Noire where you pivot an item around in your hand looking for clues, except now Detective Phelps can plunge his eyes directly through the molecular structure of those objects. Slicing is the representation of that detail - you can zoom into locations, then zoom into items in those locations, and then zoom physically inside those items. He might be unable to interact directly with the world, but Morris can now examine anything on it in minute, normally impossible detail. In short order, his spectral dog, Sparky, tells him that the island’s dormant volcano is about to erupt, and he needs to convince a fellow ghost to become the island’s spirit and hold back the disaster – he just needs to track them down first. Morris, having died offscreen, reappears on his fictional North Atlantic island home of Shelmerston as an invisible ghost. But, again like Morris, there’s also a layer of deep intelligence just under its warm exterior.Ĭore to I Am Dead is the idea of ‘slicing’. Except, instead of some spurious revenge motive, he’s doing it because he was a curious old museum owner who’s quite surprised to find out there’s an afterlife, and his dead dog is now telling him to do stuff.Īnd Morris is I Am Dead in microcosm – a game as fluffy and warm as its hero’s jumpers (British parlance very much intended), and just as interested in aimlessly wandering as it is actually getting to the business end of its story. In a way, Morris is a bizarre reflection of decades of video gaming’s amnesiac antiheroes – he too is on a quest to find out what’s really going on around here, possibly even to save the world (or at least a piece of it). He’s charmingly useless enough as to become an absolute delight, floating through the plot on a cloud of good vibes and light befuddlement, without ever really knowing what’s going on. Played by David Shaughnessy – whose velvetine English West Country tones are thoroughly unusual for any game character other than ‘fantasy yokel’ – Morris’ voice is your vehicle through I Am Dead’s short story, a narrator who basically knows as much as you do at any given time. It’s not because he’s dead (because if you think about it, a surprising number of video game characters are dead), it’s his voice.

Morris Lupton is like no lead character I’ve played before.

I am dead review