverty in return for their immortality.
Karra is over 100 years old and is already on his fourth body when the story begins. It turns out that in addition to the aforementioned social and moral problems of this unique form of immortality, the older someone gets and the more bodies they inhabit, the harder it is for their consciousness to sync up with a new host. When Karra has one of his episodes, the blue spidery veins he is seeing is actually the Icarus substance, which is the pseudo-magic and technical substance inside his brain that holds and transfers consciousness to a new body. Living like that is enough to mess with a person’s sanity, which drives them to try and find ways to commit suicide in such a manner that their consciousness is eliminated once and for all and not just moved to a new body or locked in the data vault with all the poor people’s minds. Karra’s wife took that route to end her life, which is why she only exists in his memory now.
But we don’t have too much time to wallow in the many problems that the hardboiled (and suspended) detective Karra is facing because he quickly catches a case. One of the elite members of society, who in fact was one of the men who helped create immortality, has been murdered. And he’s been killed in such a way that his Icarus was destroyed, so he’s truly dead now – which is as shocking as it is rare. The chief of police promises to reinstate Karra if he handles the investigation quickly and quietly, only he would like Karra to rule everything a suicide. But, of course, no detective in a noir thriller is going to play along with something like that once he learns that his case is a murder, so he instead begins walking down a very dangerous path of political intrigue, double crosses and lies – again like any typical detective tale.
The main gameplay element in Nobody Wants to Die besides just walking around and experiencing what the world has to offer is doing the detective work at crime scenes. In this, Nobody Wants to Die easily compares with LA Noir, especially since many of the high-tech gadgets and even the cars in the world have a 1940s aesthetic that mirrors that classic title. But one huge advantage that Karra has over LA Noir’s Cole Phelps is the use of a device that can reconstruct crime scenes by rewinding and fast-forwarding time. You can only fast forward or rewind different elements once you have found related evidence for that part of the footage around the crime scene, so there is some leg work involved. The actual mechanics is very similar to the brain dance missions in Cyberpunk 2077, although you had the full footage at your disposal from the start in Cyberpunk.
There is also an incredible amount of hand holding in Nobody Wants to Die, which sort of almost turns the adventure into a walking simulator versus an actual detective thriller. The level of challenge is less than you would get in a point and click detective adventure like the Twin Mind series. You really can’t mess up or go off the rails. Nobody Wants to Die even tells you which tools to use in what places, so all you really have to do is follow along to get to the end of the mystery. While that could disappoint those looking for a challenging case like they would find in a Sherlock Holmes game, the simplicity does open it up to more casual players who want to experience the incredible graphics and dystopian world without worrying about being locked out from continuing by overly complex puzzles.
And the story is worth experiencing. It’s a pretty deep one, to the point where you may not even realize who the real killer is (or if there even was a real killer) after you complete the game. There is some debate about that on the Steam forums and no real consensus about what really happened. Unfortunately, the developer, Critical Hit Games, has yet to weigh in on this to my knowledge, which seems like a slight disservice to players, especially given that Nobody Wants to Die does not really provide a definitive solution one way or the other. That’s basically a flaw in the story, and I believe they owe it to players to explain things about the plot, at least at some point in the future when enough people have played it.
Playing Nobody Wants to Die makes for quite an interesting experience, and rarely have players been presented with such a stunning world soaked in so many wonders and flaws, or a place where beauty and ugliness exist in such close proximity. Anyone looking for a more causal detective title will have a great time exploring the dark underside of Nobody Wants to Die’s dystopian paradise and soaking in the heavy noir atmosphere that is dripping like warm rain from every corner.
Developers: Critical Hit Games
Platforms: Epic Games Store, GoG, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X