WordPlayer: Nobody Wants To Die Shows the Possibilities – and Limitations – of Detective Adventures

Deduction - giving players a mystery and then empowering them to solve it - is one of the hardest mechanics to get right in a narrative game. Getting a player to a point where they can accurately and correctly trace a path through a crime and land on the correct suspect and motive, unpack the specifics of how they committed the act in question, and arrive, alongside the character, at the right conclusion - all while making them feel like they solved it themselves without the solution being hand-fed to them - takes a lot of deft hands working in tandem. 

The conclusion isn't satisfying if the writing is muddy or too obvious. If the mechanics carry you too much, there's no sense of accomplishment, but if they really let you flounder then players who aren't keeping up will really struggle. If you get it right, it's magic - but most of the games that really nail this feeling are small-scale and/or text-heavy.

Nobody Wants To Die is, underneath a lot of aesthetic trappings and worldbuilding, a game about solving a case. There's a dead body, seemingly a suicide, but something's amiss, and more bodies soon show up. As a player, you must, at least in theory, figure out the connection between these corpses and deduce the story behind these crimes. 

If the mechanics carry you too much, there's no sense of accomplishment, but if they really let you flounder then players who aren't keeping up will really struggle.

You play as James Karra, a New York detective living in the year 2329. In the game's version of the future, the secret to a sort of immortality has been discovered and then immediately co-opted by capitalism. Adults no longer own their bodies, and must, in essence, pay rent to stay alive every year, lest their "ichorite" - their mind and soul, more or less - be sent to the "bank" until someone can afford a new body for them. The death of a body is no problem if you can simply afford the new body of a recently bank-deposited individual. But the first dead guy in the game - a man of extreme wealth and influence - has had their ichorite destroyed, and is thus truly dead.

James, for his sins (and low wage), is stuck in a body with significant dependency issues, one that requires a steady pill intake if he wants to starve off the memories of his dead wife, whose ichorite was destroyed in an incident you'll eventually learn more about as you play through the game. It's up to him to solve the crime - which is to say, to some extent, that it's up to you, the player, to solve the crime… or maybe it's not, really, because the case in Nobody Wants To Die will essentially resolve itself as you play it.

A futuristic, ultra-detailed, six-hour detective game is right up my alley. It's the kind of thing that I tend to enjoy almost by default. And I did enjoy Nobody Wants To Die quite a bit - but I also find myself thinking a lot about the limitations of the design decisions and sacrifices the game made to hit this level of fidelity.

I finished Nobody Wants To Die, but I did so without totally grasping the full logic of the case I solved. By the end (no spoilers), I could tell you some of the broad strokes of what happened. If you asked me to give you a bit of a brief summary of what had happened in the plot, I could have done that. I could tell you the few narrative-critical dialogue choices I made that led to the ending I got (what you'd probably call the "bad" ending, although getting the "good" ending, which really isn't any rosier, is guided more by the philosophy of your dialogue choices than their accuracy).  But, I realized, I couldn't get too specific about the case. I might not be able to answer any questions someone might ask. The game told me that I'd figured the case out, albeit not super neatly, even with the bad ending. But had I, really?

I finished Nobody Wants To Die, but I did so without totally grasping the full logic of the case I solved.

Nobody Wants To Die is a very cool game, full of neat mechanics and concepts. The experience largely involves revisiting crime scenes and using your futuristic tech to recreate exactly what happened. You'll rewind and fast-forward animated holograms to watch as events play out while searching for clues to progress the scene. Occasionally you'll break out a luminol spray or an X-ray device to track a specific element in the environment. But more often, the investigations solve themselves. There are very clear guidelines for what to do, where to move, and how to act. You are the one pushing the buttons, but the game is the one solving the case.

This extends to the deduction puzzles in the game, where you line up clues and bits of information against each other to reach conclusions. If you're really keeping track of what's happening, you can lay things out logically the first time. But if you're like me, you'll hit a few points in the process where you are not really sure, and you'll simply test every suggestion until the game gives you the literal green light. The game will patiently explain to you in the text why every wrong answer is wrong, which is a real feat for the writers, as the attention to detail is extraordinary. But I sure did struggle to ingest all the information the game was throwing at me and to correctly predict in advance which deductions would be right or wrong.

Nobody Wants To Die is a game of both stunning visuals and fairly limited means, which is an interesting combination. It looks and feels very expensive for a game that sells for about a third of the price of a modern AAA experience, but you can see the things that have not been included. Investigating corpses and crime scenes alone, even with time-rewind recreations, means that Nobody Wants To Die is a lonely experience - and that the developers were able to cut back a lot on animations and fully rigged characters. This is smart in terms of delivering a high-fidelity game on a budget, but it also means that so much of the case revolves around characters you never actually meet. You hear names, watch sequences play out, and talk to a few characters through your earpiece, but that's it.

Nobody Wants To Die is a game of both stunning visuals and fairly limited means, which is an interesting combination.

This means, that in the deduction sequences, I often wasn't really sure who James was talking about when he pieced events together. There are a lot of references to things that happened off-screen, or characters I never met. There's a more rounded story in here about James himself, about the handler in his ear, a woman named Sara, about the rights people have to their own bodily autonomy, the corruption at the heart of wealth, and the perils of over-reliance on technology under capitalism. All of that's great, and interesting, and fleshes out the world. I could talk to you about the world and the main characters all day - but the case at the game's heart, not so much.

Should I have been able to finish Nobody Wants To Die without really understanding the case I more-or-less solved? It's a complicated question. I recently played No Case Should Remain Unsolved, a very different kind of detective game, one based entirely around words and timelines, organizing thoughts until the truth emerges. That game, I thought, did a great job of guiding me towards enough of the truth that I could reach a point where it laid its final twist on me. The Ace Attorney games, which obviously carry a very different tone, hit the balance well - if you're a bit behind, they can catch you up after some educated guesswork. Deduction games like The Curse of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol require that you know most of what's going on while allowing you to fumble over the occasional hurdle. In Nobody Wants To Die, you never really have to solve anything - James will solve the case, and it's up to you to try and keep up.

On top of that is the fundamental question for any mystery text, one that is difficult to answer, but which dictates how an audience member might approach it: whose fault is it, exactly, that I didn't understand everything? Is it intrinsic to the game's storytelling, a fault in how the mystery unfolds? Or is it, simply, that I didn't pay enough attention? Was the game carrying me in a way it didn't have to carry other players? Were my "oh, okay?" moments "A-ha!" moments for others? If I failed over and over again in an action game, it might be that working to improve my skills was the most satisfying way to progress. But that's not really an option here - muddling through the case is the default, rather than a choice you opt into.

...whose fault is it, exactly, that I didn't understand everything?

I may have enjoyed deducing the crime more if I'd done a better job at paying attention to the right information. But I also might have been miserable if the game had required that I prove myself before progressing through the story. It's a hard balance to hit, and it's a question that can make detective games hard to review. Is this story unclear, or is it actually just smarter than me?

Despite how negative a lot of this might sound, I did quite like playing through Nobody Wants To Die. It's very engaging on a pure aesthetic front, and the worldbuilding is fantastic - the corporatization of the body is such a rich theme, and the idea of not owning your own flesh and blood is scarily plausible the more I think about it. Maybe I'm holding the game to an unreasonable standard because it's a game, and I'm meant to be in control - I didn't totally follow the case in The Big Sleep either, but I was reading about those characters, not embodying them.

The reaction from other players has been ecstatic. This is the kind of small-scale, high-polish, graphically intense narrative experience we don't see very often, an AA throwback that I'm glad to see succeed. Maybe one day I'll play it through again, with enough information in my head this time to better follow the case.