Check out the trailer for this cyberpunk-noir detective game with a hard-boiled private dick
Nobody Wants To Die is out some time this year
One of my favourite 'jokes'to do is parody Raymond Chandler, i.e. I shout "She had legs all the way up to her thighs!" and then laugh at myself. Chandlers's trademark "blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window" kind of zingers are very hard to do well, so it's better to say you're doing Philip Marlow badly on purpose. The trailer for Nobody Wants To Die seems like it's self-seriousness is actually self-awareness. I mean, I kind of refuse to believe that hard-boiled future crime detective James Karra saying "I'm in the business of secrets... But it's more of an addiction... And I like 'em straight... No chaser..." while sipping from a glass of amber liquor isn't indulging in some amount of winking and nudging.
The trailer, being a cinematic one, doesn't give too much away about the game, except that James needs a Strepsil, and somebody explodes a tree (these points seem unrelated).
Our stage is New York in 2329, where there are cool hover-cars like in The Fifth Element, and consciousness can be stored on computers and transferred between bodies - which means if you're rich enough, you can live forever. This is the sort of imbalance that a) I like and think is a good interpretation of what could happen in the future and b) will get people all riled up. Little surprise that a serial killer is going around murdering New York's elite. Critical support to them while I play as James to track them down. So it's sort of a detective puzzle game deal, rather than an action game.
The Steam page tells us that we will have access to a bunch of advanced cyberpunky gadgets to solve the crimes. Screenshots show a sort of x-ray magnifying glass, a scanner, and - the key feature - a sort of Bernard's Watch/Obra Dinn gadget that lets James rewind time in a crime scene to see what happened. Other things the trailer and screens make me think of: The Matrix, the Batman Arkham series, BioShock. I respect a future that is very advanced but all the flying cars are still 1930s-y and your environmental storytelling blimp has art deco signage. I also love the image of James sitting on top of a building drinking from his flask like a grumpy little alcoholic Spider-man.
Nobody Wants To Die is out later this year some time.