Nobody Wants To Die Review (XSX)
Summary: A pulpy neo noir adventure fans of Altered Carbon and a good walking simulator will love
4
Who wants to live forever?
Nobody Wants to Die is a thought-provoking neo-noir thriller that fans of cyberpunk, mystery games, and retrofuturism are bound to enjoy.
Set several hundred years in the future in the rain-soaked streets of New York Nobody Wants to Die presents a compelling ethical dilemma, what if your consciousness could be extracted and you could live forever by body swapping?
Set in a dystopian vision of New York that seems to have regressed to the 1920s, Nobody Wants To Die presents a world where the rich and powerful prosper from the discovery of a substance called ichorite that allows people’s consciousness to be encoded and transported into another body, making death little more than an inconvenience.
This being America though, the new tech is used to serve the wealthy and powerful, who now treat their bodies as little more than playthings to be discarded and traded in for a newer model whenever they feel. While everyone else is forced into a life of crippling debt as they no longer own their body anymore, they rent them from the government, and any lapse in payment sees your body repossessed and sold to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, your consciousness is transferred to a debtor’s prison for the rest of eternity, or until someone pays off your debt.
Set in a beautiful neo-art nouveau world of 500 ft skyscrapers, never-ending drizzle, and flying cars, you inhabit the brand new body of former baseball star turned detective James Karra, returning to work shortly after being killed on the job. Karra is drawn into a case in which, rich elites are having their ichorite destroyed, killing them permanently.
As Karra and his long-suffering handler Sara slowly unravel the motivations of the killer and begin to connect the dots between the seemingly unrelated victims, they’re pulled into a much larger plot that could unravel the whole of society as they know it.
It’s a thought-provoking, slow burn that had me hooked throughout the five or so hour run time, to the point where I binged the whole game in a single sitting, and was still left pondering my actions and the gloomy ending I managed to achieve by the end of it, through Karas dubious actions.
However, if you’re after an action-packed thriller full of car chases and shootouts, you will be left wanting more.
Much of the action sees you using a clever device that can key into the memories of murder victims to slowly piece together what the scene looked like the moment the crime took place.
This boils down to walking around each crime scene looking for clues, fiddling with your watch, then wandering over to the next area of interest, and doing it all over again. Kara also has a handy portable X-ray that he mostly uses to follow wiring to secret switches and busted fuse boxes.
It’s novel, to begin with, but can get a tad repetitive by the end, and there’s a level of hand-holding at times that can feel a little obnoxious.
The other major part of the experience is putting all your clues together to figure out your next steps on Kurras’ caseboard. Like a simple version of the Mind Palace from Alan Wake 2 you have to answer questions by linking clues to them revealing the truth.
This was my least favourite part of the whole experience because it either felt habitual and much like in Ace Attorney like you were trying to figure out the logic of who created the board, rather than of the case itself since every connection ultimately only had one right answer. I would often brute force the answers by trying every clue I had until the correct answer presented itself because I couldn’t figure out the logical thread I was supposed to be following.
Thankfully you only need to complete a handful of boards and the rest of the experience is so engaging that it didn’t dampen the experience too much.
Despite the simplistic gameplay, Nobody Wants to Die impresses with some top-tier presentation, thanks to its use of Unreal Engine 5, which makes the game sing on Xbox Series X. WIth some clever level design and a little visual trickery, it not only looks phenomenal but also runs well as you explore the highrises, slums and dirigible bars of Manhattan circa 2329.
The soundtrack is also rich and jazzy and works well with the neo-noir flavour of the world around you, which feels a lot grander than what is presented and as if Keras’s story is just a small part of a much grander tale.
The best part though is the voice acting, everyone on the cast is superb especially Keras and Sara, who have brilliant chemistry and do a wonderful job of normalizing the retro-futuristic world that both of them inhabit and giving a damn about the sky-high, yet deeply personal stakes that Nobody Wants to Die presents its audience with.
Your actions feel like they have some weight too, and Nobody Wants to Die features multiple endings based on decisions you make at key moments in your investigation. Although, achieving ‘the good’ ending is more a matter of being a Boy Scout than doing what may seem harsh but ultimately better for society in the long haul.
Final Thoughts
Nobody Wants to Die is a gripping, thought-provoking cyberpunk thriller that’ll sink its claws into you from beginning to end.
It may not be the most action-packed experience, but fans of a good slow-burn mystery, with a penchant for the philosophical will love it.
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