Nobody Wants to Die is a detective adventure game set in 2329. The game is built by a small game studio from Poland, Critical Hit Games. This game has been reviewed on the PS5. The game is also available on Xbox and PC.

Story

An interactive sci-fi story built in a neo-noir retro futuristic New York, where you play as a detective called James Karra. The main purpose of the game is to solve crimes. This is purely a story driven game, with nothing in the way of combat as it is more puzzle based. You solve crimes using some interesting and advanced technologies.

One of the main plot points is that you live in a world where nobody dies, but the way it’s done asks the question, are you even living? Don’t want to say more to avoid additional spoilers.

The game can be finished in about 6 hours, which isn’t a long time. But this game does not beat around the bush, you don’t have some small crimes that get harder as you go, you are solving a big crime right from the get go.

The way the game plays out, it almost feels like an interactive movie, where you control the protagonist, but the story is almost pre written. Almost.

Graphics

The graphics are really good, if you don’t put them under a microscope.

The game is built on Unreal Engine 5, which as you might know is a beast. There are some visuals that will absolutely blow you away.

One of the strangest graphical issues I faced was when using the torch in dark places. The shadows looked so artificial that it made using the torch painful. The shadows were pixelated and boxy, hopefully you can see it in the picture below.

There were some other oddities, but again these were only when looking for it. E.g. The windshield of the car gets instantly wet once the wiper swipes back. It clears as it wipes forward, and stays clear as it wipes back, but as soon as it completes, the water suddenly fills the windshield again. Am I knit picking? Yes. Not a deal breaker, but this is where the smallness of the studio becomes apparent. Would I still recommend this game? Absolutely.

If you want the full visual spectacle, get the game on PC and push everything to the max, your eyes will thank you!

Gameplay

The game does not give you a gun and you can’t jump. But you can sprint, you get some cool detective tools for detecting various things. Does this matter? Absolutely not, because it’s not the point of the game.

There is an element of randomness in the game, and your choices do matter how the narrative plays out. They even have an interesting mechanic where some dialog options are locked/hidden based on what you did previously.

It’s a cool idea, which can help increase replayability if that’s what you want to do.

You get to reconstruct crime scenes in a cool way, and piece it all together. Seeing it finally come together is extremely satisfying and you can keep replaying to see all the various angles. This is a great concept and I hope they come out with other games exploring this concept more.

Performance and Stability

The game does give you two modes on the PlayStation 5, performance or graphics.There is probably a hardware limitation here, but playing on the high quality mode dropped the frames significantly, making the game quite difficult to play. The performance mode, while buttery smooth, left something to be desired.

During my run through the game did not crash even once. I didn’t face any issues except probably once where a random person popped into my view and I couldn’t see anything other than this random torso. But that’s probably a byproduct of the game mechanic.

Summary

Overall the game Nobody wants to die is a great game to casually pick up and play. Something that won’t be a drag, won’t leave you side-questing and still provides a fun and engaging experience. I highly recommend this game. Glad to see a small studio pull something like this off.