I likeCyberpunk 2077. It’s a game that I feel a persistent pull to return to — especially after thePhantom Libertyexpansion — despite already having played it through to completion twice. I’m the kind of person who uninstalls a game the second I hit credits, more focused on playing a broad array of games than I am in playing anything very deeply. So the fact that I felt compelled to return to Cyberpunk 2077 tells me that it does, in fact, have a hold on me. Though it has frequently frustrated me, I can’t argue with my own behavior.
Nobody Wants To Die Captures The Blade Runner Vibe
Still, it wasn’t the game I wanted it to be — at least not fully. I loveBlade Runner, and despite Cyberpunk’s marketing focusing so heavily on its sunnier take on the genre, I held out hope that it would deliver the kind of neon-drenched, rainy metropolis I go back to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece for over and over. 2077 did offer those sights intermittently, but that aesthetic wasn’t really what CD Projekt Red was going for. Cyberpunk was doing something different and while that’s laudable, I still wanted something else.
If you’ve ever felt a similar pull and/or a similar frustration, Nobody Wants To Die is a must play. I’m still only about a third of the way through the game, but it is delivering evocative cyberpunk vistas at a clip that 2077 just couldn’t match.
That’s partially because Nobody Wants To Die is a strictly linear game, which allows developer Critical Hit to carefully craft each skybox. Cyberpunk 2077 often served up sights that wowed me — like a huge wall of skyscrapers that reached to the sky, filling your entire field of view — but those moments were fewer and farther between because the game was offering an open world that you could look at from any location and angle you chose. Plus, those sights were enticing because they stoked your imagination of what you could do once you got to those places. After playing the game for a while, you figured out that the answer was, “Not much.”
Blade Runner Meets BioShock
Nobody Wants To Die, by contrast, doesn’t pretend that it’s going to let you loose on its futuristic New York City. It’s a highly curated experience, and its strict linearity and minimal interactivity mean that you’re only ever focused on taking in the world around you and the story unfolding within it. And that story is pretty interesting genre storytelling in the tradition of Blade Runner, with a retrofuturist spin that will hit hard for fans ofBioShockandFallout. The game is set in the New York of 2329, and our era is now referred to as ‘The Mortal Age’. Humanity has solved the pesky issue of mortality, but what should be an unalloyed good has, through the innovation of capitalism, been replaced with a hellish payment plan. Thanks to a substance called Ichorite, humans can pass their consciousness from one body to another. But, to do so, they must continually pay into a subscription service. And because new physiques are auctioned off, regular working class people tend to inherit bodies with illnesses, chronic pain, or worse.
It’s playing with some of the same ideas as Altered Carbon, the sci-fi novel which was adapted into a Netflix series starring Joel Kinnaman and Anthony Mackie, but the ideas still feel fresh here. The game’s portrayal of a capitalist future where immortality — the most mythic, impossible dream humanity ever dreamed — has been reduced to just another bill rigged to screw over working people is dark and bleakly resonant.
The actual gameplay is less exciting than its ideas and presentation. Mostly, your hard-boiled detective character, James Karra, walks around murder scenes, searching for bits that the UI indicates are interactive, interacting with them, then moving on to the next interactive bit. We’ve been doing these kinds of crime scene investigations in games for over a decade now, and it just isn’t particularly interesting. Piecing the case together using little holographic statues on James' apartment floor is more fun, but mostly you won’t be here for the gameplay.
No, you’re here for the sights Nobody Wants To Die has to show you, And those are things you wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Just kidding, that’s Blade Runner. But, more than most cyberpunk games, Nobody Wants To Die comes close to realizing on screen the evocative beauty of Roy Batty’s monologue to Deckard on that rain-drenched roof.
