Nobody Wants to Die Review

Over the past decade, most small developers have adopted the obvious and more cost-effective strategy of creating games that don't focus too much on the visual presentation – particularly the technical side. In order to create high quality visuals that even approach their triple-A rivals, it would take an inordinate amount of effort, so it often makes more sense to focus on the art style and gameplay. But there are some developers that choose go to all-out and try to create a technical visual showcase nonetheless, from Bright Memory Infinite to the recent Indika, thanks to the advancements in Unreal Engine making impressive visuals more accessible. The newest title that hopes to wow players with its visuals and style is Nobody Wants to Die, an adventure game that combines noire themes and a futuristic setting.

In this first person narrative game, players assume the role of James, a hardened detective in New York. James ticks all the noire boxes – from gruffy internal monologues, to having being kicked off the force recently, to missing his deceased wife who appears to him as a pseudo-hallucination. However, the year is 2329, which makes for an interesting combination of styles. The city is a vast, cyberpunk jungle with flying cars and neon signs, as James watches a black and white film from his floating car, takes a puff of a cigarette and sips on alcohol from a flask.

On top of it all, is the fact that James is over 100 years old, because in this world, technology has been developed that allows people to transfer their consciousness into new bodies, and continue to live. James has gone through a few bodies already, and his latest was unfortunately a drug addict, so he has to occasionally take some pills to keep his composure. The government has laws that require everyone to keep in good shape, and to pay their fees, as otherwise their body may be involuntarily taken to be used by another (usually rich) person.

It's in this unique world and tense political climate that James receives an "unofficial assignment" from the police chief, asking him to investigate a potential "final death" murder (meaning the person does not get to transfer to another body). The victim is one of the key elite members involved with the body transfer technology. James gets paired up with Sara, a remotely operating detective that's looking for her promotion. The pair then visit a number of crime scenes to investigate what happened, then unravel the conspiracy that goes beyond just the initial murder.

Nobody Wants to Die certainly does its best to weave a number of thematic elements together. The combination of noire and futuristic sci-fi is certainly unique, but it is unable to live up to its full potential. Largely, that falls to the weak dialogue and unconvincing voice acting. The conversations that James and Sara have over the radio are filled with strange turns of phrase and plenty of swearing, and no matter how many philosophical or political monologues James attempts in his thesaurus-heavy expositions, it never falls into place. Given that the developers Critical Hit Games are from Poland, this is likely a case of being lost in translation. And even when the writing has a few good moments, the voice acting leaves much to be desired, as both James and Sara sound fairly robotic and monotone, without much chemistry (cursing and occasionally yelling doesn't constitute emotion).

The narrative also stumbles. While it's highly promising and engaging for the first hour, things unfortunately settle into lots of exposition dumps, especially in the latter stages. The game also offers a few different endings, which you can reach through dialogue and action choices throughout the story. While many of these choices seem quite engaging and dramatic, such as choosing to kill or spare some evil elite corporate leader, they lead towards an unsatisfying conclusion. While there are about four endings possible, they are all underwhelming at best and feel very unearned. The desire to be dark and dramatic is extremely obvious, but the narrative is not able to support it. Actions of James and other characters do not make sense, and we aren't even given answers to the main mystery. Without chapter select, having to replay the whole game just to see a slightly less bleak but equally meaningless outcome doesn't seem worthwhile.

While James is a detective, Nobody Wants to Die is not an adventure game in traditional sense. In fact, there are no puzzles or inventory; it's more of an interactive story. You'll get to visit a few different crime scenes, where you can use a couple of gadgets in order to unravel what happened. James has a special Reconstructor glove that allows him to manipulate time. After a quick minigame, you can rewind the scene forward and backward and you walk around the room, which reveals the sequence of events and allows you to interact with new objects. The time control mechanic is fairly simplistic, as you usually just rewind it as far back as possible, and then walk into a designated area that contains the clue. With each time rewind, you uncover new UI indicators that highlight clues, and listen to James and Sara discuss their findings and spell out what has taken place. There is not much thinking required to solve these crime scenes, and it’s just a matter of not missing the indicators that can be sometimes finicky to appear, leaving you walking around the room aimlessly.

Outside of time shifting, players can interact with optional objects that offer no insight, providing a bit of optional dialogue or lore, such as discovering a preserved sample of chocolate, that apparently doesn't exist in the future. James may also need to pick up some items and rotate them around, in typical video game fashion, to discover or read something. Other tools in this detective's arsenal include an X-ray, which lets you follow pipes through walls and floors, and a UV lamp, which does the same thing but for trails of blood or other substances. Both of these mechanics – and even the time shifting glove – are common staples of adventure games and don't do anything new or interesting with their implementation.

The crime scene reconstruction is the main gameplay pillar, and while it's initially interesting, just like the story it quickly becomes a bit repetitive and monotone. You'll get to explore a couple of crime scene areas, but the game has the audacity to make you return to the same locations more than once and re-use the level. For a title that already runs at a slim 4-5 hours, that's not a great choice. When not at a crime scene, James will be back at his apartment, in order to talk to Sara some more and try to put clues together. This requires one of the most confusing and poorly implemented minigames in recent memory, as you haphazardly arrange bottles on the floor of James' apartment.

The game's best feature is probably its visual style. While the story, writing, and dialogue are not always able to support the atmosphere, the technical visuals and art style do the heavy lifting. This is an excellently realized futuristic world that probably gives Cyberpunk 2077 a run for its money. The impossibly tall skyscrapers, the flying cars, and glowing neon signs all come together to create a highly impressive cityscape. Although you don't get to explore any of it, just being present in this city creates an impressive ether, and the game seemingly knows it, with showy camera angles and scripted sequences when outside. Indoor areas are a bit more generic, but they still fit the aesthetic. Walking around time-frozen scenes, such as mid explosions, is where the game looks best and tries to impress - and so it does it multiple times. The soundtrack is also good, and adds to the noire setting with jazzy music.

All of this is rendered with Unreal Engine 5 and a photorealistic aesthetic, and runs decently well. There are some blemishes and some settings may need to be tweaked, especially around motion blur and camera sensitivity, but the game does helpfully offer three different upscaling methods. We did unfortunately experience a few minor bugs, such as breaking interaction sequences that played out of order, and a couple of hard crashes to desktop.

Nobody Wants to Die has a very strong idea of what it wants to be, but it doesn't quite get there. The unique combination of noire in a futuristic setting is admirable, but the poorly paced story, stiff voice acting, and unconvincing dialogue prevent the game from reaching the heights that its technical visuals try so hard to reach. It's an impressively atmospheric world when you simply gaze out into the city, sitting on a neon sign and taking a smoke. And yet eventually you have to get back to the dull and simplistic crime scene investigation gameplay, which leads to some unsatisfying endings. The game's unique setting where people can live forever doesn't really come into the story in an effective way; aside from simplistic body snatching. In some ways, it reminds of the efforts of Atomic Heart. Priced at only $25 USD though, it serves as a good technical showcase of the latest Unreal Engine, but not as much of a good narrative adventure.