Nobody Wants to Die review – a noiry cyberpunk tale told beautifully

Sometimes a game comes along and sucker punches you right in the gut. You can be completely aware of the premise going in, but some element of the setting or the mechanics takes a broader theme or commentary and makes it deeply, intensely personal. Papers, Please got me like that. My job at the time involved identity verification and, while it was nowhere near as life or death as the game, it still made it all too real, too visceral. Dragon Age: Inquisition completely caught me off guard, with NPC reactions to my Qunari Inquisitor feeling way too close to my experiences as a very visible trans woman.

Nobody Wants to Die is a work of dystopian science fiction, so I was expecting some hard hitting moments. I’m hardly the first person to point out that the last few years have felt increasingly like living in a cyberpunk novel – only without the ability to get shiny chrome replacements for my ageing knees. As a disabled person with a veritable laundry list of health conditions forced to rely on the underfunded NHS, the games’ medical themes hit way too close to home.

Nobody Wants to Die is set in New York circa 2329, which, in a completely shocking and surprising twist, looks a lot like New York circa 1929, complete with tommy guns and prohibition. The sci-fi angle brings flying cars, 500+ story high apartment blocks and, most importantly, immortality. The discovery of a substance called ichorite allows brains to be encoded and transferred to new bodies, making death little more than an inconvenience, other than on the rare occasions that ichorite is completely destroyed. It’s all very Altered Carbon, really.

The really dystopian bit is that there doesn’t seem to have been any comparable advancement in cloning or artificially grown bodies. Instead, fresh bodies for the rich and powerful come from regular folks who haven’t been able to pay their subscription fees. Yep, in 2369 you no longer own your body, you merely rent it. If you can’t keep up, you’re arrested, your body is auctioned off to the highest bidder and your ichorite is locked up in the Memory Bank.

Into this hellish vision of the future steps protagonist James Karra, a pro baseball player turned detective, and the cheesiest collection of noir clichés you could possibly imagine. Noir and dystopia go together like hot lead and even hotter dames, but Critical Hit Games have taken it to extremes and it is glorious. It’s all done with a nod and a wink that’s self-aware, but not self-deprecating, and this commitment to the bit helps you accept the setting on its own terms.

Karra, still adjusting to a new body after a recent on-the-job accident, is predictably pulled into a murder investigation with the aid of remote liaison Sara, who provides the audience for Karra’s monologues and musings as he pokes around each crime scene. What follows is a linear series of investigations where you use a selection of tools, most importantly a fancy time-manipulation bracelet, to reconstruct each crime scene, amassing evidence on the way. Afterwards, you’ll head back to Karra’s apartment and use an evidence board to make connections and figure out the who, what, why and how of each murder.

I say you’ll do these things, but it’s really Karra and Sara doing it all, while you pilot James around and press some buttons. Investigative video games are hard to get right, but Nobody Wants to Die is so afraid that you’ll miss something or get stuck for even a moment that it doesn’t just hold your hand, it drags you through the process, giving clear instructions every step of the way. There’s a selection wheel for your assorted tools, but you never have to use it, because not only will you be told what to use, but a button prompt will pop up to select the correct device. If you want to flex your detecting muscles, Nobody Wants to Die isn’t the place to do it.

That being said, you’re not completely devoid of agency. As you make your way through the game, you’ll be presented with dialogue options and some genuinely thorny moral conundrums, and frequently have to justify them to Sara or other characters. You can’t make drastic changes to Varra’s personality, but you do get a good amount of leeway to decide how he reacts to events and consider how he, and you, feels about it all.

Once I’d gotten over my initial disappointment at how guided the investigations were, I really started to appreciate the structure. The step by step process of moving back and forth through the timeline of each crime scene helps to properly comprehend the sequence of events, while at least one scene turns out to be a full-blown shootout. Being able to watch the fully reconstructed firefight play out in slow motion was a real icing on the cake moment. It’s a bit like reading a good mystery novel in that you’re going to be told what happened, but there’s a lot of satisfaction to be gained from figuring it out for yourself before then.

Even more important is how every scene is an opportunity to immerse you in Nobody Wants to Die’s beautiful, intriguing world. It’s absolutely gorgeous to look at, all dramatic cityscapes, opulent bars and run-down slums, and the slow reveal of precisely how messed up things are veers from humorous to horrifying, often simultaneously. Like when you discover that Karra shares a bathroom with his neighbours, which involves pressing a button on the door to summon it like a lift and having to wait if it’s already in use.

These mundane moments provide a welcome contrast to the grand intrigues of the plot, and it’s what makes Nobody Wants to Die so successful. We’re shown how the wealthy and the powerful have created this dystopia, how they continue to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, but we also see the utterly banal ways in which this manifests, like terrible processed food and omnipresent acid rain. Karra is the ideal protagonist for this environment, representing the squeezed middle, once a lauded celebrity, now trapped in a broken body, one wrong move away from the Memory Bank.

There’s nothing new in Nobody Wants to Die; the story and characters are built from long-established tropes and archetypes, the world constructed from well-worn elements. This doesn’t make it any less powerful. Instead the confidence with which it presents itself allows these familiar elements to resonate all the more strongly. Its five to six hour runtime keeps the story tight and makes replaying to see the results of different choices much more manageable. It’s not subtle, but the issues Critical Hit Games have highlighted are more pressing now than ever, and the time for subtlety has long passed.

A copy of Nobody Wants to Die was provided for review by Plaion.