Nobody Wants to Die [Review]
Hard boiled retrofuturist noir Nobody Wants to Die is an uneven yet riveting adventure.
Nobody Wants to Die. Credit: Critical Hit / PLAION
Critical Hit and PLAION’s Nobody Wants to Die is an adventure game inspired by noir and neo-noir films that takes familiar genre tropes and spins a compelling sci-fi yarn. Despite having a first half that’s stronger than the second, it’s a solid dramatic experience you’ll want to see through to the end.
It’s 2329, and humans now have eternal life through body transfers—an innovation that has led to dystopia thanks to the greed of the upper echelons of society. After a certain age, everyone must pay a tax on their bodies, now government property. Failure to due so gets your body repossessed and put up for auction, with your mind sent to a bleak existence in a memory bank until someone can pay your debt.
Nobody Wants to Die. Credit: Critical Hit / PLAION
You are James Karra, a New York City detective suspended after causing a tragic train derailment two weeks prior. James is in his third body and struggles with the permanent loss of his wife. Sent by the police chief on an off-the-books errand to recover the mind from a high society bigwig who died from an apparent suicide, James discovers that not only is the victim’s mind destroyed, but that he was the victim of foul play. James’ sense of justice doesn’t allow him to become part of the coverup; his off-the-books investigation quickly drags him into the middle of the deadly web of a killer and paints a bullseye on his back.
Nobody Wants to Die is played entirely in first person. Its lushly rendered retro-future, art deco, lived-in environments are gorgeous. You get to see the various levels of the, stratified city that James navigates in his flying 1930s style car. This isn’t an open world game—it’s very linear—yet it’s easy to get lost in the details of every place you visit thanks to the game’s incredible, detailed world design.
Nobody Wants to Die. Credit: Critical Hit / PLAION
There are three types of gameplay: exploration and dialogue, crime scene reconstruction, and the clue board.
The first has you exploring a location, interacting with objects, and having conversations where you’ll be making dialogue choices. My only gripe here is that the majority of the dialogue happens over your earpiece and physical character interaction is rare. For such a densely populated city, you come upon actual people very infrequently. Nonetheless, the game’s writing is strong and the voice performances are emotionally convincing. I enjoyed the rapport between James and his long-distance investigation partner Sara, as well as James’ genre-mandated hard boiled detective internal monologue. Many of the choices you make in conversation or in the world will bring up an on-screen message that you’ve done something to affect the story’s outcome, but most of these choices just result in different dialogue options later on; only a couple of key choices will affect the game’s ending. I wish that the game let you replay specific chapters; I was disappointed after finishing the game that my only choices were to view the credits again or start the game over.
Nobody Wants to Die. Credit: Critical Hit / PLAION
Crime scene reconstruction works a bit like it does in the Batman Arkham games. You’ll use a wrist-mounted device to rewind time and holographically depict what happened in a crime scene while walking around the paused events to gather clues. As you skim forward and back on your device’s timeline, you’ll examine elements at key points that will give your device enough data to reconstruct more parts of the scene and events. You also use a UV light and portable x-ray device to follow blood trails, wiring, and bullet trajectories. These scenes were all very fun to solve, though not very challenging; the game’s primary goal is immersing you in a narrative rather than stumping you and the reconstruction is a fun and different way to unveil the plot.
After investigations, you’ll put the clues you discovered together in the clue board. Everything you discovered is placed on the floor as holographic tokens, as will key questions. You must connect a question with the clue that answers or explains it, which will connect it with a red thread and bring up a new question. You establish the timeline of events, relationships of the involved parties, motives, etc. These can be solved entirely through trial and error if you’re ever at a loss. These segments of the game are unnecessary, but I respect that the developers came up with this as a creative way to recap important information.
Nobody Wants to Die. Credit: Critical Hit / PLAION
I felt the story got a bit strained in the second half of the game as it became more metaphysical. As the game went on we also heard more from the game’s villain, whose performance was a little too over the top for my taste. If the game had been any longer, it would have run out of steam. However, as it stands, I was completely sucked into Nobody Wants to Die during its approximately five hours of playtime. It doesn’t hurt that the game is eye candy, just beautiful to look at. I’d love to see more stories set in this world.
If you enjoy adventure games, interactive fiction, film noir, or dystopian stories, I highly recommend Nobody Wants to Die. It was an almost perfect cross section of interests for me and the execution was excellent.
Nobody Wants to Die is available now on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Overall Score: 7/10
Played on: PS5
