Our Verdict
Nobody Wants to Die is a stunning homage to noir royalty that provides a fascinating retrofuturistic murder mystery experience. Though it’s brought down by more hand-holding than I’d like, and a few frayed narrative edges, Critical Hit Games has seriously impressed with its ambitious debut.
There he was, Edward Green – an immortal god brought down under the weight of his own gravity and a length of rope from the local supply store. The once-blossoming tree in his atrium – his own personal Eden – a charred husk barely hanging in there like a prize fighter down to his last legs. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Green was murdered, and in Nobody Wants to Die there’s only one man with a worldview cynical enough to see through the layers of high society bullshit obfuscating the truth – detective James Karra.
In 24th-century New York, your body isn’t yours until you’ve paid it off. If you haven’t managed to earn the skin on your back by the time you reach 21, your Ichorite – a transferrable cerebral fluid that houses your very essence – gets put on ice while your body is sold off to the highest bidder. The parallels between how Nobody Wants to Die and Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon handle transhumanism draw themselves – developer Critical Hit Games wears its influences proudly on its sleeve; a recurrent theme throughout the detective game’s five-to-six-hour runtime.
Nobody Wants to Die opens with former baseball star-turned-detective Karra and his wife Rachel catching a detective movie at a drive-in theatre. Before things get too romantic, Karra begins to experience the symptoms of de-sync sickness, which is a side effect of the new body he recently acquired after a major workplace accident he can’t recollect. After medicating, Karra turns to see that Rachel is no longer there – he remembers what happened. He doesn’t have time to lament, though, as he gets a call from his boss: Green is dead and Karra needs to retrieve his Ichorite.
When Karra, assisted remotely by new handler Sara Kai, arrives at Green’s luxurious, albeit lightly barbecued abode to get the goods, he makes a terrible discovery: Green’s Ichorite has also been cooked, rendering the man responsible for legislating immortality in the first place well and truly dead. As Karra and Kai go rogue to investigate they soon find themselves entangled in a seedy web of legislative lobbying and debauchery among the elite.
As noir films are typically produced against the prevailing societal anxieties of their time, Critical Hit actively engages with our own socio-economic paradigm. Taking the trappings of neon-drenched tech-noir classics like Blade Runner and gussying it up in the bold geometries of Art Deco, Nobody Wants to Die doesn’t just use its story beats to illustrate its stark class division. Critical Hit juxtaposes the gritty, fluorescent underbelly of 24th-century New York against the golden, anachronistic opulence synonymous with The Great Gatsby era to exhibit the intense wealth disparity between the ultra-rich who go through bodies like they’re going out of fashion, and the folks in the slums who cling to their hard-earned skin suits for dear life.
I almost feel bad for calling this twisted sci-fi world beautiful, but it truly is. In film noir, the city is often considered its own character, and for me, its dangerous charm is as close to a classic femme fatale as Nobody Wants to Die gets – its greatest deception being the illusion of scale it masterfully conjures, as the actual gameplay takes place in far more condensed areas. I was stunned when Karra first opened his car door, revealing the sprawling city – an experience compounded by a brass swell from the game’s euphonious musical accompaniment.
Critical Hit gets the small stuff right, too, painting details into every nook and cranny. Whether it’s the Orwellian state posters on the walls, a rotary telephone repurposed as an apartment door passcode unit, or the ant-like colony of flying vehicles scurrying across the city’s airways, Nobody Wants to Die offers up provocative snippets with every pan or tilt of the camera.
I’m also thoroughly impressed by how deeply Critical Hit has considered the flaws of immortality. While anyone who’s watched the Netflix adaptation of Altered Carbon will understand the mental toll of switching bodies too often, I was left positively bemused by the email on Karra’s PC detailing the cocktail of issues his pre-loved bucket of bones was kitted out with. In another moment, Karra reminisces over a photo of him with his old pals, jovially lamenting the fact that they’re unlikely to recognize each other anymore.
Having the freedom to explore and uncover all of these little nuggets of worldbuilding goodness is a real joy – one that I felt somewhat robbed of when it came to actually investigating the game’s crime scenes. For the most part, I was led by the hand around each location, stopping only to pluck out one of Karra’s three tools of the trade to detect something – their usefulness limited.
For example, the X-ray tool lets you follow electrical wiring and bullet traces, and peek inside someone’s internals. The UV lamp lets you follow blood trails. It’s pretty pedestrian stuff, but it makes sense that a society that never really expanded past the 20th-century in crucial ways technologically would continue to lean on simple equipment to get the job done. Of course, there is one major advancement that exists to remind us that Nobody Wants to Die is very much a futuristic sci-fi noir – the Reconstructor.
This gorgeously crafted hand-held time machine is by far the most interesting part of the core gameplay loop. By dialing it back and forward, Karra can rewind and fast-forward pockets of spacetime, granting him the ability to relive a crime retroactively and snoop around for clues that may have been destroyed in the process. Sadly, the game doesn’t quite grant you the agency to figure out when and where to use each tool, as it’s often made painfully obvious either through visual highlighting or a suggestive utterance from either Karra or Kai.
The only time I ever felt in the driver’s seat was when I was back at the evidence board in Karra’s apartment. Similarly to Saga’s Mind Place in Alan Wake 2, Karra collates his and Kai’s findings, matching them together to create strands of deduction that advance the investigation. As with everything else in Nobody Wants to Die, these sections are presented handsomely.
I must say that, while I wish I got to use my brain even a smidgen more during the actual detective work, I understand why Critical Hit perhaps wanted to keep things continuously flowing. Traditionally, film noir is predicated on its snappy dialog and brisk pacing to ensure the audience never gets a moment to disconnect or ponder what its red herrings could be for too long – if you’ve watched the likes of Double Indemnity, you’ll get where I’m coming from. By keeping my eyes on the prize at all times, my mind could never wander too far from the narrative being delivered. And, perhaps more importantly, I was never too far away from another great back-and-forth between the two leads.
“At this altitude, the air was so clean that without a smoke I was beginning to suffocate.”
Most of Nobody Wants to Die’s dialog is commandeered by Karra and Kai, placing a huge amount of responsibility on the shoulders of Phillip Sacramento and Keaton Talmadge respectively. I’m elated to say that the pair have absolutely nailed it. Kai’s initial presentation as a jobsworth chasing promotion sets her up as the perfect foil for Karra’s loose-cannon approach to investigation. As the story unfolds she’s gradually won over by Karra – an evolution we get to enjoy in real time.
Karra himself is a wonderfully complex character and is a pleasure to get to know throughout. As we learn more about him – his career switch and love for detective films in particular – it becomes clear that he isn’t your classic noir PI. The contrast between his stylized, cinematic monologues and his more erratic personality sold it for me: he’s cosplaying what he’s seen on the big screen – a homage within a homage.
The way Nobody Wants to Die continuously teases Karra for effectively being a giant nerd is one of my favorite parts of the whole experience. Whether it’s through cliches like him having a smoke while perched on a giant, neon sign, or Kai’s stalwart resistance to any of his flowery exposition, Critical Hit does well to tread the fine line between ‘stoic, hardened veteran,’ and ‘caricature.’ Characterization is bang on across the board, which makes reaching one of the four possible endings all the more bittersweet.
While a few of Nobody Wants to Die’s narrative threads never quite connected fully for me, the broad strokes of Critical Hit’s ambitious murder mystery debut are excellent. Its menagerie of classic and neo-noir influences is brilliantly synthesized, and though it never really asks the big questions about why society has evolved the way it has, it offers a thoughtful exploration of what it’s like for the company store to always be one step away from owning body and soul.
