“Nobody Wants To Die” has a wild interpretation of Central Park

Central Park is nothing new in video games, and over the years many games have given us a stroll through the iconic New York landmark. The park has often featured in games set in the city that never sleeps – sometimes as itself and sometimes under a pseudonym. In GTA 4’s New York analogue Liberty City, for example, it was given the thesaurus-like name Middle Park. In Mafia 2’s Empire Bay, it was called Lincoln Park.

Whatever you call it, it’s a defining feature of New York City, and for developers tired of bricks and mortar, building a patch of green in the big grey city must be a breath of fresh air. That’s the role it takes on for the player in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, where it provides a unique piece of terrain that tests Peter and Miles’ ability to swing without skyscrapers.

This was made easier in Spider-Man 2 with the introduction of wingsuits, which allowed the Spider-Venoms to travel long distances in the air without throwing a single punch.

“Nobody Wants To Die” shows us the Central Park of the future

The world of Nobody Wants to Die is aesthetically interesting enough, depicting a cyberpunk version of New York with lots of neon, art deco architecture, and vintage cars flying through the air. There was no need for Central Park, and it wouldn’t make sense for trees to survive for hundreds of years in this dystopian future.

And to be honest, I was a little disappointed that the game went there instead of showing more of the big city landscape. The second half of the game spends too much time in cramped crime scenes and doesn’t show enough of the incredible cityscapes. But when I saw Critical Hit’s take on the iconic setting, I was won over.

That’s because Central Park feels like an extension of the urban environment surrounding it. In the year 2329, there are no real trees left in the park. Instead, they’ve been replaced by holograms. From afar, it looks like the trees are illuminated by spotlights. But once you’re at ground level, you realize that this piece of nature in the middle of the concrete jungle isn’t organic at all. No, the bases of the trees are little mechanical pedestals that project holograms. The branches sway in the simulated wind, but if you look closely at the leaves, you can see that they’re translucent. As your detective character James Karra flies down to the park, he notices that it’s a perfect metaphor for the perpetrator he’s pursuing: “a forest of artificial trees that last forever without actually being alive.”

Is it really Central Park without real trees?

In this way, Central Park becomes a metaphor for the game’s central sci-fi theme: ichorite, the substance that allows residents of the far future to live forever by preserving their consciousness and transferring it from body to body. Just as this isn’t really cheating death, just delaying the inevitable, the trees are a hollow simulacrum of reality. People can live forever… but only as long as there’s a steady supply of new bodies. These trees can live forever… but only as long as there’s a steady supply of electricity.

A walkway between the artificial trees in “Nobody Wants To Die”

Most importantly, I just want this Central Park to look cool, with a giant Giger-esque statue towering over the trees and the concrete giant of the city hanging above, on the sides, and below. It’s the perfect marriage of ideas and aesthetics, and that’s exactly what I want from my cyberpunk games.