Nobody Wants to Die has come out of nowhere to become one of my favorite titles of 2024. You are Detective James Karra in the year 2329. A future-noir adventure set in an enormous, New York you will take an off-the-books case from your boss while recovering from a severe accident. It’s like Altered Carbon meets Cyberpunk with a 1940s aesthetic. An incredible soundtrack, solid writing, and excellent voice work carry this narrative adventure title to heights few studios have hit with their first title.
New York, 2329
The game takes place in a gothic-noir-style future New York. Flying cars are modeled like something you’d have found between the 1920s and 40s. Everyone smokes, drinks, and the world has gone to shit. The elite have created a technology that grants seeming immortality. The ability to transfer a human consciousness to another’s body which has led to a forced insurance program. You either pay it off by the age of 21 or your body is taken for the elite to play with while you’re mind is stuck in a bank with an enormous fee to pay if you ever want to get out.
The game starts with a murder mystery, about what is going on with the city’s elite as you come across a gruesome crime scene. Thanks to some innovative mechanics, you’ll solve crimes using future tech that allows you to reconstruct just what happened. The aptly named reconstructor will enable you to use bits of evidence to slowly puzzle piece reality back together. There is also a portable x-ray that can show bullet trails, and the occasional gameplay curveball thrown in to keep things feeling fresh.
A full playthrough took me roughly five hours, and I was engrossed during every moment. A sweeping orchestral soundtrack full of saxophones, trumpets, and beautiful arrangements lets you get your inner Sam Spade on as you dig deeper and deeper into the political intrigue of this future hellscape.
Detecto-vision
The main mechanic in most main levels of Nobody Wants to Die is the Reconstructor. It has various modes, typically starting with a reconstruction that will have a short timeline you can scrub through. As you find more clues you’ll gain access to more of the timeline’s events, with anomalies being a yellow line that you’ll need to dial up correctly. The timeline mechanic works with the left and right triggers and allows you to fast-forward and rewind “reality” in real time. Going back and forth through the moment a bar exploded or a rich businessman got his brains blown out is as satisfying as it is disturbing.
There is no direct action gameplay to be found, though at certain moments you’re technically not on active duty detective will pull out his gun. Whether you choose to shoot or not is up to you, and every decision you make can and will matter. Outside of the detective sections, you’ll use the d-pad to make choices during conversations. Those choices you make matter for what choices you’ll have at the game’s climax and if you the player can’t figure things out as you go along you may be locked out of the game’s only “happy ending”.
Between the choice system, detective tools, and first-person immersion this is one of my favorite narrative games of all time. I felt more influential than you typically do here. I didn’t need twitch skills, just my brain, but the ability to walk around everywhere in first-person helped me feel like I was in a living, breathing future in New York City.
An Unreal Sense of Scale
One of the best parts of Nobody Wants to Die is the developer’s ability to make you feel like you’re in an enormous future metropolis, full of flying cars and millions of people. If you poke at the seems you realize how most play areas are tiny, and those cars and people in the far distance are just high quality enough to not stand out unless you stare at and zoom in on them. It is a gorgeous game, running with either a 60 fps targeted performance mode or a higher fidelity though more molasses-feeling quality mode.
I stuck with performance mode for my playthrough and I cannot overstate how impressed I am by a smaller dev putting something of this quality out with their debut project. While human models and faces may look a bit lower fidelity the environments are always stunning. Whether you’re inside a massive building, in your small apartment, or flying around New York it never fails to make my jaw drop at least a few times per level.
The game’s soundtrack helps give that sense of a lived-in, surreal noir cityscape. It sounds like a full-on orchestra with lots of brass, piano, and a grand style that you rarely get in media today (let alone video games). There are two main characters in the game, your detective and his over-the-comms liaison, Sara. The actors do a wonderful job making these characters feel believable despite the story going in some bizarre places. This is a body-swapping, f’ed up world, and you’re nowhere near the top of the food chain. The acting and writing help make that feel real. You’re a low-ranking cop recovering from a massive injury and a liaison who can’t truly fight this world’s power structure.
Wrapping Things Up
Nobody Wants to Die is an incredible experience. Engaging detective gameplay, an incredible soundtrack, and a fascinating noir-yarn come together to create one of my favorite games in a long time.
Nobody Wants to Die
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Beautiful
- Music
- Engaging Gameplay
- Writing
- Voice Acting
CONS
- I need a sequel A.S.A.P.
This game is incredible, cannot recommend it enough.
Very much sounds like my kinda game - while I do like action, often I want to de-stress with games that have nothing trying to kill me where I’ve got to solve puzzles.
Will be picking it up today and squeezing it into my current roster
This sounds awesome. I’d get it, but won’t. The backlog is getting crazier by the minute.
I read that the quality mode enables raytracing and therefore 30fps. Is it truly raytracing?
Great review, think I’ll pick it up right away as it’s quite short.
In on this! My kinda game for sure.
This went onto my wish list immediately!
When somebody has seen every ending and knows what answers should be picked, please ping me! I’m interested to see all of them.
You need to solve what is going on yourself and give the answers that make it clear in-game that your detective is figuring things out properly. It all ends in the same place, just with wildly different possible outcomes.
Thank you! I reached a good ending, and now going through it again for the other ending.
Just rolled credits on this - complex story to understand for the good ending, but a really great one.
The world building is brilliant and really hits the worst of human nature - in a world where people can live forever by transferring their consciousness to new bodies, they need other people to get out of theirs so they can move in.
So you instead “rent” your body and if you can’t afford it are banked so someone richer can have your body - it’s an horrific idea but the game shows people have kind of accepted it as everyone hopes to be one of the lucky ones and live forever.
It’s very much like people accepting inequality nowadays as they think billionaires earned their money and think they’ll one day get rich and don’t want people taking their money if they do.
It’s not a game filled with much hope for humanity but it’s a great detective game and the story really had me hooked…