Game Review: Will Die Alone (Xbox Series X)

A very interesting concept that deals with strong subjects in a measured and clever way. Will Die Alone is a short and simple narrative driven experience from developer Arianna Ravioli and publisher Fantastico Studio.

Players take on the role of Alex, a new employee for the Dewitt Corporation. A company with a unique selling point. They specialise in memory removal. Offering their customers the chance to take away a memory that causes them pain and suffering. Can someone’s entire life be re-written by the simple removal of a memory?

Will Die Alone tackles this question in a short and simplified way, wrapped up in a story around corporate greed, negligence, cover-ups and more.

What if you could remove the memory of being bullied to such an extent that it affected your confidence for the rest of your life? What if you could forget that you ever worked in that dead-end, soul-sucking job? If you could remove the memory of your must intense failure, would you?

Most would if the opportunity was there. However, what if there was the possibility that human error could mean something far more important is lost. What if you forgot the memory of meeting and falling love with your partner? Forgetting that you ever had children? What if the thing that makes you the happiest was just gone from your mind?

Deep questions and questions that are asked by Will Die Alone as Alex is tasked with deciding the future of several customers.

Read the customer’s request, analysis their trauma and choose from four options to try and give them the best future possible. It’s very simple to play and understand, yet the decisions you make come with an incredible amount of gravitas. Especially as the game will show you how that person’s life turned out after you removed the specific memory.

Alongside this, you’ll get emails and reports from people within the company, news outlets and more that make it clear Dewitt Corp has a lot to answer for. How does Alex fit into all of this and what does it mean for her future?

A single playthrough of Will Die Alone takes no more than 15 minutes but the choices you make matter and affect the ending you will get. Meaning there is replay value, at least up until you get the ‘true’ ending. Not only that, there’s another story to play through too, one set before the events of Alex’s experience and one that adds more weight to the overall narrative.

As far as story-driven, limited gameplay experiences go, Will Die Alone is a very satisfying play. One that is ripe for expansion into bigger territories. It’s a very good game with just a few niggling things, such as the awkward UI that sees you dragging a cursor across the screen and having to close down each window before opening another, stopping it being a great game.