Press X to Not Die

Press X to Not Die wears its conceit on its title screen and never breaks character. The setup: you wake up in a town where everyone has gone violently insane and is attacking each other, you receive a cryptic instruction — Press X to not die — and the rest of the game is figuring out how to survive long enough to find your girlfriend and understand what happened. It is, by design, a B-movie wrapped in interactive-movie format.

The content is genuine live-action HD video — over 35 minutes of footage shot specifically for the game — with the player's job being to hit the right button at the right moment to survive scenes that would otherwise end immediately. There are 29 unique ways to die, which the game tracks gleefully, and a branching storyline that genuinely diverges based on your choices and reflexes rather than only on a critical-path level.

The Dynamic Dialogue system is the most interesting wrinkle: key spoken sentences are constructed on the fly to reflect what you actually just did or how well you performed, so the same scene can play out narrated three different ways depending on the player. A 1994 Mode re-renders the entire game in the visual style of the golden age of interactive movies — VHS compression, period menus — for the full retro experience. Steam leaderboards track high scores and decision paths. There is, of course, a clown fight.