Will Die Alone

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Will Die Alone, released in 2022 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is a game with Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel elements. In this game, players take the role of an employee of Dewitt Corp., a fictional company with a similar modus operandi to the one seen in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – clients pay the company to remove their memories. However, while Spotless Mind had clients erasing painful or difficult memories, the clients in Will Die Alone go to the company with the vague goal of improving their overall life, and the company’s employees must deduce which memory to erase to reach that goal. As players set about this task, messages they receive and news surrounding Dewitt Corp. both make it clear that there’s something more sinister going on here.

It is very clear that this game took inspiration from games like Papers, Please in the way it challenges players to make ethical choices in difficult and murky circumstances. If this game were just about fixing the lives of clients by erasing their memories it would be interesting enough, but the way the game inserts ominous overtones about Dewitt Corp. right from the game’s onset in a vaguely threatening comment at the end of your hiring letter makes for lots of delicious potential. However, the game runs into a few problems.

The first problem will become apparent almost immediately – the interface here is pretty terrible. Players must guide a cursor around the screen using the analog stick (no touchscreen support, unfortunately), and interact with the items in the game’s minimalist desktop much like you would in a normal GUI like Windows or Mac OS. However, the font size this game uses is absolutely tiny, and virtually unreadable in handheld mode. Players can zoom in and out of the screen to make it easier to read this text, but players can’t interact with anything while zoomed in. What’s more, players can only have one program window open at a time, and there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to go back a single step.

What all this means is that players who have multiple E-Mails to read must move the cursor over to the E-Mail icon, press the button, move the cursor over to the E-Mail program icon, press the button again, move the cursor over the E-Mail, press a button to zoom in, move the cursor around to scan over the E-Mail as you read it, press a button to zoom out, move the cursor to close the E-Mail window, press the button to close the entire E-Mail program, move the cursor back to the E-Mail program icon, press the button to open it, move the cursor to the second E-Mail you want to read… and so on. It’s absurdly tedious, frustrating, and highly unintuitive.

The second issue is that this game’s great plot premise isn’t really given time to grow and breathe. The entire game can be completed within a half hour or so, and while the idea is to play through multiple times to get different endings, none of the great ideas here feel as fleshed out as they should be. You don’t get a proper introduction to your character, their motivation, or their circumstances until pretty much the end of the game, you don’t get an introduction to the company or an indication why people are so upset about it. By the game’s end you’ll probably be able to mostly piece things together, but this is not a good way to tell a story.

What’s worse, it affects the gameplay. You’re never given a good indication how the game chooses the memories you can select from to erase, or how the erasure affects the client. You just kinda’ have to guess at it. If, for example, you erase the client’s memory of them meeting someone, will they forget all their other memories pertaining to that person, or just their first impressions?

There’s also the issue of this game’s clever idea seeming to be like that old saying about how “if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail”. The only solutions you can give the game’s clients are erased memories. Perhaps they could do with some therapy, drug rehabilitation, or taking a class or something… but players aren’t ever given the option to not erase memories and refer someone to an outside service. This also feels like a double-edged sword where you’re not sure which edge you’ll get – will erasing a traumatic memory remove the negative consequences of that trauma, or will it remove the defenses that person gained from that experience that helped to protect them later in life? It’s not something you can easily predict here.

The other issue with this game’s premise has to do with the way the clients have their “good” and “bad” endings revealed. Choosing the correct memory to erase generally results in the client living a long and happy life surrounded by loved ones who help them to overcome their problems or forgive the client’s transgressions, with the client’s predicted death being surrounded by their beloved partner. Choosing incorrectly ensures that one way or another the client will lead a life of solitude and, as the title states, die alone. The problem with this is that it sets up a false dichotomy, assuming that no one could possibly lead a fulfilling and happy life if they aren’t with someone else. Not only does this implication fail to account for the happiness and satisfaction that comes with self-actualization, but also I’m sure that there are aroace people out there who would find the implication to be insulting.

Finally, I suppose I should talk about the presentation here, though there’s not much to say about that. This is a fairly minimalist experience with white print on a black background, with simple 2D artwork for photographs, minimal atmospheric sound to back up various scenes being depicted, and no music save for somber music at the title screen and during the credits.

Overall, I think that Will Die Alone has a phenomenal premise with a lot of potential, but it ruins that potential with a mountain of flaws, including interface problems, lacking presentation, gameplay issues, and storytelling issues. What’s left after all that is a game that still has some hints at a potentially great game, but nothing more than hints. If you’re looking for a game similar to this that works well, I suggest you check out Eliza, or alternately get Papers, Please on the PC. Either of those will provide you with a much more satisfying experience dealing with the sorts of ethical choices these games make their primary focus.

tl;dr – Will Die Alone is a game that’s somewhere between a Graphic Adventure and a Visual Novel, where players take the role of an employee of a company that erases memories to improve the lives of its clients. While there are hints of the great ethical choices you’d see in games like Papers, Please, and a fantastic premise for a story, Will Die Alone makes numerous blunders that make it fall far short of its potential. The result is a game that’s too tedious and frustrating, too short to develop its story ideas, and with some questionable messaging. As a result, you’re probably better off playing something else.

Grade: C-

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