Nobody Wants to Die

Do you remember, in Black Panther, when Killmonger had a point until he decided to go full bonkers heartless villain because that’s what villains are supposed to do? Or, in The Batman, when Riddler had a point until the third act, when he decides to ruin Gotham in a way that betrays his own history and ideals? I thought a lot about these moments during Nobody Wants to Die, which also boasts an antagonist who wants to violently shake the status quo… until everything about him suddenly changes – for the worse.

The futuristic setting shares a lot with Altered Carbon’s, showing us a world where rich people are, for all intents and purposes, immortal, having the financial means to transfer their consciousness to other bodies even after death. Middle-class people, like our protagonist James Karra, can also do that, but their new bodies are not beautiful and athletic; they come with addiction, trauma, allergies, and a hefty bill behind them. Now, poor people… well, all these bodies must come from somewhere, right?

One night, our James Karra, a 120-year-old gruff cop tormented enough to think things like “A lit cigar pressed against a wound that never heals. That’s me,” is watching an old black and white movie at an open cinema at the top of Times Square. It’s raining heavily, but the woman in red by his side doesn’t seem to care. They flirt and joke with each other. It’s his late wife, Rachel. She’s not really there. When he snaps out of the hallucination, Karra receives a call from his boss, who is not very keen to give work to an old veteran on sick leave – Karra’s a legend, but, as his new partner Sara puts it, his legend is more of a cautionary tale.

The Rachel scene exemplifies the problem: Karra is not really that well in the head. He often sees things that aren’t there, like dead wives and glowing tentacles of ichorite (the substance that allows consciousness transference) growing and taking over objects – a common symptom of changing bodies too much, but which seems to be getting much worse than usual. Karra, of course, thinks he can handle it. Men…

Sara will be his liaison officer with official access to the new Edward Green case, which the chief wants handled off the books. Green is a powerful man – so powerful he’s got the keys to the city –, and he has apparently died in an accident, so Karra is to go to the man’s home – the last floor of a building, high above the clouds –, and retrieve the dude’s ichorite.

There’s this breathtaking shot very early on when Karra opens his car door, and we see a whole world beneath him: thousands of flying cars caught in traffic during the heavy rain, holograms of beautiful women and pulsating ads, skyscrapers that seem to stretch on forever, blocking the sun. New York has become a claustrophobic vertical city, where the poor live on the ground floor – stashed with the garbage and the ruins of the world – while the rich live in their own private Mount Olympus above the clouds: we can barely spot the ground, but we most certainly can’t see the top. The rain is acidic, and the air is mostly toxic due to pollution, but these are problems literally below the rich. On our car, we find the contract of Karra’s new 40-year-old junkie body and how the detective must pay a hefty fee for it if he ever loses his job, as it probably came with a discount. The bathroom in his apartment is a module shared with other tenants. And he’s got it better than Sara.

This is a world where people must pay a body subscription service when they turn 21, and if they fail to do so, their body is seized by the state, and their consciousness gets stored in a bank. If humanity ever cracks this technology, our capitalist society will certainly lead us to this marvelous, humanitarian outcome: we are very good at finding ways to exploit others. Some people (the exploited), of course, are not happy with that, but powerful people (the exploiters) are, and that’s what matters.

Take that into consideration when we arrive at Green’s apartment and see him charred and hanged next to a burned cherry tree (the last one in the world). When asked if Green deserved what he got, our partner Sara – who is often the kind, by-the-book, voice-of-reason opposite to Karra’s rough, unhinged, violent approach to things – answers, “I do. And it still wasn’t enough.” There’s a lot of hatred toward the rich and powerful in Nobody Wants to Die. There’s this moment when Karra is in front of the corpse of a rich man, and the killer – a bodiless voice speaking in Karra’s head for most of the game – urges him to destroy the dudes ichorite, making his death final. You see, nobody wants to die, but some people certainly deserve to.

There’s another crime scene we visit that seems to have come from Eyes Wide Shut, showing the rich wearing masks and forming secret societies and going to depraved parties where torture and killing are a thing. We see that one guy gets off with being killed – and luckily for him, there are plenty of rich women who get off with killing, and he’s also rich enough to afford a constant flux of new bodies from the people who couldn’t pay that subscription. A win-win situation… if you’re a millionaire.

The killer – Kara’s main antagonist – appears to despise this world and pass judgment on these people. I bet you can understand where he’s coming from, sympathize even. Karra, however, judges the guy, as if thinking “wow, that’s fucked up” were all we could do before such predatory behavior, since taking matters into our hands is apparently crossing a line. Karra is the guy who is not happy with the status quo – he dislikes the rich as much as the next guy – but he’s also not willing to do anything about it: like most noir detectives, he’s pessimistic, believing in systemic solutions to society’s problems as much as he believes in God. He’s the kind of guy who resignedly growls that there are only two types of medicine in the world: “those with an awful taste and narcotics.”

The killer, on the other hand, is destroying the system from within, taking out these people who have all their lives believed to be untouchable. He’s making them pay. And Karra, well, Karra condemns the man for acting like judge, jury, and executioner, accusing him of madness. This is a discussion that works during the middle parts of the game – has the killer gone to far, is it naive to judge him? –  but one that quickly derails during the ambiguous last act that can’t decide between turning the antagonist into a problematic Killmonger/Riddler villain, or even worse, destroying what he means altogether by turning the discussion to other, more personal, psychological matters.

In the end, the story has two possible big endings (I’m going to be vague here, don’t worry) where, in one, the murderer becomes this boring one-dimensional villain (and he’s really played by Jonny Loquasto like a mustache-twirling one), and in the other, he’s rendered moot, making a story about “eating the rich” much less about the poor doing the eating than one would initially assume (besides being littered with red herrings to the point of frustration). Ultimately, however, it’s a story that doesn’t benefit from the ambiguity at all, leaving each path underdeveloped and gaining nothing in the process.

Not that you would want to play the game twice to see the different outcome anyway. I mean, the desire may even be there, but you’ll most certainly not be going to do it, as the gameplay in Nobody Wants to Die is dull enough to make us believe the title should have been * drumrolls please * Nobody Wants to Investigate.

There are these major crime scenes where we must find clues and figure out what’s happening. Pretty standard stuff in a detective game, but here we have these sci-fi gadgets that complicate matters: the main one allows us to reconstruct bits of what happened in the crime scene, with the effect being similar to reversing time, as we see a corpse reanimate and perform his last actions. Couple that with a portable X-ray machine that can retrace the path of bullets with precision and an uninspired but still effective blood detector, and we should have the groundwork for something great.

And yet.

Nobody Wants do Die sins are twofold. First, it makes the act of investigating a crime scene a pretty linear affair: we can reconstruct just one moment in the scene – the one the game allows us to –, than use the x-ray when prompted, and then follow the bullet lines into another point in the room and then, when prompted, use the reconstruction there once again and then, when prompted, follow the blood trail until we find another corpse or point of interest that we can reverse in time to see what happened… when prompted. There’s little to no thinking and little to no action, which means these are whole sequences with almost nothing to keep us engaged.

And here comes the second sin: these sequences take a good bloody while nonetheless. Performing these actions for 5-10 minutes to make the plot move along would be one thing, but staying in a crime scene for half an hour just following button prompts is just frustrating. I don’t know about you, but I value my time, so I groaned each moment I found myself in another crime scene, knowing I would have to waste 30 minutes performing these dull actions. And to make matters worse, some of the clues we find are red herrings – in the first crime scene, we could even say most of the things we find there are red herrings – which makes all this busywork exasperating: you really took me into this half-hour – maybe more – boring, linear investigation and then later revealed that most of it was bullshit? Come on.

Now imagine playing all this again just to see the other ending. God bless YouTube.

But there are some good things in Nobody Wants to Die, especially in the way it handles optional dialogue. If we compare the smell of chocolate to that of a cigar to Sarah, in a certain scene, when we arrive at Karra’s flat later, the smell of tobacco will remind him of chocolate. If we come across some documents in Green’s office with the chief of police’s name on them, when he tries to shut the investigation down, we can try to use that as leverage. When it comes to the big choices, the game may fall apart – the main one that decides the ending is quite random and poorly worded, for example – but in the small moments, Nobody Wants to Die really shines.

If Nobody Wants to Die had greatly reduced its investigative side, it would have worked much better, even if its story kind of loses its focus by the end.

But regardless of all that, “Memento Revolutionem”: remember to eat the rich. And to floss afterward.

March 24, 2026.