Will Die Alone Review

Short narrative adventures are becoming far more common place in gaming, and I for one am all in favour. Despite not typically caring about narratives in gaming, when that is the sole focus of the experience I end up enjoying the genre quite a lot. Latest on the docket for the Tavern is Will Die Alone, a brief but enjoyable enough affair about corporate over reach, technology’s good and bad sides, and the human lives both affect.

We take on the role of Alex as she is enlisted at Dewitt Corp., a company that specialises in the eradication of memories from people who need help forgetting something particular. From the first moment it’s clear something is off with the set-up though, and soon we learn that there’s another side to this tale altogether. Being so short I don’t wish to spoil things, but the ideas of corporate responsibility, mistakes, cover-ups, and more are on show here.

As part of our new job, we must help a handful of people with their problems by determining which memory out of four options would grant them the best future possible. On the right we get a brief synopsis of the person, what has happened and what they need help with. Above that also is a daily news report following the tales of protests against Dewitt and the program that we can expand for more info.

On the left, we get the current predicted future for the person at hand, with a rough timeline of the remainder of their life and the key events that’ll play out. Above that, a selection a memories are present, each one offering insight into a key moment of this persons past that could have led them to be in the situation they are today.

We must read all of the information and decide which memory’s deletion would provide them with the best future. We only get one shot though, and are being judged on how well we chose by our Dewitt boss, Tom. Protest leader Irwin also gets in touch early on, asking us to help out his cause, but again I won’t spoil too much other than to say following his request is not an easy ask.

Choosing the correct option isn’t easy, and Arianna Ravioli uses some clever wording to have us second guessing ourselves. Even in such a short time span and with only a handful of real choices to make, they create some tricky scenarios, with half of my outcomes not quite going the way I had envisioned. This had the knock on effect of limiting my ending choices.

Replayability here is key, and going through picking the (hopefully) correct ones shows a different outcome. Whizzing through the game is quick enough to make figuring this out easy enough if you care to grab all the achievements or just want to get the good ending. Each playthrough varies in only small ways until we get the ‘true’ ending, in which case you may want to hold off skipping ahead for the last section.

While it’d have been nice to have more nuance to the outcomes based on our choices, I do appreciate the simplicity of the options and outcomes on show here. Again, the story tackles some fairly heavy themes and scenarios but in a light-touch way to not really get dragged down into the details too much. The main niggle I’d mention here is the UI on Xbox; clearly designed as a PC title, having to drag the cursor around the screen is pain enough, but also having to close each new open window before we can click on anything else (sold in game as Alex’s PC being too old) is tiresome even in a 15 minute game.

Conclusion

Will Die Alone is a decent narrative adventure that handles difficult topics with a light touch and some decent writing. A single playthrough is less than 15 minutes at best, but those looking to fully explore the tale will need to play it through a few times at least. It won’t captivate like some titles in the genre, but for what we get there is a decent evening to had.

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This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.

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Good
  • Short runtime
  • Tackles some heavy themes without getting too overblown or preachy
Bad
  • UI is fiddly and slow
  • Little changes thanks to what we choose outside of the finale
7.1
Good
Written by
I've been gaming since Spy vs Spy on the Master System, growing up as a Sega kid before realising the joy of multi-platform gaming. These days I can mostly be found on smaller indie titles, the occasional big RPG and doing poorly at Rainbow Six: Siege. Gamertag: Enaksan

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