“Even though we are all immortal, only some of us live like gods.”
Detective James Karra utters this thesis of Nobody Wants to Die early on. In the future New York of Critical Hit Games’ tech noir mystery, death is only an annoyance for most. The oldest person in the city is well over 300 years old, for example, and most people swap one body for the next when the time comes.
One god of New York is Edward Green, purveyor of the world’s immortality and one of the signers of the Declaration of Immortality, granting every US citizen the right to be immortal. Except even living on Mount Olympus, gods can fall.
Karra finds Green hanging from the last cherry blossom tree in his own apartment, charred to the bone with a completely melted ichorite – a physical manifestation of a person’s unique personality, memories, and experiences that wraps around the brain. Green’s dead, and an accident or suicide this was not.
Thus begins Karra and his partner Sara Kai’s investigation of New York’s elite. Like any great pulpy murder mystery, Green isn’t the only victim. More of New York’s gods fall.
Karra’s investigation will uncover a web of political intrigue, capitalistic plots to make the world even worse for the young and poor, and the powerful in compromising positions (who knew dying could be someone’s sexual kink). One truth is abundantly clear throughout Karra’s investigation – capitalism is the true antagonist here.
I won’t go into much more detail – the whole fun of a mystery game is solving it for yourself, after all. By the time the credits roll after five or so hours, Nobody Wants to Die will have told an intriguing story with plenty of details for you to dig up. Though not everything was clear or neatly wrapped up – I didn’t quite pick up on the connection between Karra’s past and the current investigation – the central plot is still well done and overall satisfying. It’s the type of story where you’ll want to immediately jump into a second playthrough to experience how your dialogue choices could have affected things differently or go to YouTube to see how else the game might have ended (which is exactly what I did).
Nobody Wants to Die does a great job of building out its world and letting the player in. Small details, like James remarking that police officers in an old photo probably wouldn’t recognize each other now as they’d all likely have new bodies, go a long way in showing the mental fatigue of living for a century or more. Notes in Karra’s apartment reminding him of his new body’s allergies show that even though people can transfer their consciousness between bodies, those bodies are still human.
Where Nobody Wants to Die falters a bit is with its gameplay. I’ve always found investigations and clue gathering tough to pull off well in video games. Did I discover something on my own, or was the game blatantly guiding me to the highlighted-in-fluorescent clue? At times playing Nobody Wants to Die, I felt like the latter was more the case as I went from highlighted item to highlighted item as Karra and Sara drew conclusions.
I never had to ponder what futuristic tool was needed for a job as the game would prompt the correct one, or Sara and Karra would overtly tell me what I needed to use. Investigating was as simple as using the X-ray tool to follow bullet trajectories or the UV lamp to spot blood trails. The reconstructor was Karra’s most handy tool as it was essentially a time machine, allowing Karra to explicitly see how events unfolded. The reconstructor was a novel concept, though its overuse did take some of the air out of investigating, and I never quite gathered the in-world explanation of exactly how it reconstructed events.
After certain sections, you can piece together gathered clues in Karra’s apartment to advance the investigation. During these sections I felt more like an actual detective. I connected the dots, combining clues to form hypotheses. Karra and Sara would comment on if they were going nowhere – and slap a red X on the clue board – or if I was on the right path with a correct hypothesis. These clue boards take a second to figure out how to navigate in-game, but once you have the hang of them, you’ll be off to the detective races.
Combining a great murder mystery with a cyberpunk world, one where a detective like Karra still enjoys black & white films from the mid-20th century, creates a great success in Nobody Wants to Die. Its world is rich with storytelling possibility, and I wouldn’t mind visiting it again sometime in the future to solve murders in a land where nobody should die.
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