How Had I Not Heard About Nobody Wants To Die Until Now? – TheGamer

There is no subgenre I love more than cyberpunk. I've written about it several times. And yet, as much as I love it, it often disappoints me it's filled with ambitious swings, but few true masterpieces. Even the canonical greats, like Blade Runner, tend to be flawed. It wasn't until that film's 25th anniversary in 2007 that we got the Final Cut, the definitive version that you should watch today. And even that best possible version is long on mood and short on compelling plot. It's a movie I deeply love for its masterful production design, moody cinematography, and evocative score, but if you're immune to those aesthetic charms, it doesn't really hang together.

This is the difficulty cyberpunk fiction often runs into. Few subgenres do mood as well, but most storytellers working within its confines fumble the actual story. There are the rare masterpieces, like The Matrix, that manage to bring everything together, but cyberpunk works usually emphasize one quality to the detriment of all others, like a cybernetically enhanced boxer who keeps building up the top-half of his body until he can't stand anymore. This is a genre of massive strengths and obvious weaknesses.

With "The Hunt," Cyberpunk 2077 heads into The Silence of the Lambs territory, and it rules.

However, reviews of Nobody Wants To Die make it sound like a cyberpunk unicorn. The new first-person adventure from independent Polish developer Critical Hit seems to emphasize story while still building a world that consistently wows you. This game looks incredible, is right up my alley, and presumably due to the struggles of marketing indie titles in a saturated market, I hadn't heard about it until today.

Almost as soon as I saw the screenshots I had the retrofuturist walking sim downloading onto my PS5. But it is wild to have a game like this that, in normal circumstances, I would have been eagerly anticipating, setting aside money and time for, seeking out previews on YouTube just suddenly appear. This can happen to anyone, even if you cover the industry for a living. The gaming industry is so diffuse now that if you skip one indie showcase on the packed June schedule, you might not hear about a game that would become your next obsession.

That's a downside of the splintering of E3, but it's a massive endorsement of the independent space as it stands today. Nobody Wants To Die, which I'm going to start playing as soon as I clock out, has reminded me that incredible things are happening in gaming all the time. I often see posts on social media where gamers express nostalgia for the good old days when gaming was more exciting and, yeah, there are trends that I think have made triple-A games more safe and homogenized than they used to be. But the indie scene is doing more than enough to pick up the slack.

I've played a few triple-A games that I've liked this year. I'm putting in the time to get good at XDefiant, slowly playing through Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and having a good, if repetitive time with Rise of the Ronin. But the standouts this year have all been smaller games from smaller teams. There isn't a triple-A game in my current top five for the year. Instead, I have picks like Anger Foot, Crow Country, Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain, Fallen Aces, and Harold Halibut. None of those games are from big teams and, in a few cases, I had no idea they were coming out until they were tempting me from a new releases list.

Nobody Wants To Die is just the latest example of this trend. A cool-as-hell indie game with impressive production values and standout art design that has captured my imagination more than anything made by a triple-A team this year.

As Lucy comes to Guilty Gear Strive, it's time to look back on the modern anime classic.

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How Had I Not Heard About Nobody Wants To Die Until Now? - TheGamer