Indie Game of the Week 483: Nobody Wants to Die

I've been playing a spate of first-person games in which the goal is to pick up items and read notes, and it occurred to me with this week's game that thematically the detective adventure genre is perhaps the best fit for what have been pejoratively been called "walking simulators" in the past. Honestly, that term has only really applied to Dear Esther and a handful of others in which literally nothing happens: it's in games like this or #481's Call of the Sea where the first-person immersion factor proves the best method for delivering gameplay where you're required to scour a scene for clues (once exclusively the domain of 2D graphic adventure games that only had the one side-view. Critical Hit Games's Nobody Wants to Die has its issues but there's no denying that it's a slick way to tell a whodunnit with sci-fi crime scene investigations framed by a gritty neo-noir presentation, using its perspective to draw you into the role of its protagonist James Karra and the interiority that is endemic to the internal monologue-heavy noir genre.

Times Square looking more like Times Cuboid in the future. Can't have cybernoir without a big hologram lady in the mix.

Nobody Wants to Die posits a sort of retro-future setting reminiscent of a BioShock or Fallout in which fashions and attitudes of a 1940s/1950s period branched off from our own timeline and remained static due to technology that does not exist in the real world. It's now the 24th century and humanity has been fully enraptured by the breakthrough that is ichorite: a means of retaining a human's consciousness on a sort of biotechnological SD card so that they might pass to another "shell" upon the death of their current one. Karra himself is over 100 years old, kept alive for his usefulness more than any kind of elevated status in society, but the rich elite of future NYC are potentially twice that age. It's an era where everyone is forced to sign up for a body donor program, where everyone must follow a government-mandated exercise regime for the sake of those who might adopt their shells next (presumably the original owners have their ichorite go into the deep freeze for a while as punishment for a crime while some legally abiding citizens takes their bodies for a joyride), and where wanting to leave this immortal chain of body recycling has been criminalized as a form of suicide. It's reminiscent of that book (and Netflix show) Altered Carbon, which explored the similar loss of humanity that comes from losing the humbling mortality (memento mori as it were) that our finite lives grants us, for better or worse. The world has become hopelessly corrupt as a result of this technology, with various contextual hints pointing at the death of most life on the planet after human overpopulation and overindustrialization blotted out the sun: early on, after observing an antique saddle, Karra and his new partner/handler Sara Kai discuss horses and pegasi in the context of one being mythological while the other is simply extinct. Having no sun in the sky, ever, certainly helps this game's noir bona fides at least.

Unfortunately, the game's script isn't too hot. You do get some philosophical musings while sitting somewhere lofty observing an enormous vertical version of NYC that stretches up and down as far as you can see, so there's no issue with the tone per se, but in order to sell the "grittiness" the writers deemed it necessary for every character to swear at least twice in every line. This much casual cursing might resemble conversations with friends in the real world, depending on who you might associate with, but for the sake of a scripted narrative you typically want to dole out these f- and s-bombs a little less frequently so that they land harder when something truly dramatic happens. It also gives the game a sort of childish approximation of hard-edged noir, where saying all the cusses makes you sound more adult, so it's less about taking issue due to prudishness (because what do I fucking care about language policing?) but a failure of vocabulary. I have at least liked the bickering relationship between Karra, the kind of mentally unstable loose cannon who gets reprimanded for doing police work right instead of in a way that greases the correct palms, and the pragmatic liaison officer Sara, who has just about managed to turn a blind eye long enough to the less savory aspects of her job that she's all set up for a promotion if she can rein in Karra sufficiently. The game's occasional dialogue choices lets you either inspire her to remember the reason she became a cop, or make her even more jaded with your apparent insouciance.

Ed Green is the first of these rich elite corpses you end up investigating. Part of his elaborate murder involved torching the very last cherry tree. Dang, no more Singapore Slings.

The game breaks up the more standard exploration—walking around looking at items, often spurring conversations between Karra and Sara, the latter watching these crime scene investigations from Karra's lapel camera—with special crime scene recreations, using the technology of the time to rewind the crime scene to witness events leading up to the murders with the environmental clues available, or else using UV lights and X-ray devices to track what is normally unseen. (Odd to say this isn't the first detective game I've played this year with those same tools: they were all over AI: The Somnium Files—The nirvanA Initiative too.) The tech certainly makes these investigations flashy, but at their core they're simply flashy exposition delivery tools: it's not until later when you have to put motives and deductions together on an evidence board ("board" in quotes, perhaps, since it's mostly holographic projections and photos strewn about the floor of Karra's apartment) that it becomes a bit more like an interactive puzzle that requires the player's input. There are many hints of a Telltale Games style subtle branch course-correction as certain choices trigger one of those ominous "this will effect the story" pop-ups, but I'm not sure what effect any of these choices have had so far besides opening up otherwise locked dialogue choices (and I've no clue what those do either). Maybe all will become clear when I reach the end of the game and I get one of those fancy flow charts that comprehensively delineates the repercussions of all the choices I made. Something tells me it's not going to affect that much of the narrative though, besides perhaps the ending, given how much effort has been put into crafting and rendering all of these admittedly attractive 3D scenes: the idea that there might be alternative ones for different branches seems like an extravagance an Indie project like this couldn't hope to indulge in.

On the whole, Nobody Wants to Die certainly has its style on-lock and the tone is mostly hitting the right notes even if I take occasional issue with some of its dialogue and its delivery. It's a relatively passive adventure game, akin to others using the same perspective where the player's role is largely to walk to wherever the game's story needs to them to be next and look at the thing the game's UI is pointing towards, but between the attention to world-building, the appeal of its striking visuals, and the potboiler approach of its noir narrative I've found it engaging enough so far. There might be times I'll roll my eyes at some incidental background object's description or seeing James or Sara break a new record for fitting as many "fucks" as possible into a single sentence but it's not really enough to take the shine off a confident, polished whodunnit mystery like Nobody Wants to Die. (As per usual, I'll add a post-script review once I've completed the game and can talk more about its overall story arc, excepting anything too spoilerish of course.)

All these environments seem immaculately constructed until you see just how many typos pop up in the game ("alergies", "suprise"). It is a dystopia though, maybe everyone just got more lax with correct spelling? I think if the meal du jour is "Stinky Secret" typos are the least of your concerns.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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