Nobody Wants To Die lives up to its name, depicting a futuristic society where the rich, to avoid death, transfer their consciousness into younger bodies and essentially live forever. This future is designed like the setting of a 1920s noir thriller, but cars fly and buildings are impossibly tall.

You spend your time in the game making decisions and trying to figure out who the killer really is, but the game ends without any clear answers. Well, the answers are there, but they aren’t explained to you, so read on to understand what exactly happened in this dystopian New York.

Warning, spoilers for the end of the game!

The plot

The plot of Nobody Wants To Die follows Detective James as he tries to uncover both the murder of Edward Green and the evil machinations of whoever is killing New York’s elite. The answer to these puzzles is always the same regardless of the ending, so it’s best to cover these things first.

Who is the murderer?

During the game you will be contacted by someone who is known as the stranger, a mysterious voice who seems to know more than he admits. He seems to be behind at least several murders, the murder of Edward Greenthe initial case given to James at the beginning of the game.

The game tries to excuse the stranger/murderer’s seemingly magical abilities by claiming thathe can hack into people’s ichorite (this is where consciousness is stored in the game’s universe), but the answer goes beyond that. The reality is that There is no strangerhe is a hallucination that James has due to his desynchronization.

James died in a train accident, but the police gave him a new body. And yet he is Problems synchronizing with this new bodyas can be seen from the numerous hallucinations he has during the game; The stranger is simply someone else of that.

James is not the only one affected by this murderous voicewith several other characters hearing it as well, although it may be different for each individual. Edward Green also heard this voicebecause he has already changed bodies more than five times and is therefore the oldest person in the world.

Therefore, nobody murdered Edward Greeninstead he took his own life. The footage found at the crime scene shows him begging for his life, but we now know that he talked to himselfbecause he was have suffered from desynchronization for decades already.

What was Green’s goal?

The mastermind behind it all was indeed Edward Green, but what did he want to achieve? Well, over the course of his various lives, Green realized that the system could not sustain itself for much longer, not only because of the increasing unrest among the common people, but also because of the increasing number of desynchronization cases.

For this reason He planned to kill the New York eliteto remove them from the picture and to allow humanity to move beyond the need to cheat death. It is not clear if the plan was entirely his own or if the stranger’s voice guided his hand, but he even drank a poison that corrupted his ichorite, ensuring that his next death would be his last.

The endings, explained

The game culminates in a confrontation between James and Jane Salmathe latter inhabiting the body of James’ partner Sara. Her final decision is whether or not to shoot Salma, which gives the final scene a slight variation, although not shooting Salma makes for the most substantial endings.

Pain

If you only get this ending, you might have concluded that the stranger is a real person, which in turn leads to a rather unsatisfying cutscene. You get this ending by do everything the stranger tells youand then tell Sara that you think the stranger is behind everything.

Whether you shoot Salma or not doesn’t matter, because she will survive anyway and you will always die from your wounds. The next scene shows James trying to get to an islandwith Rachel (James’ deceased wife) waiting for him, but several vines representing the Ichorite grab James and pull him away.

The game ends with a recording of a database, James’ name engraved insidewho is obviously waiting for the police to give the detective a new body. This ending suggests that Ichorite of people is not just data with information about a person’s memory and personality, but their “soul” or essenceand that they are trapped in the database until they die or receive a new body.

This will likely result in the minimum age of membership being lowered from 21 to 18, driving unrest to unprecedented levels and forcing the government to take drastic action. This would usher in the grim future Green has been trying to prevent, and humanity will continue to suffer from the Desynchronization until there is no one left.

End of deadly dreams

You get this ending by do not listen to the strangerfrom which one can conclude that Green is behind everythingAnd Salma will not be shot at the end. If you shoots Salma, you both dieAnd you Get the End of Anguish; the only difference is that you left Sara without a body.

Reaching this end means that James has come to terms with the fact that there is no stranger and that humans are not designed to live that long. So he takes the same poison that Green and Rachel took before they died and jumps off a building, ending it all.

After his ichorite was removed, James can die a real deathwhich is why he is washed ashore on the shore of the same island as in the Anguish ending. Now it is a warm, sunny day. James is greeted by Rachel, is able to reunite with his beloved and leave the earthly plane behind.

This ending allows Green to advance his plans, Preventing a reduction in the subscription age. Even though people are still forced by law to pay the contribution, this blow to the world’s elite could pave the way for humanity to return to a more natural state where death is a part of everyday life.