In the first five minutes of the new cyberpunk Noir game Nobody wants to diethe main character runs through a list of genre cliches in record time. He pops a bottle of pills, takes a swig of alcohol from his bottle (while another unopened bottle of moonshine sits in the background), grieves over his dead wife, and talks about being a disgraced detective who doesn’t take the law too seriously. All of this happens before he gets a call from the police chief informing him that he’s being rehired for a high-profile case. I love it.
Nobody wants to diefrom developer Critical Hit Games, is a loving homage to classic noir films. Sure, the game is set in a retro-futuristic New York City full of floating cars and science that lets people live forever, but at its core, it’s just a lurid crime thriller. It doesn’t subvert the cliches of the genre, and that’s a good thing, because it instead opts to be an entertaining, cliched mystery that plays everything incredibly straight. Critical Hit has created a wonderfully gritty noir world here that’s worth spending time in.
The crime with which the story begins is the death of a man named Green, who is responsible for the greatest achievement of this futuristic city: immortality. In Nobody wants to diepeople can transfer their consciousness between bodies. Even if your body dies, you can just buy a new one, although they aren’t cheap. Now Green is dead and the killer has done his job so well that he won’t have a chance to return. From here, the five- to six-hour story sprints toward its conclusion. This short running time is a godsend, as it fits the lurid adventure perfectly.
As disgraced but temporarily reinstated detective James Karra, you go to a series of crime scenes to uncover a major conspiracy. What begins as an apparent suicide quickly develops into something more sinister, with the entire upper echelons of New York society somehow involved. In this regard, Nobody wants to die makes his own version of noir classics like Chinatownand it works really well. Of course, this story also includes the tools of a science fiction detective, allowing Karra to rewind crime scenes to reconstruct what happened. That’s the main task you’ll have: sifting through the events of a crime backwards and forwards, looking for clues that will help you figure out exactly what happened.
You have a handful of other tools at your disposal (a UV lamp to see old bloodstains, an X-ray machine to find secret compartments, etc.), but the gameplay itself is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. I don’t really have a problem with this, as each clue is primarily an excuse for Karra and his partner Sara to talk through the case and its details, thus giving you new information. You’re given just enough to keep you engaged without your attention being diverted from the main attraction, the complicated mystery at the heart of the game. I spent most of my time at crime scenes listening carefully to the dialogue and trying to understand the case.
Crime scenes are also Nobody wants to die‘s most breathtaking moments are just something to behold. That even goes for the game’s first major set piece, a massive penthouse with a grand staircase and a giant cherry tree in the middle of everything. When you get there, the whole room is engulfed in flames, including the tree. As you reconstruct the timeline, you can rewind and watch the flames flicker and die out backwards as the tree’s leaves turn color again. It’s pretty spectacular. A floating bar and secret sex club also make an appearance, and each of them is a delightful playground to wander around, if only to take in all the details while listening to the dialogue. That dialogue is also wonderfully written. Karra and Sara do most of the talking, and they constantly resort to noir tropes without them coming across as trite.
This visual splendor extends to the rest Nobody wants to dieit is part of its essence. The entire world of the game is based on a stunning aesthetic that combines the flair of the 40s with Blade Runner grain. It is a mashup of Art Deco decor and pure industrial metal. It is incredibly impressive at first sight, similar to BioShock‘s Rapture. The path you take through the world is as guided as the crime scene gameplay sections, but it never feels constraining thanks to the incredible level of detail in each room you can explore. Everything in Nobody wants to die
What surprised me most in my time with Nobody wants to die was its deep lore. The premise of a future without death isn’t just a superficial idea that sets up the mystery, but a moral and ethical dilemma that Critical Hit Games explores at every turn. In 2329 New York, we hear about bodies being literal government property. It’s as horrific an idea as you could imagine, and the game goes into more detail about it, like how alcohol and smoking bans are in place to avoid ruining a body for its next owner, you have to pay a subscription fee to use your body, and a new death fetish is emerging for rich people who can afford to buy poor bodies and take them over, only to get themselves killed for a quick high before returning to their old bodies. It’s a biting allegory of wealth inequality and how rich people literally view poor people as commodities to be controlled. Learning more about this world is one of the best parts of Nobody wants to die and the flavor text you can find is full of interesting anecdotes that only add to your understanding of the crimes at stake. This game came out of nowhere for me, but its tightly paced film noir mystery builds such an intriguing world that it quickly became one of my favorite surprise hits of 2024.
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