Zarf Updates

I'm bad at mysteries but I love games where you're a detective. This sounds silly, but detective games aren't always about interrogating suspects and drawing conclusions. Sometimes it's all about scouring an immersive world for the evidence and letting the pieces -- or the narrative threads -- fall where they may. (See The Flower Collectors, Dahlia View, and yep there's Paradise Killer smirking in the corner.)

So I was happy to run into Nobody Wants to Die. Narrative-heavy, easy on the detectiving, and thoroughly soaked in rainy noir vibe. The devs are Polish but the scene is Times Square: a Gilded Age future where everybody lives forever thanks to "ichoryte". The catch? You spend your eternal life in eternal debt for the mandatory body subscription plan, hoping to scrape out enough savings for a replacement before your current clogs pop. Fall behind on your payments and your body is repossessed -- probably by the millionaires who glitter in New York's unreachable upper crust.

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The interesting question is, what genre is this? The drenched skyscrapers and towering neon billboards say "Blade Runner"; the body-swapping might say "Altered Carbon". But we're not doing cyberpunk here. Flying-car noir, sure, but it's not about the technology or its extension of humanity. No AIs or cyborgs or posthuman sunglasses.

(Technological immortality is at the center of the story, but this is presented as a subtraction, not an extension. Life's day-to-day grind is the same; you've just lost all hope of change or retirement. "The street finds its own uses for things," runs the cyberpunk motto, but ichoryte only benefits the rich.)

No, this is the future of the 1920s, not the 1980s. Art Deco stretching upwards to infinity. Prohibition, honored in the breach by your hip flask. The flying cars are Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows. Think Brazil or, more recently, Cloudpunk -- the real filthy run-down city that Cloudpunk only gestured at.

(Like I once said, Cloudpunk's Nivalis is ultimately homey -- a cheerful bustling crowd and a noodle-shop on every corner. NWTD's New York is isolating and desperate.)

The Gilded Age setting evokes the rootspring of noir, and NWTD brings that in Spades. (Sorry.) You're a broken-down cop, fighting off the shakes from the DTs and your janky third-rate cop-pension body. The chief won't clear you for duty and your dead-for-real girlfriend won't stop pestering you. Your best shot for a case is a suicide scene. Off the books, a favor for the chief, in and out: pull the rich bastard's ichoryte so that he can wake up young and healthy in the morning. But "rich" means "political", and does this look like a suicide scene? Really?

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The other interesting question is, what genre is this? And now I mean game genre.

Like I said, the detective work is not hard. The game handholds you through it: use this tool now, use that tool next. Every hotspot is either flagged or, at worst, localized within a small sphere for you to find. A holographic "reconstructor" lets you plumb past events; gorgeous in implementation, but in gameplay terms it's just a "go here" marker followed by "rewind to this moment". You're just clicking through. The most challenge you get is following the odd hidden wire or blood trail.

The investigation chapters alternate with clue-wall connection scenes. (Okay, it's your living room floor, same idea.) But again, there's no serious challenge or chance of failure. You connect up two clues and the game says "yes" or "try again". When you reach the correct conclusion, the scene ends. (And your holographic clue markers revert to empty gin bottles and cigarette packs, a delightful touch.)

So if NWTD is not centrally a detective game, what is it? It's certainly a narrative game. Every scene is laced with banter (or tooth-gnashing) with Sara, your unwanted comm-link partner. She's supposed to keep you in line while your technically-off-duty corpus trawls the crime scenes. Naturally there's friction. More so when the chief you're both doing a favor for starts to smell a little funny, agenda-wise.

This sideline dialogue looks like frosting, but you rapidly realize it's a good part of the cake. Do you support the Chief or push back against him? Open up to Sara, deflect her, or lie to her? Do you break your knuckles against the City's blatant corruption or is that just the way life is? Plus an occasional in-world action choice -- usually about whether you're going to sneak some liquor. Small decisions add up to significant story branches.

It's a simple model: a few dialogue choices per node, plus perhaps a locked choice. (Locked because of your previous decisions, or just because you need to finish out the topic before moving on; it's not explicit but it's usually pretty obvious.) Throw in a smattering of "Clem Sara will remember that" and you have quite a dynamic branching story running in the background.

These decisions don't affect the surface story: you will visit the same crime scenes in the same order, return to your apartment at the same times. But they make a great deal of difference to who you are. Drunk? Cynic? Tarnished crusader? You're compromised -- noir, right -- but you can decide what you'll betray. Your boss, your partner, your job, your memories, your fellow citizens... In a real sense this game is "Choice of Noir Protagonist". The investigation scenes are just pacing, something to do with your hands while the text/voice character story plays out.

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But gameplay and story aside, did I enjoy the play?

I really did. Oh, the writing itself (perhaps just its English translation) is a bit generic and hammy. Your detective protagonist growls through noir cliches like a motorcycle on an empty street. But the story is solid and the world is amazing. Terrific visualization; terrific visual direction and use of interaction moments.

The story is a top-to-bottom tour of New York City. The gleamingly cavernous penthouse of the elite; then the hollow-hearted, garbage-strewn housing block of your cramped capsule apartment. Then you go down to visit the street-level slums where things are really bad. (Ground level is "below the poverty line", a worldbuilding phrase that I love. Okay, I've loved it since Project Eden used it in 2001 but that just means it's ready to go again.)

This game will own you the first time you pop the door of your flying car and look down, down, down. Breathe it in. You get the occasional opportunity to lean on a railing, light up a smoke, and look out over the expanses of your fair city. ("Dirty and dangerous, smelly and shitty...") These moments are optional but really, don't miss 'em.

Do not expect a happy ending -- noir, right? I'm sure there's better endings than the one I got (I was indecisive in the final chapter) but I'm also sure the endings top out at "ambivalent". An off-duty cop is not going to save the world. You might be able to save one thing, maybe, if you commit. (Indecisive will screw you.) And you're going to get hurt doing it.

Mind you, I've only played through once. I said NWTD was like a choice-based title, but that doesn't extend to the visual-novel affordances of replay. You do not get multiple saves; you do not get to rerun the final chapter. If there's a speed-running option for the investigation chapters, I didn't see it. If you really want to know the range of variation for this game, I think you're off to the wikis. (And I bet the wikis list a "best ending". Don't believe it. It's noir, Jake.)

A quality production.