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User:The Millionth One/No-One Has to Die

< User:The Millionth One

No-One Has to Die
Developer(s)Stuart Madafiglio
Artist(s)Cindy Xu
Composer(s)Jesse Valentine
EngineConstruct 2
Platform(s)Web browser
ReleaseApril 2013
Genre(s)Puzzle
Mode(s)Single-player

No-One Has to Die, stylised as no-one has to die., is a puzzle browser game by Stuart Madafiglio, released April 2013. The player takes the role of a visitor to Fenix Corporation Headquarters, where they discover a fire is burning down the building and the security staff have been killed. With four people still in the building and the character only able to close down one fire door each floor, the player is asked to choose between saving different people as they evacuate. After the player has gone through each route a final one is unlocked.

The game's art was done by Cindy Xu and its music was done by Jesse Valentine. It received a generally positive response. Reviewers noted easiness and simplicity of its gameplay. Its science fiction mystery story, told through a series of computer messages, received praise.

Gameplay

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One choice. The player may either deactivate the lever and leave Steve to burn whilst saving Lionel, or drown Lionel to protect Steve from the flames.

Plot

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Troy tells the others that he lit the fire, and gives them the security code to unlock one of the fire doors. Eventually, only one survivor remains at the end of each route. The visitor and the survivor continue sending messages to each other, then each survivor finds a different code unlocking an extra fire door and walks into a mysterious machine before disconnecting. The survivors also all make different discoveries or revelations:

  • In Steve's ending, distraught over Christina's death, he finds a file talking about the company's "Phoenix experiment", involving teaching cockatiels a phrase. Then, one bird arrived already knowing the special phrase, and they tagged it. The birds were all put through a machine, with the cockatiel that already knew the phrase being the only survivor. Steve then reveals the phrase: "Christina lives".
  • Christina reveals to the visitor that she lit the fire, not Troy, and that Steve wasn't meant to still be in the building. She wanted to stop the company and kill Lionel, as her mother was killed in one of Fenix Corporation's experiments. The body sent back to the family had had its brain cut out, and Christina blames them for killing her to look at her brain.
  • Troy
  • Lionel

Development

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No-One Has to Die was Madafiglio's entry into clay.io's "Got Game? HTML5 Game Development Competition".[1] Cindy Xu created the art for the game, while Jesse Valentine created its music. Construct 2 was used for its engine.[2] The game was released April 2013.[3]

Reception

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Tom Sykes of PC Gamer praised the game's story and its "compelling" mystery, seeing it as "tense" combination of a visual novel and a turn-based puzzle game and noting the difficulty in making decisions in the game.[4] PC Gamer would go on to list it as one of the best 100 free online PC games.[5] Alecc Meer, of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, called the game worth playing, feeling it worked better when focusing on its "demanding" choices and believing the dialogue was "over-expository" when revealing its mysteries.[6] Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Porpentine highlighted it as one of the week's "finest free indie games".[7] Rating the game four stars out of five, Digital Spy writer Ben Lee noted the ease of the puzzles and praised the game's narrative, calling it "gripping from start to finish".[8] Steve Brown, of Adventure Gamers, called the narrative "fascinating".[3] Later, he praised the characters' dialogue and called the story "surreal but compelling science fiction".[9]

No-One Has to Die ultimately came first place in the "Got Game?" competition.[10]

References

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  1. ^ http://indiegames.com/2013/04/browser_pick_no-one_has_to_die.html
  2. ^ "no-one has to die". rpgmaker.net. 7 April 2013. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  3. ^ a b Brown, Steve (31 May 2013). "Following Freeware: April 2013 releases". Adventure Gamers. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  4. ^ Sykes, Tom (12 April 2013). "The Free Webgame Round-Up". PC Gamer. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  5. ^ "The 100 best free online games on PC". PC Gamer. 30 May 2014. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  6. ^ Meer, Alec (10 April 2013). "FireShock Infinite: No-One Has To Die". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  7. ^ Porpentine (21 April 2013). "Live Free, Play Hard: The Week's Finest Free Indie Games". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  8. ^ Lee, Ben (5 April 2013). "Downloadable reviews: Slender, BattleBlock Theater, No-One Has to Die". Digital Spy. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  9. ^ Brown, Steve (16 September 2015). "Five Years of Following Freeware: Year Three". Adventure Gamers. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  10. ^ "Announcing the Winners of 'Got Game?'". clay.io. 20 April 2013. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
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