Nobody Wants to Die

It'd be very tough to recommend this. The game just doesn't hit home. It's a point-and-click that put all of its chips on good graphics and the cynical witticisms of a burnt out detective, and neither are very good. The central concept of the gameplay is rewinding scenes and watching them play forward and in reverse in order to piece together what happened using your trusty X-ray or UV light. You've basically got a back seat view to disaster unfolding. This itself is well done. The choreography and animation are smooth and meticulously crafted. It's good. The detective work involved, however, is chafingly mundane. Rewind to a highlighted point in time, figure out what's missing, and track it down. You're not branching out or chasing rabbit holes so much as checking off items on a list. In the first crime scene when I tracked down the panels to open some side doors, I thought I was about to uncover secrets and unlock new, hidden parts of the story. The hallways went nowhere and held nothing. The entire game is like this. The story is... functional. A lot of very safe calls. The story and the protagonist himself make several overt, very ham-fisted references to Greek myths as if to build upon past greatness, but it comes across like they're following a format, painting by numbers. There's a regretful dream sequence that plays out 3 times, and you always think they'll change it up somehow to keep it fresh or provide new insight, and they never do. It just plays out 3 times exactly the same way, requiring all the same begrudged player input to literally drag this slow, laborious scene out. The interactivity of the story just isn't there. You are a passenger. You get a few choices and they quote-unquote "impact the story", but it doesn't pass the smell test. It's exactly like in Heavy Rain, the David Cage game, where the killer asks you to chop off your finger to find a clue about your son, and if you don't do it the police shoot off your finger in the very next scene. The dialogue is stilted and lives mostly in service to the plot. The actors themselves do a good job with the work they're given, no disrespect there. But the work they're given is to say stuff like "James, I have been talking to you for ten minutes" as the best way to clue the player in that they've been knocked out for 10 minutes. Every key dialogue ends with a not-so-subtle hint at what tool you're supposed to use next (you only have 3). At one point the protagonist says "people will riot" and then just like that the whole city falls into riots like they were awaiting their cue. There is a soundtrack. Can't really say much else about it. It's inoffensive and sounds like it was meant to slip in and out of your conscience without leaving any memory of its existence. The setting is exactly how it looks in the screenshots: hyper dystopian New York City with flying cars, 1950s aesthetic, and the suffocating sense that you've been robbed of everything you'll ever own before you were even born, viewed through the lens of the world's most divorced cop. It's not a bad setting to mull around in if only to close out the game in a few hours and be glad your life isn't that. And if this were a comic or animated movie or something that leaned into rather than chafed against its linearity, it's a setting I might even be willing to revisit. But as is, I closed out the credits and uninstalled and will probably never think about it again.