Nobody Wants To Die Is Pure Noir Perfection

In the first five minutes of the new cyberpunk noir game Nobody Wants to Die, the main character runs through a list of genre tropes in record time. He pounds down a bottle of pills, takes a swig of alcohol from his flask (while another unopened bottle of moonshine sits in the background), gets sad about his dead wife, and talks about being a disgraced detective who plays fast and loose with the law. This all happens before he gets a call from the police chief letting him know that he’s getting reinstated for a high-profile case. I love it.

Nobody Wants to Die, from developer Critical Hit Games, is a loving homage to classic noir films. Sure, the game is set in a retro-futuristic New York City full of floating cars and science that makes people live forever, but at its core it’s just a pulpy crime thriller. It doesn’t subvert the tropes of the genre and it’s better for it, instead opting to be a fun, tropey mystery that plays it all incredibly straight. Critical Hit has built a wonderfully gritty noir world here, one that’s worth spending time in.

The crime that kicks off the story is the death of a man named Green, responsible for this futuristic city’s biggest achievement: immortality. In Nobody Wants to Die, people are able to transfer their consciousness between bodies. Even when your body dies, you can just buy a new one, though it isn’t cheap. Now Green is dead, and the killer did the job so well he won’t get a chance to come back. From here, the five-to-six hour tale sprints towards its conclusion. That short runtime is a godsend, as it feels perfectly fit for the pulpy adventure.

As disgraced but temporarily reinstated detective James Karra, you go to a series of crime scenes in order to unravel a grand conspiracy. What starts as an apparent suicide quickly becomes something more sinister, with the entire upper echelon of New York society somehow involved. In this regard, Nobody Wants to Die is doing its own take on noir classics like Chinatown, and it works really well. Of course this story has the added element of sci-fi detective tools, so Karra gets to rewind crime scenes to reconstruct what happened. This is the main thing you’ll be doing: scrubbing backwards and forwards through the events of a crime in search of clues that help you piece together exactly what happened.

There are a handful of other tools at your disposal (a UV lamp to see old blood trails, an X-ray to find secret compartments, etc.) but the gameplay itself is fairly straightforward and hand-holdy. I don’t actually have a problem with that, as each clue is primarily an excuse for Karra and his partner Sara to talk through the case and its particulars, giving you new information. You’re given just enough to do to feel occupied without focus being pulled from the main draw, the elaborate mystery at the game’s center. Most of my time at crime scenes was spent listening attentively to dialogue and trying to wrap my head around the case.

Crime scenes are also Nobody Wants to Die’s most stunning moments to just look at. That is true even with the game’s first big set piece, a massive penthouse with a grand staircase and a huge cherry tree in the center of it all. When you first get there the entire room is ablaze, including the tree. As you reconstruct the timeline, you can rewind and watch the flames flicker and die down in reverse as color comes back into the tree’s leaves. It’s pretty spectacular. A floating bar and a secret sex club also make appearances, and each one is a delightful playground to walk around in, even if it’s just to look at all the details while listening to dialogue. That dialogue is also wonderfully written. Karra and Sara do the bulk of the talking, and they constantly hit on noir tropes without making them seem tired.

That visual splendor extends to the rest of Nobody Wants to Die, it’s part of its very essence. The entire world of the game is built on a stunning aesthetic that blends 40’s flare with Blade Runner grit. It’s a mashup of art deco decor and purely industrial metal. It’s incredibly evocative just on sight, in much the same way that BioShock’s Rapture is. The path through the world you take is just as directed as the gameplay segments at crime scenes, but it never feels constricting thanks to the incredible level of detail in every space you do get to explore. Everything in Nobody Wants to Die has a place in a larger tapestry, be that the conspiracy you are trying to solve or the city of New York itself. The game’s ending (or endings, since there are multiple) don’t quite tie up all the fascinating threads and world-building with the same excellent execution as the rest of the narrative, but it didn’t put too sour of a taste in my mouth. I had a good ride, even if the finale was a bit lackluster.

What surprised me most in my time with Nobody Wants to Die was its deep lore. The premise of a future without death isn’t just a shallow idea that starts the mystery, it’s a moral and ethical quandary that Critical Hit Games investigates at every turn. In 2329 New York, we hear talk of bodies as literal government property. That’s as horrific an idea as you would imagine, and the game digs into this with further details like drinking and smoking being illegal so as to not ruin a body for its next owner, a subscription fee you must pay to use your body, and the emergence of a new death kink for rich people who can afford to buy poor bodies and take them over just to get killed in for a quick high before returning to their old body. It’s a biting allegory of wealth inequality and how rich people see poor people as a literal commodity to control. Learning more about this world is one of the best parts of Nobody Wants to Die and the flavor text you can find is full of interesting tidbits that only add to your understanding of the crimes at its center. This game came out of nowhere for me, but its tightly paced film noir mystery is built on such a fascinating world that it’s quickly become one of my favorite sleeper hits of 2024.

.