Nobody Wants to Die review

A couple of years ago I watched a show on Netflix called Altered Carbon. The first season is still on my list as one of the best shows of recent years, and the book it was based on, by Richard K. Morgan, is also fantastic. I bring it up because its central premise had to have been part of the inspiration for Critical Hit’s Nobody Wants to Die. Both are set in far-future cyberpunk dystopias, both centre on a society wherein everybody lives forever, transferring consciousness from one body to another. In Altered Carbon humanity is space-faring, and the subconscious is stored on reverse-engineered alien technology called the Stack, whereas in Nobody Wants to Die the world is a retro-futuristic 1940s analogy similar to Bioshock, where the consciousness is held in a substance called Ichorite.

Even the central conceit is similar: in a world where immortality is legally mandated, the protagonist is called upon to investigate a very unusual suicide. In Nobody Wants to Die, the protagonist is James Karra, a disgraced former police detective paired with a rookie named Sarah to investigate an apparent suicide that soon turns out to be much more sinister. For a start, the dead guy is fully dead, all the way, and his Ichorite is gone. There’s also not only evidence that it was homicide, but everybody above James is really keen that he leaves it well alone.

Of course, that means he won’t, and together he and Sarah plunge headlong into a conspiracy that touches every corner of the city. Narrative is one of this game’s greatest strengths. The acting and writing might lean a little too far into hard-bitten noir at times, with James often monologuing in his gruff private eye voice and Sarah trying hard not to lose her job in his wake. He’s got form, see, having gotten his partner killed before hitting the bottle really hard in the aftermath.

It’s a slow burner though, with few action sequences and some long transitions between scenes and areas that often exist solely to either show off the stunning environments or let James monologue some more. The meat of the game isn’t action, but rather investigation and deduction.

James is armed with some impressive future tech that allows him to analyse clues, and then create a temporal bubble that reconstructs prior events. You can then walk into the bubble and poke around, moving time back and forth within a tiny window to piece together the moments directly before and after a crime. There’s not a great deal of guidance in these sections, however, and you’ll often need to scan the environment multiple times and kind of trial-and-error your way through. From following pipelines with the X-ray machine to analysing mystery substances, the detective work involved is interesting, and there’s always plenty of extraneous things to investigate which, even if not pertinent to the case at hand, help flesh out the world and its politics.

You’ll also spend time working with Sarah to put the clues together and try to figure out what the hell is going on. You’re often presented with dialogue choices, most of them on a timer. It’s not always clear which is the “right” choice to make, but everything you say is logged by the NPCs and could come back to affect the story later. It’s not overly original, but it’s an effective way to engage the player.

In fact, that may be the only real issue with Nobody Wants to Die: despite how beautiful it looks and how compelling the narrative is, it does absolutely nothing new. The world has echoes of Bioshock and Fallout, the writing brings to mind any number of noir thrillers, and the dynamic between the main characters – him a hardboiled PI living half in a bottle, her an idealistic newbie trying to save him from himself – has been played out countless times. And yet there’s something eminently likable about Nobody Wants to Die.

And a lot of that comes down to the effort that has gone into it. There’s so much detail in the world, so much lore and history if you want to look for it, and yet it doesn’t inform the narrative. The story itself plays out thanks to your actions, while the flavour is there for those who wish to seek it out. While the pace is not fast, it’s consistent, and with a story like this that may be more important. Even that outward relationship between the two leads deepens and takes on unexpected dimensions as more and more is revealed about their pasts, and that’s only possible because the story gives the characters time and room to develop.

At the heart of it all is a decent mystery, which of course makes a world of difference. It’s the driving force that keeps the engines turning, and had me coming back until the climax just to see how it would unfold. A solid, if slightly formulaic, thriller, then, Nobody Wants to Die manages to do nothing new yet feel different to most other games on the market right now, and that’s got to be worth some attention.