"Nobody Wants to Die" first play through

I played this game over the last three days. The game is a noir mystery story about New York City in the future when people can transfer their consciousness to a new body. The game opens with a case of a rich politician who died permanently due to damage to the substance / mechanism that allows this transfer to be done. (Usually people can be saved even after the death of their body).

I was feeling pretty hooked when I first jumped into it for a few reasons. The graphics and visual style of the game are a lot better than a lot of the games I play. Secondly, I had been playing "Lamplight City" before jumping into this and the contrast was pleasing because the writing in "Lamplight City" had felt kind of mediocre and safe. "Nobody Wants to Die" felt edgier right from the start.

So, overall, I felt mixed about this one. In some ways I quite liked it but in some ways I felt disappointed. I think the first cause of disappointment was just that it is quite short. I finished in under 6.5 hours and just three play sessions. I was hoping for something a bit more involved and substantial.

I think the biggest reason might be that I didn't get a very good ending. There seems to be some branching and various outcomes are possible. The ending I got wasn't very happy and it seemed to leave some things unresolved like specifically what happened to the murderer.

 I did like the story for the most part although it got a bit too psychological and head-trippy for me. There are definitely cliched elements but that is only to be expected in a story that bills itself as a "noir detective story". In some ways though the game felt a bit railroaded. It promises that your decisions affect the story but a lot of it felt pretty one-directional. I noticed afterwards that it bills itself as "an interactive story" which seems to place the emphasis on it as a narrative rather than as a game.

I thought the mechanics were interesting. There is a device that allows you to reconstruct past events. At first I was worried that using this was too complicated and I wouldn't be able to remember all the commands but I seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly. (Part of this process seems a bit silly and doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it didn't bother me while playing. That is more what I thought afterwards.) But this is another aspect of the game feeling a bit one-directional. Basically it is constantly telling you exactly what to do and so in some ways the investigation mostly consists of following the cues that the game explicitly gives you about how and when to use the various gadgets. This is kind of mixed because it definitely reduces frustration with the process of investigating and allows for a more complicated narrative of the events to unfold but it also takes away a lot of the player's agency in the game. 

Another interesting aspect was the deduction board. I have played a number of different detective games and this aspect of forming specific conclusions from the evidence seems to be a difficult nut to crack. I have seen a number of different ways of handling this and none of them have really felt completely satisfying although they all have points in their favor. The deduction game in "Nobody Wants to Die" is interesting visually in that is played on any floor by setting up your device and then placing evidence "pieces" (they are presented very much like game pieces) on a board of hexagonal tiles. The pieces will be linked by lines. This process is kind of interesting but again, the game explicitly tells you when you are right and when you are wrong.

My main conclusion after finishing and writing some notes in my notebook about it was that it is begging me to play it again. It seems to really want me to try messing around with it and exploring some different options and to try to get a different ending. I want to do this to see how much variety is actually achievable and how much the story is predetermined. I am unsure though whether I want to jump right back in or wait awhile. There is a save file from near the end of the game that I can use to redo just that part. (The save system is an autosave that overwrites the previous save.) Or since the game is not that long (and it might go a bit faster the second time through). I could start again from the beginning.

As far as whether I recommend it or not, it is hard to draw a conclusion. I feel like I need to mess around with it more to figure out the whole of the game and whether additional playthroughs add enough value to make it worth the purchase price. ( I got it on sale for about 450 NT which is about 14 USD.) My feeling is that it is not worth the full price of over 20 USD.