Nobody Wants to Die Review

I’ve always had a soft spot for detective media, where you see some sort of murder mystery get solved, and you have this trope of a talented detective who is down to his third strike, someone who is extremely bitter and attuned to his own methods—almost to a fault. Sure, it can get repetitive, but these days, that sort of thing has become so hard to come by. There’s something cool and suave about the noire aesthetic that usually comes with this sort of media.

Nobody Wants to Die is exactly that but with a cyberpunk twist. It is LA Noire meets Cyberpunk 2077. It is a narrative-heavy walking simulator set in a cyberpunk setting with heavy 1900s-1920s noir themes. You are in a dystopian world where even your own life has been capitalized upon. You must pay a subscription after turning 21 to have the right to your own body, which is now known as a shell.

Now, before you write this game off because it is a walking simulator, I will say this: Nobody Wants to Die is one of the best narrative experiences I have had in quite some time. I’m one of those people who cannot sit still during a game if it doesn’t immediately throw me into the gameplay. Nobody Wants to Die is a game that understands that it has a great narrative and knows how to use it well.

The developer of Nobody Wants to Die is Critical Hit Games, and this is their first release. It happens to be a double-A game. Considering the quality that can be seen here from the visuals, the narrative, and the atmosphere, this is outstanding.

In the story of Nobody Wants to Die, you play James Karra, a 120-year-old man who fits the bill when the topic of old-school noir detectives is at hand. When you boot up the game, you are shown an ad done in the style of early television informing you of how mortality has changed in New York in 2329. Thanks to the cutting-edge technology, Ichorite, people are able to transfer their consciousness to another body to evade the constraints of mortality.

This sounds great, but the depiction of the future in Nobody Wants to Die is crude and dystopian. Of course, if you transfer your consciousness, you have to be able to afford a body—or a “shell” in this case and you must pay for a subscription after you turn 21, or your shell gets auctioned to someone else. Essentially, this world has put a tangible price on immortality, which is both intriguing and terrifying.

As this ad ends, the camera zooms out to you watching a movie in a drive-in theatre with your partner, a beautiful woman in a red dress, chitchatting about the black and white film that is playing in front of you. This woman acts all cute and asks you if you would still love her if she had the shell of someone seen in the movie. Of course, you say no, and then you have this sudden psychotic episode, slamming your fist against your knee and all.

You take a swig off your hip flask, grab some pills, then look to your right, and the woman’s nowhere in sight.

Was that all a hallucination? Leaving no time to think, you turn on the radio to drown out your misery, but all the channels are about politics and just how bad it is, setting the stage for the sort of world you are put in. You turn that off, and then you get a phone call from this Police Officer, and you two seem to go way back—for half a century, in fact.

He tells you about this important political figure who gets murdered and asks you to find out whodunnit. You are ecstatic. You open the door of your car to see that you are hundreds of feet off the ground, to the grand reveal of Critical Hit Games’ depiction of Times Square, New York.

This is where the cyberpunk part comes in. You have been in a flying car the whole time and below you, you can see several vehicles flying past down below you. This was an excellent way of revealing the world and its scale and it actually set off my fear of heights. You are introduced briefly to a liaison officer, who reluctantly helps you with this case.

Right away, the atmosphere of Nobody Wants to Die pulls you in. The natural dialogue and the stylized aesthetics of vintage cars, everyone with the classic transatlantic accent, and the music and the overall vibe this game gives off. It is clear that Nobody Wants to Die draws inspiration from the Bioshock series with its cinematography and aesthetics.

As for the gameplay in Nobody Wants to Die, you have this device called the Reconstructor, that lets you tap into the memories of a victim at a crime scene and make it play out in the real world so you can figure out the who-did-what of the situation. You have a magnifying glass that functions as an x-ray and a handy handgun which you named Sullivan.

The gameplay progression is quite linear, but you feel quite involved with the case. You have puzzles and as you uncover more about this case, you find out that this is much more of a bigger deal than you initially thought, and the stakes get higher as you progress. I know this sounds cliché and vague, but trust me, the less you know about this story, the better.

There are some quick time events and in almost every interaction, you are given the choice to pick your response. These decisions are pivotal to the course of the story, and you can get locked out of the only happy ending rather early on in Nobody Wants to Die. I think the story here was excellent and the world Critical Hit Games built is atmospheric and beautiful.

You can reconstruct any scene, yes, but you can only see what the body you are tapping into experienced as well as the objects around them. This means, say, if a victim gets thrown around by someone, you will only see that body floating around and being slammed. This just makes sense. It’s a neat way to work in a time reversal mechanic without making detective work too easy.

There is a part in Nobody Wants to Die where you turn back time to right before a briefcase was too mangled to be opened to a pristine state so you can open it and see the contents inside. It doesn’t really make sense, but this is a video game, and these little things are what make it fun.

Visually, Nobody Wants to Die is a treat. It’s rare to see an Unreal Engine game to have some style these days. Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, for example, looked generic. Nobody Wants to Die, is fantastic. The lighting, the 1920s cars, everyone’s clothing—everything here is done to create the vibes of an old-school movie with a cyberpunk twist, and it is done so well. One of the best parts of the game is the developer's ability to make it feel like it is this enormous future metropolis full of flying cars and millions of people.

Yes, if you look closely at some parts, you can see little things like the cars and objects rendered to be just detailed enough to seem alright, but that sort of thing rarely caught my eye while playing Nobody Wants to Die.

The music here complements the aesthetic very well. You have this big sweeping orchestral soundtrack full of saxophones, trumpets, and beautiful arrangements that lets you get your inner Sam Spade on as you dig deeper and deeper into the political intrigue of this future hellscape.

Nobody Wants to Die is an excellent walking simulator that, all things considered, is checking out. After the release of Still Wakes The Deep, this is yet another narrative-heavy game that you should check out if you're a fan of detective stories, dystopian futures, or simply appreciate well-crafted storytelling.

The cyberpunk aesthetics with classic noir create a world that's both familiar and utterly captivating. It's a bold statement from a new studio, and it makes me look forward to what projects Critical Hit Games has in store for us.