Nobody Wants to Die Steam Charts & Stats

It really is about the journey and not the destination. Because man, what a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ trainwreck of a finale. The gameplay was fun. The banter was fun. The setting was fun. Yet somehow, just like Stephen King, the writers can't write a proper ending to save their lives. Believe me, I had to double check when the plot twist happened because it was such a lackluster nothing-burger with a side of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I really thought in the first half, "No way the writers would do that. That would actually just be retarded." Now we both look like we ride the short-bus. I call the window seat though. String together choices along the way with the decision making ability of a schizophrenic with advanced lead poisoning to achieve a substandard outcome. Amazing. The real meaning behind this game is that you must take your meds. If you don't, you get the inability to write a coherent/decent story past the 2nd half of a game.

All style, no substance. Nobody Wants to Die bills itself as an ‘interactive detective story’, a label that is unfortunately very literal. First off, the style. The game’s retro-futuristic dieselpunk version of New York is a sight to behold. Unfortunately the game does little of interest with it beyond a few setpieces and the prologue. This only gets worse as the game rolls on and late-game segments are much more generic looking. In some cases indistinguishable from something set in the modern day real world. There’s also the time-manipulation mechanic which I do have to admit looks pretty cool. And now the substance. Or lack thereof. The game’s classification as a detective game only extends as far as it being a game in which you play as a detective. In all other metrics it is an abject failure. Like most detective games, gameplay involves examining crime scenes to piece together a sequence of events, then taking collected evidence to piece together the theory behind the incident. The examination parts are insultingly linear. Often you don’t even get to choose which piece of evidence to investigate next. The evidence examination theoretically allows for more player freedom, with you needing to place the correct pieces of evidence as answers in a growing web of questions. But there’s only one correct answer and only one correct path to it. Combined with the vague questions, this gameplay segment boils down to trying every piece of evidence on each question until the game lets you continue. Overly linear gameplay can work in service of a strong narrative. Pity then that Nobody Wants to Die does not have one. The writing posits many fascinating ideas and implications about its characters and world, but follows through on exactly none of them. Preferring to revel in spectacle and hard-boiled detective cliches instead. Nobody Wants to Die is indeed an interactive detective story in the same way that a book or movie is. And it doesn’t have the writing chops to back up that linearity. Unless you have a particular hankering for pretending to be a detective without any of that thinking business, skip this one. One final note: this game very likely contains undisclosed AI generated content. Small stickers throughout the game, including in the area leading to James’ apartment and in the slums appear to be AI generated, with garbled text and colors that clash with the surrounding environment.

Great story and atmosphere, but the controls are absolutely terrible. That almost ruins the whole experience. Since the setting is so good, I'm still giving it a positive review—you just have to be very patient so you don't lose your temper because of the lousy controls.

The more I played the story the more I hated the MC and the story. The first two parts are of game where really interesting tho. But once you get near the end, the only way to finish is to hate play.

It's a noir game anyway, but the problem is the game have a pacing problem in narration. But either way, it's one of most beautiful walking simulator game I ever seen. So I give it positive.

Short and sweet, easy to get the good ending. Don't come expecting a lot of shooter action, is a story driven game where you are a detective, as in, actual investigation detective. The graphic side is just freaking stunning and the music was amazing, the overall setting was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome and the first 10 minutes of the game hooked me immediately.

TL,DR: Great visuals, setting and atmosphere, *almost*, but not quite, ruined by undercooked mechanics and apparent lack of proper QA testing. Got this game at random, had no expectations. The ambience and visuals are great, especially the cityscapes. Some late-game scenes are very cinematic. The story is technically solid, but ruined by the broken presentation. Unfortunately, to get there, you have to slog through the first half of the game, which becomes more boring and less polished the further you advance. I got so annoyed at one point, that I started making a list of issues I have with this game. It's a wall of text, but nearly EVERY issue could have been caught and fixed if QA did a proper job. 1. More than half the secondary NPCs all share the same face across crime scenes. 2. Some controls are uneditable. If you edit the ones which aren't locked, in-game messages still mention the outdated controls. 3. Very early in the game, you see very obviously AI-generated stickers on the walls of the corridor leading to your apartment. Instant points off, sorry. 4. Half-baked UI. Inoperable scroll bars on some messages. Inconsistent tool prompt approach: early in the game, you are prompted to take out your tools manually and use them, but from the second scene on, you just click the prompt to start using what you need. Plus, you never, ever need to use any tools where a prompt doesn't ask you to. 5. Reconstructor automatically jumps to the beginning of a new segment once it's revealed. Which interrupts the flow immensely. It gets better for a minute in late game where the UI changes for one scene, but that's it. Cyberpunk 2077 had this much better implemented. 6. Transitions between locations are abrupt. One minute I'm at my apartment, the other I'm inside Icarus. This gets better in the late game, but why the lack of attention in the first half? 7. Cause and effect are often jumbled or miss-able. During Icarus investigation, I was getting remarks from Sara about stuff "we found" on Kovalev before I even started analyzing his clues. And as I found Salma's scarf, the protagonist mentioned seeing it on a photo while Sara confirmed it, but the photograph of Salma is super easy to miss during the evidence stage. 8. Many of the conclusions the protagonist jumps to make no sense to the player - it's almost as if a portion of the scenes were intended to be in the game but got cut out, with nothing added to fill in the gaps. 9. Annoying inconsistencies like, a few scenes after grabbing a special bottle from a safe, the protagonist sees another one like that and says that he "saw" one like it before. You didn't "see" it, you took it and you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ drank it. In a notebook, the visual representation has one text, and the UI text has something else. Protagonist's reactions to names of people who apparently mean something to him but were never introduced in the game. Out-of-line remarks like "THAT's what you were hiding!" before the player even interacts with the prompt that makes "that" appear, whatever it is. Pointless prompts that do nothing. 10. Repeated VO lines. 11. There's no real "investigating" happening, to be honest. All you do is use the magic-wand "reconstructor" and look for prompts to click. You can't fail or make a mistake. If you can't find something, there's a "hint mode" which tells you what to do at a push of a button. On top of that, the "investigation" process feels disjointed: there is one instance where you find a bootprint on a flyer while investigating a victim using a UV lamp. The logical thing would be to check the victim's boot to see if it's the same distinctive pattern. Nope, just gotta keep reconstructing with your magic gadget. Cherry on top: the thing doesn't just simulate events - it literally, physically rebuilds stuff, apparently. Which raises a million questions and completely destroys any suspension of disbelief you may have started with. Also, unfortunately, it just plain gets boring by the third crime scene. 12. No journal. Unless you're playing through the game in one sitting, good luck remembering who's who the next day. Because let's face it, the story isn't that gripping. 13. The writing seems good, but I get the feeling the English translation is lacking and doesn't really help connecting the dots. 14. In at least one major scene, a character explicitly tells the protagonist what to NOT do. But the player is not presented with an option not to. It's not a cutscene or anything, the new objective just pops up and you can't not do it. And your car which you could've taken to leave, just disappears magically. 15. The "grand reveal" reconstruction in the early endgame is pretty damn misleading due to the suspect's model.

Narrative walking sim in a neo-noir setting. Didn't research this before buying/playing but ended up enjoying regardless. Fifth Element meets Altered Carbon. Visually stunning, appropriate soundtrack, and great voice acting.

Pros: - Great Worldbuilding and Visual Design. The vibes are immaculate. - Moody soundtrack and suitably noir tone to everything. - Gameplay is [b] mostly[/b] satisfying - Story and dialogue are well written, [b] for the first two thirds of the game. [/b] Cons: - The game will only let you see clues in the order it wants you to. Noticed some blood in the environment, and you want to inspect it or use the uv lamp to see if theres a trail? The game either won't let you or will only make any trail or forensic evidence visible when they want you to see it. This happened to me several times, and it was annoying every time. You gave me these gadgets and you put me in the role of a detective, LET ME DEDUCE STUFF ON MY OWN. - The story and the writing has some pretty fundamentally fatal flaws: 1. Often, your partner will tell you to do or not do something, which made it feel like you might have a choice between doing what she wanted, or what the protagonist wanted. Sometimes this was the case. Other times it was not. For instance, at one point she straight up tells you to stop what you're doing, and go somewhere else for something urgent. I ran out of the area I was in to where the car had been outside when the level started, and it had de-spawned. From what I can tell online, this is intentional, as the devs seemingly needed you to ignore her to progress the story the way they wrote it. You cannot choose to do what is arguably the sane and non-self-destructive thing to do in that moment despite an NPC explicitly drawing attention to it and asking you to. Absoloutely baffling as a writing decision in a game that highlights player choice as a mechanic. 2. There were several times where a dialogue option appeared, and the tone that it ended up being read in, or the apparent intent behind the line was completely different to what I read it as. Thankfully, this never seemed to happen in any dialogue that actually mattered or changed anything, so thats something. 3. As someone who loves choice-based games, I was appalled to see that both: a. the choices seemed to be largely pointless, and b. the ones that did matter, [b]seem to be actively detrimental to the experience of the narrative being satisfyingly told.[/b] The biggest issue with the story: [spoiler]the "murderer" or "stranger" as he is subtitled is in your head and is actually just some weird symptom of jumping bodies too often that everyone eventually experiences[/spoiler], and you only learn this, if you choose one of two options in the third last section/level of the game, and even then it's not super clear in that moment, and doesn't become so until closer to the end. This means if you choose the wrong option, like I did, you play the game for another hour to an hour and a half, become baffled at wtf was going on in the ending, and the mystery isn't resolved. In an investigation, is that a conceivable consequence for getting the deduction wrong? Yes absolutely. Is that confusion and bafflement an acceptable ending for a game of this length that has no way of rewinding to earlier scenes without restarting the entire game? [b]Absolutely not.[/b] Especially when said information leans on one of the worst writing tropes they could have possibly chosen. You don't have to make all the endings happy if you're going to have multiple endings, but at minimum it should be satisfying. As much as Silent Hill F was annoying for [spoiler]forcing you to get a bad ending on the first playthrough even if you knew from the start to not take the pills[/spoiler], it was satisfying on it's own, and it is possible to be content with leaving the game there. Here, from the ending I got and reading about the other three, it seems there's only one satisfying ending to the game and it only depends on two choices. One you make an hour prior, and one you make one minute before credits roll. [b]And I cannot stress this enough, there is no chapter replay, or manual saving.[/b] I'm not about to spend another 5 hours playing this when I know around four of them don't matter, and I've already solved those crime scenes before.

Looks gorgeous, but if you wanted more for gameplay than the braindance mini-game from Cyberpunk, you're going to be disappointed.