Writing about Immortality is extremely challenging. It's unlike anything else out there, and discussing its gameplay too much could spoil the experience. Rest assured, I'll steer clear of anything that might ruin it for you.
I can begin by explaining that Immortality is a blend of a game and an interactive movie, featuring real people.
The game begins with a video featuring an actress on a talk show. Within the first few minutes, you realize that by pausing the video and selecting a person or object, a new video will start, similar to your selection. Your task is to unlock new videos by doing this.
As you unlock new videos, you're introduced to the life and career of Marissa Marcel, a talented actress. Her story is compelling and well-crafted.
I can't reveal much more, as even how to progress in the game is a spoiler. It's not very clear to the player how to move forward. At some point, I felt satisfied with the experience and understood what I needed to do, but still struggled with how to finish. Towards the end, I became fatigued and eager to complete it.
I played the iOS version and found the controls to be unreliable at times. There was a particular video where I knew what I needed to select, but it took me about 20 minutes to do it correctly. I wouldn't recommend this version, to be honest.
One more thing to note is that the game contains explicit scenes, including nudity and sexual content, so be prepared for that.
In summary, Immortality offers a unique experience despite some minor issues. I wish the game offered clearer guidance on what the player needs to do and was a bit shorter. Nonetheless, I recommend playing it on a PC or console, avoiding the mobile version.
I can begin by explaining that Immortality is a blend of a game and an interactive movie, featuring real people.
The game begins with a video featuring an actress on a talk show. Within the first few minutes, you realize that by pausing the video and selecting a person or object, a new video will start, similar to your selection. Your task is to unlock new videos by doing this.
As you unlock new videos, you're introduced to the life and career of Marissa Marcel, a talented actress. Her story is compelling and well-crafted.
I can't reveal much more, as even how to progress in the game is a spoiler. It's not very clear to the player how to move forward. At some point, I felt satisfied with the experience and understood what I needed to do, but still struggled with how to finish. Towards the end, I became fatigued and eager to complete it.
I played the iOS version and found the controls to be unreliable at times. There was a particular video where I knew what I needed to select, but it took me about 20 minutes to do it correctly. I wouldn't recommend this version, to be honest.
One more thing to note is that the game contains explicit scenes, including nudity and sexual content, so be prepared for that.
In summary, Immortality offers a unique experience despite some minor issues. I wish the game offered clearer guidance on what the player needs to do and was a bit shorter. Nonetheless, I recommend playing it on a PC or console, avoiding the mobile version.
Content warning for descriptions of sexual assault. Full spoilers below.
Oh, no. This is stupid.
People used to make jokes that Hideo Kojima never actually wanted to make games, and he was only in the industry because he couldn't make it in film. This is a very safe, paternalistic, mocking idea; the man includes a lot of cutscenes in his games, and — tonally speaking — they can be pretty silly, which movies totally never are. But it's a statement that's untrue. It ignores the contributions he's made to the field of game design. It ignores the way in which he uses the medium to paint his narratives, rather than create and pigeon-hole them into a video game post-facto. It ignores a lot of things about him to make a quip that'll make you seem epic and haughty when it actually makes you look like a rube.
With that said, I think Sam Barlow is only in this industry because he wouldn't be able to make it in film. The in-universe movies are constructed with an amazing amount of love, care, and technical prowess, and they're completely spoiled by two of the worst meta-plots I've ever seen.
God, can we put a halt order on media made by men where the entire framing device is "Wow, powerful men constantly exploit women! Not me, though!" Apparently this is the third time Sam Barlow has made a game about the voyeuristic portrayal of traumatized women, and I think the guy needs to take some time off to come up with a new plot. How many more self-flagellating men in the director's chair do we need to keep releasing high-profile shit like this while blaring it over and drowning out the work of women who have been talking about how badly society has been treating them for the past fifty years? Are we meant to be shocked when we see a titty for the nth time in Ambrosio, as if Doris Wishman wasn't already producing sexploitation films centered around misogyny and rape culture from a woman's perspective in fucking 1964? In a world where creators like Coralie Fargeat are making deconstructive rape-revenge films that take the entire industry to task for the shit that they've put women through, why the fuck does Sam Barlow feel the need to throw his limited perspective in? How many women do I need to namedrop before I get my point across?
What the fuck else is even going on here, anyway? Is the intent for me to feel disgusted when the reels swap in the middle of a sex scene and Marcel suddenly looks like she's about 50 instead of 18? Am I expected to do anything other than laugh my ass off when everyone is suddenly butt-naked during a table read while two people fuck on top of a copy of the script? Is there a point to any of this, or is it just here to "shock"? There's so much capital-I, italicized Imagery on display that your main means of interacting with the game is through a visual match cut system, and feels like it's in service of the most surface-level, meaningless symbology imaginable. An extra-dimensional being who is haunting the video game says that he invented "the snake and the apple" and then menacingly looks into camera while pointing a snake at me. Shut the fuck up!!!
Right, the match cut system. Conceptually very interesting. Forcing the player — viewer, I suppose — to pay attention specifically to props and background actors is an inspired choice. These are elements of a film that are often purposefully obscured and painted over; almost nobody watching a movie is actually taking notice of set design and extras unless they spent five years in film school, first. By gating progression behind the viewer's ability to break a shot down into its constituent parts, you force them to engage with the medium far deeper than they normally would otherwise. This game is likely going to make a lot of people feel very smart, because they're being encouraged to watch a film in a new way, and then being rewarded for their curiosity with more scenes.
And you do feel very smart when you're linking snake earrings to living snakes, or one actor in an older movie into one of their later appearances. You feel significantly less smart when you realize that this is all mostly just blind-luck fumbling around to try to uncover more clips, with little actually linking one shot to another. Despite being called a "match cut" system, the visuals of an object aren't actually matched; the objects themselves are. A spiky balloon ball links to an owl trinket on a dresser. An avant-garde, metal apple links to the same owl trinket. A gilded statue links to the same metal apple. This is because the game classifies them all as "sculpture". The match cut system appears to load in a clip with a "sculpture" in it at random, even when clicking the exact same object again.
Match cutting is also prone to breaking, or otherwise just not working in a way that a human would be able to comprehend. There was a painting in one scene that was clearly made by covering a woman's breasts in green paint and then stamping them onto the canvas; clicking on this inexplicably sent me to a zoomed-in shot of Marcel's face with her eyes closed. Her clothes were on, so it's not like it was linking "breasts". I don't have any clue how the game logic determined that they were connected. You can select accessories, but only sometimes. Wristwatches count as "clock", but only sometimes. Crosses and other jewelry around the neck can be selected, but rings around the neck can't.
As you're conditioned to keep an eye out for props, you'll inevitably start noticing ones strewn throughout the scene that look especially unique or vibrant, and then you try clicking on them and get nothing. It's not hard to feel like you've started thinking too far ahead of what the game is actually keeping track of, and it's frustrating. Why is the most reliable way of making progression not to keep a watchful eye out for unique props and actually pay attention to the movie, but instead to reel every clip back to its start and spam-click on the slates until Brownian motion sends you to a new piece of film?
Immortality has zero faith in its audience. A lot of what you're meant to click on gets long, drawn-out holding shots, where the camera refuses to break away for several seconds lest you miss out on spotting the special thing. It's like they hired Dora the Explorer to be the DP.
Even beyond that, though, the hidden "reverse" scenes start off interesting and end embarrassingly. The first one I discovered had what appeared to be an older, nearly-bald Marcel standing off in a corner while two actors rehearsed a rape scene. As the clip progressed, it zoomed in further on her face, and played distorted, echoed audio of someone yelling something to the effect of "hold the French bitch down" in German. The older "Marcel" then screamed, and the clip ended. I was intrigued. My immediate first instinct was that this was Marcel, decades later, reinserting herself into this old footage and releasing it to the public under the guise of an archival project to showcase how complicit many had been in the abuse she'd faced through her life, and how many more had perpetuated it.
I was wrong. It was sillier.
See, that wasn't Marcel, that was The One. Like Neo. The One is an angel, or demon, or God, or an alien, or something, and she's immortal. The One was Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary, and Eve, and all of Christianity was a story that she made up. Or maybe not, it's ambiguous. She's also Marcel, and also the director that Marcel was having sex with. Anyway, her entire thing is that she possesses humans and lives through them as a puppet master, carrying within her the thousands of essences of the people she's taken control of throughout her existence. There's another one of these entities, named The Other One, and The Other One is embroiled in an endless battle with The One. The Other One thinks that humans are all worthless monkeys, and The One thinks that humans have value because they can make movies. They kill each other a lot because they don't see eye-to-eye on this issue. I'm barely exaggerating. At the end of the game, The One deletes all of the clips and then possesses YOU, the viewer! You're now a vessel for The One! Metaphorically! The One is a cognitohazard! That's right, this was a fucking creepypasta all along!
This is the actual meta-plot stringing all three of the included films together, and it's fucking terrible. It's so bad that it retroactively sapped nearly all of the enjoyment that I had felt up until that point. I don't even think that it would be possible to rewrite this into something that isn't Daniel Mullins-tier. Scrap this entire idea. Get rid of the whole thing and try again. It sucks. It's so unbelievably bad. I don't know how you could see this and give it a pass.
Given how immaculately constructed some of these sets are and how few continuity errors I noticed, it doesn't seem like this was a production that barely made it out of the door because of COVID. You would expect that to be the case, but it seems as though the crew were able to work around it almost effortlessly, putting together some genuinely impressive film backdrops, faux-studios, and apartments for the sake of all of these shots. The actual films on display are the most polished things here, which is especially funny when you consider that, in-universe, they were never actually finished. If you really want to feel where the game has a limp, it's in both its writing and the fact that these actors seem to be getting inconsistent direction.
Less artistically and more objectively, however, technical issues abound. At one point, the game popped an achievement to celebrate me seeing "what happened to Carl Goodman". It was another hour before I even found out who Carl Goodman was, and another hour and a half after that before I actually saw what it was that the game thought I'd seen. Attempting to sort your clips by items and actors produces so many of them that the UI lags to the point of being borderline unusable. Sometimes unlocking new videos won't actually let you watch them, requiring you to back out to the main menu and reload back into the viewer. How in the world does a game where you do nothing but scrub through film clips still have issues that are both this obvious and this critical after a calendar year and boatloads of acclaim? You couldn't afford to patch the fucking thing with Game Pass money?
I admit that none of what's written above could be read as me being fair to Sam Barlow, but I don't think he's earned it. This is a game written and directed by the same guy behind the stories of Silent Hill Origins and Shattered Memories. Finesse, historically, isn't one of his strong suits. Ironically, I think the "and company" part of "Sam Barlow and company" did an outstanding job; I love how they managed to capture these faux period pieces, what with their matte paintings and their ever-shifting accents. I love the set design, I love the cinematography, I love some of the actors. Manon Gage does such a convincing job in the behind-the-scenes footage that it's hard to believe it isn't actually candid.
Honestly, I would have been happier just watching these movies. I would have been happier leafing through all of this behind-the-scenes footage in chronological order without the forced layer of meta-narrative and detective shenanigans looming over all of it. Ambrosio would have been a legitimately good watch; Minsky is kind of dreck, but the way production ended was interesting; Two of Everything is just bad. But I would have gotten more enjoyment out of just seeing the cast interact, and build and destroy their relationships, and build and destroy their films if they weren't all told non-linearly and chopped up like this. I'd seriously suggest anyone who's read this far and is still interested in Immortality to just watch a video online of someone putting the movie clips in order for you.
The worst parts of the game are the ones which Sam Barlow decided to put his fingerprints all over. If he could have gotten out of the way of this entire production, it could have been genuinely amazing. Instead, he manages to tank three entire movies with all of their extra footage by trying to tie them all up in one of the most embarrassing science fiction Christ parallels I've ever seen. Oops. Better luck next time. Hope your crew can find another director who can actually use their talents without making the fruits of their labor into a joke.
"I'm part of you, now." Give me a fucking break.
Oh, no. This is stupid.
People used to make jokes that Hideo Kojima never actually wanted to make games, and he was only in the industry because he couldn't make it in film. This is a very safe, paternalistic, mocking idea; the man includes a lot of cutscenes in his games, and — tonally speaking — they can be pretty silly, which movies totally never are. But it's a statement that's untrue. It ignores the contributions he's made to the field of game design. It ignores the way in which he uses the medium to paint his narratives, rather than create and pigeon-hole them into a video game post-facto. It ignores a lot of things about him to make a quip that'll make you seem epic and haughty when it actually makes you look like a rube.
With that said, I think Sam Barlow is only in this industry because he wouldn't be able to make it in film. The in-universe movies are constructed with an amazing amount of love, care, and technical prowess, and they're completely spoiled by two of the worst meta-plots I've ever seen.
God, can we put a halt order on media made by men where the entire framing device is "Wow, powerful men constantly exploit women! Not me, though!" Apparently this is the third time Sam Barlow has made a game about the voyeuristic portrayal of traumatized women, and I think the guy needs to take some time off to come up with a new plot. How many more self-flagellating men in the director's chair do we need to keep releasing high-profile shit like this while blaring it over and drowning out the work of women who have been talking about how badly society has been treating them for the past fifty years? Are we meant to be shocked when we see a titty for the nth time in Ambrosio, as if Doris Wishman wasn't already producing sexploitation films centered around misogyny and rape culture from a woman's perspective in fucking 1964? In a world where creators like Coralie Fargeat are making deconstructive rape-revenge films that take the entire industry to task for the shit that they've put women through, why the fuck does Sam Barlow feel the need to throw his limited perspective in? How many women do I need to namedrop before I get my point across?
What the fuck else is even going on here, anyway? Is the intent for me to feel disgusted when the reels swap in the middle of a sex scene and Marcel suddenly looks like she's about 50 instead of 18? Am I expected to do anything other than laugh my ass off when everyone is suddenly butt-naked during a table read while two people fuck on top of a copy of the script? Is there a point to any of this, or is it just here to "shock"? There's so much capital-I, italicized Imagery on display that your main means of interacting with the game is through a visual match cut system, and feels like it's in service of the most surface-level, meaningless symbology imaginable. An extra-dimensional being who is haunting the video game says that he invented "the snake and the apple" and then menacingly looks into camera while pointing a snake at me. Shut the fuck up!!!
Right, the match cut system. Conceptually very interesting. Forcing the player — viewer, I suppose — to pay attention specifically to props and background actors is an inspired choice. These are elements of a film that are often purposefully obscured and painted over; almost nobody watching a movie is actually taking notice of set design and extras unless they spent five years in film school, first. By gating progression behind the viewer's ability to break a shot down into its constituent parts, you force them to engage with the medium far deeper than they normally would otherwise. This game is likely going to make a lot of people feel very smart, because they're being encouraged to watch a film in a new way, and then being rewarded for their curiosity with more scenes.
And you do feel very smart when you're linking snake earrings to living snakes, or one actor in an older movie into one of their later appearances. You feel significantly less smart when you realize that this is all mostly just blind-luck fumbling around to try to uncover more clips, with little actually linking one shot to another. Despite being called a "match cut" system, the visuals of an object aren't actually matched; the objects themselves are. A spiky balloon ball links to an owl trinket on a dresser. An avant-garde, metal apple links to the same owl trinket. A gilded statue links to the same metal apple. This is because the game classifies them all as "sculpture". The match cut system appears to load in a clip with a "sculpture" in it at random, even when clicking the exact same object again.
Match cutting is also prone to breaking, or otherwise just not working in a way that a human would be able to comprehend. There was a painting in one scene that was clearly made by covering a woman's breasts in green paint and then stamping them onto the canvas; clicking on this inexplicably sent me to a zoomed-in shot of Marcel's face with her eyes closed. Her clothes were on, so it's not like it was linking "breasts". I don't have any clue how the game logic determined that they were connected. You can select accessories, but only sometimes. Wristwatches count as "clock", but only sometimes. Crosses and other jewelry around the neck can be selected, but rings around the neck can't.
As you're conditioned to keep an eye out for props, you'll inevitably start noticing ones strewn throughout the scene that look especially unique or vibrant, and then you try clicking on them and get nothing. It's not hard to feel like you've started thinking too far ahead of what the game is actually keeping track of, and it's frustrating. Why is the most reliable way of making progression not to keep a watchful eye out for unique props and actually pay attention to the movie, but instead to reel every clip back to its start and spam-click on the slates until Brownian motion sends you to a new piece of film?
Immortality has zero faith in its audience. A lot of what you're meant to click on gets long, drawn-out holding shots, where the camera refuses to break away for several seconds lest you miss out on spotting the special thing. It's like they hired Dora the Explorer to be the DP.
Even beyond that, though, the hidden "reverse" scenes start off interesting and end embarrassingly. The first one I discovered had what appeared to be an older, nearly-bald Marcel standing off in a corner while two actors rehearsed a rape scene. As the clip progressed, it zoomed in further on her face, and played distorted, echoed audio of someone yelling something to the effect of "hold the French bitch down" in German. The older "Marcel" then screamed, and the clip ended. I was intrigued. My immediate first instinct was that this was Marcel, decades later, reinserting herself into this old footage and releasing it to the public under the guise of an archival project to showcase how complicit many had been in the abuse she'd faced through her life, and how many more had perpetuated it.
I was wrong. It was sillier.
See, that wasn't Marcel, that was The One. Like Neo. The One is an angel, or demon, or God, or an alien, or something, and she's immortal. The One was Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary, and Eve, and all of Christianity was a story that she made up. Or maybe not, it's ambiguous. She's also Marcel, and also the director that Marcel was having sex with. Anyway, her entire thing is that she possesses humans and lives through them as a puppet master, carrying within her the thousands of essences of the people she's taken control of throughout her existence. There's another one of these entities, named The Other One, and The Other One is embroiled in an endless battle with The One. The Other One thinks that humans are all worthless monkeys, and The One thinks that humans have value because they can make movies. They kill each other a lot because they don't see eye-to-eye on this issue. I'm barely exaggerating. At the end of the game, The One deletes all of the clips and then possesses YOU, the viewer! You're now a vessel for The One! Metaphorically! The One is a cognitohazard! That's right, this was a fucking creepypasta all along!
This is the actual meta-plot stringing all three of the included films together, and it's fucking terrible. It's so bad that it retroactively sapped nearly all of the enjoyment that I had felt up until that point. I don't even think that it would be possible to rewrite this into something that isn't Daniel Mullins-tier. Scrap this entire idea. Get rid of the whole thing and try again. It sucks. It's so unbelievably bad. I don't know how you could see this and give it a pass.
Given how immaculately constructed some of these sets are and how few continuity errors I noticed, it doesn't seem like this was a production that barely made it out of the door because of COVID. You would expect that to be the case, but it seems as though the crew were able to work around it almost effortlessly, putting together some genuinely impressive film backdrops, faux-studios, and apartments for the sake of all of these shots. The actual films on display are the most polished things here, which is especially funny when you consider that, in-universe, they were never actually finished. If you really want to feel where the game has a limp, it's in both its writing and the fact that these actors seem to be getting inconsistent direction.
Less artistically and more objectively, however, technical issues abound. At one point, the game popped an achievement to celebrate me seeing "what happened to Carl Goodman". It was another hour before I even found out who Carl Goodman was, and another hour and a half after that before I actually saw what it was that the game thought I'd seen. Attempting to sort your clips by items and actors produces so many of them that the UI lags to the point of being borderline unusable. Sometimes unlocking new videos won't actually let you watch them, requiring you to back out to the main menu and reload back into the viewer. How in the world does a game where you do nothing but scrub through film clips still have issues that are both this obvious and this critical after a calendar year and boatloads of acclaim? You couldn't afford to patch the fucking thing with Game Pass money?
I admit that none of what's written above could be read as me being fair to Sam Barlow, but I don't think he's earned it. This is a game written and directed by the same guy behind the stories of Silent Hill Origins and Shattered Memories. Finesse, historically, isn't one of his strong suits. Ironically, I think the "and company" part of "Sam Barlow and company" did an outstanding job; I love how they managed to capture these faux period pieces, what with their matte paintings and their ever-shifting accents. I love the set design, I love the cinematography, I love some of the actors. Manon Gage does such a convincing job in the behind-the-scenes footage that it's hard to believe it isn't actually candid.
Honestly, I would have been happier just watching these movies. I would have been happier leafing through all of this behind-the-scenes footage in chronological order without the forced layer of meta-narrative and detective shenanigans looming over all of it. Ambrosio would have been a legitimately good watch; Minsky is kind of dreck, but the way production ended was interesting; Two of Everything is just bad. But I would have gotten more enjoyment out of just seeing the cast interact, and build and destroy their relationships, and build and destroy their films if they weren't all told non-linearly and chopped up like this. I'd seriously suggest anyone who's read this far and is still interested in Immortality to just watch a video online of someone putting the movie clips in order for you.
The worst parts of the game are the ones which Sam Barlow decided to put his fingerprints all over. If he could have gotten out of the way of this entire production, it could have been genuinely amazing. Instead, he manages to tank three entire movies with all of their extra footage by trying to tie them all up in one of the most embarrassing science fiction Christ parallels I've ever seen. Oops. Better luck next time. Hope your crew can find another director who can actually use their talents without making the fruits of their labor into a joke.
"I'm part of you, now." Give me a fucking break.
Having played Her Story years ago and appreciating the concept though never really getting hooked by the story/ending, and having stayed away from Telling Lies due to bad press, I was a bit skeptical of Sam Barlow's newest title Immortality. However, I finished it earlier today, and I now think it's solid. Flawed, certainly, but I can't help but appreciate the craft.
The story goes like this: found footage of three unreleased films starring the fictional model turned actress Marissa Marcel has been recently unearthed (unreleased due to enigmatic circumstances), and it's up to you to uncover the mystery of what happened and why she disappeared. You start with a clip of a TV interview, and jump around through various clips by pausing/parsing footage and clicking on items of interest, such as the faces of those who appear and common objects. For example, clicking on a lamp in one scene may send you to another clip in another scene that has a different lamp present, clicking on water will transport you to a scene with water present, clicking on Marcel's face will transport you to another scene with her present, and so on so forth. It's an ambitious concept of scrolling through the database (as opposed to typing in keywords in Her Story), and while it seems to hasten the pace, it also introduces an element of randomness in that some scenes can only be accessed with certain objects, and you'll be transported to a random scene every time you click with no way to control the exact scene you jump to. This disjointed narrative telling, while broadening the mystery, could also potentially result in the mystery being spoiled prematurely if you accidentally bump into a crucial scene like 25% into the game and having it all not really make sense. If you're trying to collect all the scenes and see everything, this is probably more of an impediment than a boon.
Also without going into too much depth, let me give you a few pointers regarding the system that will aid the process, that I really wish I knew about before I started this up. The game's unfortunately not the best at explaining its various tools & gadgets.
- You can use the left and right arrow keys (or left and right on the d-pad if using a controller) to parse through all clickable objects of interest when the scene is paused.
- If you're using a controller, then the controller will vibrate at certain instances (or you'll be clued in on something strange going on when you notice flashes of black and white interspersed in the footage or the backing track turning "creepy"). That's your cue to parse the footage backwards at a very specific speed; on mouse and keyboard, you need to hold shift and tap the left arrow key twice, or on the controller, tap the left stick to the left twice. I won't say anymore on this.
- While paused and selecting clips, you can click on the clapperboard symbol to switch to object classification, which will give you a little subtitle for each shot indicating what category it falls under for that type of object.
Again, without going into spoiler territory, I think Immortality's strength is presenting layers of narratives and social commentary including the relationship between viewer and creator, art as a creative medium, meaning within art, and of course the norms & fads of filmmaking throughout the industry and its various eras; I won't comment too heavily upon these themes as I don't feel qualified to do so, but there is a lot to unpack between the narrative of the films themselves, the meta narrative of what happened as part of the creative process, and the meta narrative as part of the player's discovery. By instilling you, the player, as an active participant engrossed in the meta-narrative and not merely roleplaying an observer such as that in Her Story, Immortality is able to convey its thoughts and feelings in a much more direct and thought-out way; it is aware of its audience seeking meaning, and is not afraid to provoke the question of whether or not that meaning even exists in the first place. To boot, the attention to detail regarding its characterization of the common movie tropes and aesthetics of each era are definitely on point, down to the grainy film textures and static background buzzing in some cases, and I found the acting, especially that by lead actress Manon Gage, to be quite convincing.
While its main draw via its structure and formula is also most likely its biggest issue due to its variability, and potentially leading to tedium through constant, repetitive searching or early disappointment if key moments are brought up too early, it's nevertheless an ambitious and more realized work than Her Story and a fantastic example of how interactive media can convey a wide range of emotions in ways that are simply not possible in more static mediums such as books and films. Give this a shot if you're looking for an engrossing mystery with plenty of twists and turns to be uncovered by the player, and be prepared to experience a wide variety of emotions. I will say this is not for the faint of heart (despite having nothing I would consider a "jumpscare") but if you give it a chance, then perhaps Sam Barlow's latest thriller may give you quite a ride.
The story goes like this: found footage of three unreleased films starring the fictional model turned actress Marissa Marcel has been recently unearthed (unreleased due to enigmatic circumstances), and it's up to you to uncover the mystery of what happened and why she disappeared. You start with a clip of a TV interview, and jump around through various clips by pausing/parsing footage and clicking on items of interest, such as the faces of those who appear and common objects. For example, clicking on a lamp in one scene may send you to another clip in another scene that has a different lamp present, clicking on water will transport you to a scene with water present, clicking on Marcel's face will transport you to another scene with her present, and so on so forth. It's an ambitious concept of scrolling through the database (as opposed to typing in keywords in Her Story), and while it seems to hasten the pace, it also introduces an element of randomness in that some scenes can only be accessed with certain objects, and you'll be transported to a random scene every time you click with no way to control the exact scene you jump to. This disjointed narrative telling, while broadening the mystery, could also potentially result in the mystery being spoiled prematurely if you accidentally bump into a crucial scene like 25% into the game and having it all not really make sense. If you're trying to collect all the scenes and see everything, this is probably more of an impediment than a boon.
Also without going into too much depth, let me give you a few pointers regarding the system that will aid the process, that I really wish I knew about before I started this up. The game's unfortunately not the best at explaining its various tools & gadgets.
- You can use the left and right arrow keys (or left and right on the d-pad if using a controller) to parse through all clickable objects of interest when the scene is paused.
- If you're using a controller, then the controller will vibrate at certain instances (or you'll be clued in on something strange going on when you notice flashes of black and white interspersed in the footage or the backing track turning "creepy"). That's your cue to parse the footage backwards at a very specific speed; on mouse and keyboard, you need to hold shift and tap the left arrow key twice, or on the controller, tap the left stick to the left twice. I won't say anymore on this.
- While paused and selecting clips, you can click on the clapperboard symbol to switch to object classification, which will give you a little subtitle for each shot indicating what category it falls under for that type of object.
Again, without going into spoiler territory, I think Immortality's strength is presenting layers of narratives and social commentary including the relationship between viewer and creator, art as a creative medium, meaning within art, and of course the norms & fads of filmmaking throughout the industry and its various eras; I won't comment too heavily upon these themes as I don't feel qualified to do so, but there is a lot to unpack between the narrative of the films themselves, the meta narrative of what happened as part of the creative process, and the meta narrative as part of the player's discovery. By instilling you, the player, as an active participant engrossed in the meta-narrative and not merely roleplaying an observer such as that in Her Story, Immortality is able to convey its thoughts and feelings in a much more direct and thought-out way; it is aware of its audience seeking meaning, and is not afraid to provoke the question of whether or not that meaning even exists in the first place. To boot, the attention to detail regarding its characterization of the common movie tropes and aesthetics of each era are definitely on point, down to the grainy film textures and static background buzzing in some cases, and I found the acting, especially that by lead actress Manon Gage, to be quite convincing.
While its main draw via its structure and formula is also most likely its biggest issue due to its variability, and potentially leading to tedium through constant, repetitive searching or early disappointment if key moments are brought up too early, it's nevertheless an ambitious and more realized work than Her Story and a fantastic example of how interactive media can convey a wide range of emotions in ways that are simply not possible in more static mediums such as books and films. Give this a shot if you're looking for an engrossing mystery with plenty of twists and turns to be uncovered by the player, and be prepared to experience a wide variety of emotions. I will say this is not for the faint of heart (despite having nothing I would consider a "jumpscare") but if you give it a chance, then perhaps Sam Barlow's latest thriller may give you quite a ride.
They really had a good thing going here. For an hour or so, there's some true wonder to unpicking the gorgeously filmed, intriguing trio of movies that has been put together here. The fims - Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything, are all gloriously shot and composed. Whilst you can see the cracks at some points, it's oh so easy to fall into Immortality's facade of the lost old media - The giallo inspired and notably horny Ambrosio in particular being an utter delight. And it's all filmed so well and with a degree of authenticity that just feels so right.
And those initial few hours, where you're both trying to piece together the plots of these movies, noticeing the flaws and trying to figure out the threads and what overarching story really is about is pretty great stuff. When clicking on each weird item in the background can send you to god know where. And the prospect of this all tying together with some cool allegorical narrative or whatever, some light horror and so on - god it could work.
Shame the narrative that you uncover is absolute trash. It is a very bleh fantasy/horror thing that I would feel would fall flat on your average creepypasta site - and it still could have worked even if it was mostly invested in exploring that immortality of art/people in cinema, the aspect of lost media "reviving people" so to speak but no. Its way too bogged down in the very literal mechanics of it's bad storyline and I hate it. It's bad enough to retrospectively make me feel like an idiot for wanting to pull on the threads, and care way less about the pretty well built up and interesting character relationships you learn through the snippets.
There's also some good old gamey issues to get in the way. Searching through clips, especially at the point where you'd probably just before getting to the big storyline hooks, is a pain in the arse, and bizzarely this point and click game works best by far with controller. It's also pretty buggy and in general way more finicky and less responsive than it should be. It detracts a fair bit from an otherwise incredibly immersive experience. The music is also quite bland and is constantly repeating the same shot clips as you go over the movies. And you can't turn it off because you need it for the sound cues to know how to find a lot of the secrets. Yay.
And its such a damn shame. It's probably the best looking FMV game ever released. The performances, particularly from Manon Gage and Hans Christopher, are spot on, and the way each of the movies captures their respective spheres of cinema - Giallo (mixed with hitchcock), 70s Neo-Noir and late 90s cheapo indie is absolutely spot on. And maybe if it was edited more consicely, the game more directed in terms of getting you to the right clips at the right time, and less navel-gazing in terms of it's very bad overarching narrative, it could have been incredible.
It's a better game than it's progenitor Her Story on account of the game not being so focused on a twist you'll work on in the first two seconds, and god knows it's better than Telling Lies, a game so shit even annapurna didnt try to push it, but I do think the end result is still a failure. Barlow has got the technical side of an FMV game absolutely down pat now though, and I think if he was given a competent writer, maybe then, this long project can bear some truly great fruit.
And those initial few hours, where you're both trying to piece together the plots of these movies, noticeing the flaws and trying to figure out the threads and what overarching story really is about is pretty great stuff. When clicking on each weird item in the background can send you to god know where. And the prospect of this all tying together with some cool allegorical narrative or whatever, some light horror and so on - god it could work.
Shame the narrative that you uncover is absolute trash. It is a very bleh fantasy/horror thing that I would feel would fall flat on your average creepypasta site - and it still could have worked even if it was mostly invested in exploring that immortality of art/people in cinema, the aspect of lost media "reviving people" so to speak but no. Its way too bogged down in the very literal mechanics of it's bad storyline and I hate it. It's bad enough to retrospectively make me feel like an idiot for wanting to pull on the threads, and care way less about the pretty well built up and interesting character relationships you learn through the snippets.
There's also some good old gamey issues to get in the way. Searching through clips, especially at the point where you'd probably just before getting to the big storyline hooks, is a pain in the arse, and bizzarely this point and click game works best by far with controller. It's also pretty buggy and in general way more finicky and less responsive than it should be. It detracts a fair bit from an otherwise incredibly immersive experience. The music is also quite bland and is constantly repeating the same shot clips as you go over the movies. And you can't turn it off because you need it for the sound cues to know how to find a lot of the secrets. Yay.
And its such a damn shame. It's probably the best looking FMV game ever released. The performances, particularly from Manon Gage and Hans Christopher, are spot on, and the way each of the movies captures their respective spheres of cinema - Giallo (mixed with hitchcock), 70s Neo-Noir and late 90s cheapo indie is absolutely spot on. And maybe if it was edited more consicely, the game more directed in terms of getting you to the right clips at the right time, and less navel-gazing in terms of it's very bad overarching narrative, it could have been incredible.
It's a better game than it's progenitor Her Story on account of the game not being so focused on a twist you'll work on in the first two seconds, and god knows it's better than Telling Lies, a game so shit even annapurna didnt try to push it, but I do think the end result is still a failure. Barlow has got the technical side of an FMV game absolutely down pat now though, and I think if he was given a competent writer, maybe then, this long project can bear some truly great fruit.
FMV games have come a long way since the days of Night Trap and The 7th Guest, although still quiet in the margins of popular gaming. Undoubtedly, Sam Barlow’s recent entries have given the form a new lease of life, Her Story and Telling Lies being popular hits. His latest affair, Immortality, is just as delightfully ambitious and engaging.
The player is tasked with figuring out the mystery of missing actress Marissa Marcel by examining and connecting details from archive and rushes from three of her unreleased films. As you’d imagine, you get more than what you bargained for.
The game’s key strength is authenticity. The films feel particularly real: Ambrosia (1968) plays like a softcore Fellini fantasy; Minsky (1970) is basically a queerer, sexier Klute; Two of Everything (1999) evokes the self-serious, late style of Brian DePalma. And all of them, beautifully shot, have compelling performances and narratives - I really wish Minsky was real! Whilst the cast don’t exactly feel like real stars, the performances can be incredible both inside and out of the inner movies. Manon Gage’s Marissa is like a character from Mulholland Drive: behind her eyes is a troubled soul.
To celebrate the most terrifying and wonderful revelation in the game is to spoil it entirely. All I will say is this: the writer credits include Barry Gifford, known for his novel of Wild at Heart and the screenplay of Lost Highway, both put to screen by David Lynch. Hopefully that paints a picture of the mind-bending existential terrors to come.
As with games that give the player so much freedom, the structure and pacing can be jeopardised. Immortality is, at times, a victim of this: new plot developments can be exciting but then undercut by having to loop back to the same bits of footage until you find a new lead - this can drag out especially when there’s hours of the stuff. Similarly, the ending, which is great in and of itself, can just come too early or too late based on what you’ve just spent the last twenty minutes sifting through.
And as this is the writer behind Lost Highway, the twists and reveals of the game probably don’t feel wholly satisfying or sensical enough for most players to justify hours of careful, logical analysis. Still, for fans of the movies, and all things dreamy and weird, Immortality is the kind of unique experience that will get under your skin and stay there.
The player is tasked with figuring out the mystery of missing actress Marissa Marcel by examining and connecting details from archive and rushes from three of her unreleased films. As you’d imagine, you get more than what you bargained for.
The game’s key strength is authenticity. The films feel particularly real: Ambrosia (1968) plays like a softcore Fellini fantasy; Minsky (1970) is basically a queerer, sexier Klute; Two of Everything (1999) evokes the self-serious, late style of Brian DePalma. And all of them, beautifully shot, have compelling performances and narratives - I really wish Minsky was real! Whilst the cast don’t exactly feel like real stars, the performances can be incredible both inside and out of the inner movies. Manon Gage’s Marissa is like a character from Mulholland Drive: behind her eyes is a troubled soul.
To celebrate the most terrifying and wonderful revelation in the game is to spoil it entirely. All I will say is this: the writer credits include Barry Gifford, known for his novel of Wild at Heart and the screenplay of Lost Highway, both put to screen by David Lynch. Hopefully that paints a picture of the mind-bending existential terrors to come.
As with games that give the player so much freedom, the structure and pacing can be jeopardised. Immortality is, at times, a victim of this: new plot developments can be exciting but then undercut by having to loop back to the same bits of footage until you find a new lead - this can drag out especially when there’s hours of the stuff. Similarly, the ending, which is great in and of itself, can just come too early or too late based on what you’ve just spent the last twenty minutes sifting through.
And as this is the writer behind Lost Highway, the twists and reveals of the game probably don’t feel wholly satisfying or sensical enough for most players to justify hours of careful, logical analysis. Still, for fans of the movies, and all things dreamy and weird, Immortality is the kind of unique experience that will get under your skin and stay there.
I think movies have gotten to the point where they are reflective about the inherent danger and evilness of the camera. reflective about the bad shit they’ve been responsible for and the evil they’ve brought into this world. I saw it this year with pearl and nope and fabelmans, I don’t think any of those necessarily are intentionally about the evils of the celluloid camera, but maybe being so in love with film is the same as kind of despising both the medium and the industry. and I really don’t care about movies anymore, I used to watch about a hundred new releases per year and hundreds of older movies every year but tastes change and so does the medium. for a while it was disheartening to see the a24fication of indie films and the marvelfication of blockbusters, everything has became one homogenous blob of certain tropes and certain beats to hit, it’s easier to just not care. it’s easier to just hang up ur hat and accept that after a hundred years this medium died, it was inevitable wasn’t it? it died a sad and uneventful death. I guess that comes off as very cynical which I really don’t think I am nor am I trying to be. I’m just trying to be realistic, that something I once cared about and was passionate about is more or less dead. I’m fine with that, I still saw several new releases I really really loved, saw some older stuff like 1981’s possession and 1985’s smooth talk. this review is all over the place but mostly my thoughts boil down to the fact that Sam Barlow is as in love with the medium of film as he is critical and hateful of it. more than any other movie I’ve seen since maybe 2002’s autofocus and reflections of evil, immortality understands the destruction that films have left in the wake of people who worked on them. it’s impossible to not think of weinstein or spacey or baldwin or morrow or lee when playing through this. how many lives have ultimately been fucked over by this monolith of an industry. whether or not intentional the ‘22 movies I mentioned understand this. pearl with both its exploration of exploitation of young women in the industry and how ultimately escapism via movies is some of the most dangerous escapism. nope with its commentary on how most every movie ever made is built on the suffering of minorities, how it’s an industry built upon this that works every day to put people down. fabelmans is directly about how movies stop people from coping directly with their trauma, a very expensive distraction. immortality is all of this, it’s every piece of criticism on the film industry that’s ever existed, condensed into one of the most beautifully dense things I’ve ever experienced. doing things that are only possible in this medium, not the medium of film but the medium of games, because ultimately this does not work as anything but a game. maybe it’s really cynical of where movies are at and where they’ve always kinda been but at the same time it’s ridiculously hopeful of where games are and where they can go.
(scattered thoughts because I just slugged down a fig apple redbull and wrote all of this in my hour before work lol.
crazy that Barlow actually wrote a competent and not fetishistic portrayal of women here, the story here almost comes off as an apology for how he wrote and treated femininity in her story and most likely everything else he ever worked on.
just insane to see the wide range of influences that Barlow cops from here, I have no real issue with this as it’s just as much an exploration of the problematic themes that the directors he’s borrowing from exhibited as it is a homage to rollin and friedkin, etc.
fucking love how truly skeletal this is, ripped away from anything complete makes this feel much more realistic than her story which worked almost entirely on the gotcha of the plot. stripped away from trying to be cinematic and showing the bones of film production makes this more cinematic in the long run.
I like the costumes ^_^)
(scattered thoughts because I just slugged down a fig apple redbull and wrote all of this in my hour before work lol.
crazy that Barlow actually wrote a competent and not fetishistic portrayal of women here, the story here almost comes off as an apology for how he wrote and treated femininity in her story and most likely everything else he ever worked on.
just insane to see the wide range of influences that Barlow cops from here, I have no real issue with this as it’s just as much an exploration of the problematic themes that the directors he’s borrowing from exhibited as it is a homage to rollin and friedkin, etc.
fucking love how truly skeletal this is, ripped away from anything complete makes this feel much more realistic than her story which worked almost entirely on the gotcha of the plot. stripped away from trying to be cinematic and showing the bones of film production makes this more cinematic in the long run.
I like the costumes ^_^)
Immortality feels like Sam Barlow and his gang finally achieved what the game idea had the potential for all along. I didn’t think Her Story was a joy to play, even though I liked the idea. Immortality is both a joy to play and the idea works so unbelievably well with the story that‘s crafted here. For a movie fan, this is a must-play for sure, as it throws you into a lynchian nightmare that makes you feel long before it makes you understand. Since the game doesn’t really help you with uncovering the mystery, you will unpack all of it, step by step, on your own and that will take some determination from your part, which is why this game most probably will stay as niche as its movie counterparts. But if you have the perseverance, you will experience one of the greatest narrative moments in video game history and most definitely one of the best experiences this year.
I also want to point out, that all of the actors here do an incredible job, especially one particular character I can’t really talk about. Jaw-dropping performance.
I also want to point out, that all of the actors here do an incredible job, especially one particular character I can’t really talk about. Jaw-dropping performance.
incredibly intriguing mystery and wildly thought-provoking exploration of art and life. perfect for a pretentious bitch like me.
Wth are these wigs??? atrocious 0/10 let the lady use her own damn hair smh.
Bad wigs aside, this is a creative and ambitious storytelling experiment. It doesn’t always work, and the interface kind of sucks, but it’s unique enough to be worth experiencing anyway (especially if you are a film nerd).
Bad wigs aside, this is a creative and ambitious storytelling experiment. It doesn’t always work, and the interface kind of sucks, but it’s unique enough to be worth experiencing anyway (especially if you are a film nerd).
I make no secret in other reviews of how highly I think of knowledge-based investigation games, with Her Story being one of the early examples that really kicked off the popularity of this interesting little genre. Not only is this game another work from the very same director, but conceptually it blows the original out of the water with a massively expanded scope - you've got the plots of three movies, the fates of several actors, and a little something extra special all to keep track of. The amount of work it must have taken to put this all together is staggering.
Unfortunately, on the gameplay side of things, I do have a couple of qualms. While the mysteries are compelling once you've got more context, at the start before you really know what you're looking for, things can feel very aimless, making it hard to figure out what amongst the information overload is important to note. Conversely, while jumping between clips with shared objects is a novel idea that helps broaden your search early on, later when you're trying to find the last few new clips, the lack of control and inability to try specific things, as with Her Story's keywords, can be really frustrating, especially when trying to hunt down the secrets. By the end of the game I was pretty frustrated with the pace of progress, and when the credits rolled I felt a sense of relief more than anything, which isn't a great sign. Maybe this was just a skill issue on my end? But that took me out of the experience and made it harder to emotionally connect to the themes the game wanted to explore. It also left me missing some crucial scenes that I only found about later, despite the game declaring itself to be over.
Unfortunately, on the gameplay side of things, I do have a couple of qualms. While the mysteries are compelling once you've got more context, at the start before you really know what you're looking for, things can feel very aimless, making it hard to figure out what amongst the information overload is important to note. Conversely, while jumping between clips with shared objects is a novel idea that helps broaden your search early on, later when you're trying to find the last few new clips, the lack of control and inability to try specific things, as with Her Story's keywords, can be really frustrating, especially when trying to hunt down the secrets. By the end of the game I was pretty frustrated with the pace of progress, and when the credits rolled I felt a sense of relief more than anything, which isn't a great sign. Maybe this was just a skill issue on my end? But that took me out of the experience and made it harder to emotionally connect to the themes the game wanted to explore. It also left me missing some crucial scenes that I only found about later, despite the game declaring itself to be over.
From the very start, something is off with Immortality. Before the game even begins, the title screen you’re presented with is off-putting, a stool in a sterile room, off-kilter music, you don’t even get the proper title of the game at this point, instead calling the game a “film restoration project” of the game’s star, Marissa Marcel. What is most off-putting isn’t all of these factors, but what will occur when you merely scroll down, as I did to mess with the options where there is just something in the frame, and it just keeps coming in and out as you discover it. Only after starting the game do you realize it is Marissa herself, about to make her audition for her eventual first on-screen appearance. One that would never become public, and from a scene you likely will not find until well into the game.
This feeling of offness is one you will feel throughout all of Immortality, a game straight off the heels of creator Sam Barlow’s previous FMV works, Her Story and Telling Lies. While I can’t speak for Telling Lies, I did play Her Story not long ago, in preparation for when I’d get to it. And it is a great game, but one that I would say is a good execution of a flawed concept. FMV has always been extraordinarily cool to me, as someone who was too young to ever experience them in their peak, almost kind of having a mythic quality to me for something so dated and rarely ever attempted again, it's just a style I think is too charming not to love. But the gameplay loop of Her Story inherently meant you would uncover most of the narrative’s mystery well before it would be as truly impactful as Viva Seifart’s dynamite performance would have you believe. So how do you expand upon that concept in a way that would keep all the strengths that FMV can provide to storytelling, while making it so you wouldn’t accidentally stumble across something perhaps more early than you ought to.
Immortality almost makes it look like child's play. A stupidly simple mechanic in which you’d use the various contextual objects and clues to hop between the game’s three films that always makes every scene dynamic and exciting. The amount of work that went into this game’s setting and contextualizing every different movie as a period piece meant to represent each film’s era is staggering. Even the little details like the subtitles being completely different go a long way in making each film distinct, and that's before you get into the sets, film styles, and attitudes that you’ll see in the over 200 clips. The immature and misogynistic pathos that permeates all of Ambrosio, the more rebel messiness and dingy feel of Minsky, or the very dreamy, pretty Lynchian feel of Two of Everything and all their behind the scenes work. It is a gorgeous game to behold, as someone who loves the aspect of filmmaking, watching a new scene in this game felt like a treat that there was constantly more of; helped by an incredibly charming cast that made everything feel that much more real.
But that offness never quite leaves, and as you scour more and more of the game, it very quickly became more and more terrifying to me. Very few games get under my skin in the ways this game does, especially with a controller in hand, which this game makes special use of. But when you discover the second layer to this game, it straight up horrified me. Not to spoil too much, as this is a game that you should go in knowing very little if at all possible; but the performances in these secret scenes are next level, and the ability to simply just look at the camera was enough to send shivers down my spine. That is, until you discover the third and final layer that this game presents to you.
Without saying too much in a review that I would hope helps inspire more people to go and check out this game, there is a scene, if you’ve played the game you already know what it is, that essentially forces you to recontextualize everything in this game. I was lucky enough to avoid spoiling it for myself beforehand, but it's an emotional bomb, one that made me weep almost on command, and was essentially the moment I realized how special this game truly was. Immortality isn’t just a triumph of Barlow’s style, a game that could only have been made after tweaking his style to fit a modern context, but its a celebration of art and why we love it and continue to make it. A game that can be hard to stomach, but oh so rewarding should you let it be. I have so much I want to say about Immortality that I cannot without spoiling the game, but it's truly something that will forever stick with me. An overwhelming masterwork that I cannot wait to get to talk about for years to come with my friends; I can only hope they will love it as much as I have.
This feeling of offness is one you will feel throughout all of Immortality, a game straight off the heels of creator Sam Barlow’s previous FMV works, Her Story and Telling Lies. While I can’t speak for Telling Lies, I did play Her Story not long ago, in preparation for when I’d get to it. And it is a great game, but one that I would say is a good execution of a flawed concept. FMV has always been extraordinarily cool to me, as someone who was too young to ever experience them in their peak, almost kind of having a mythic quality to me for something so dated and rarely ever attempted again, it's just a style I think is too charming not to love. But the gameplay loop of Her Story inherently meant you would uncover most of the narrative’s mystery well before it would be as truly impactful as Viva Seifart’s dynamite performance would have you believe. So how do you expand upon that concept in a way that would keep all the strengths that FMV can provide to storytelling, while making it so you wouldn’t accidentally stumble across something perhaps more early than you ought to.
Immortality almost makes it look like child's play. A stupidly simple mechanic in which you’d use the various contextual objects and clues to hop between the game’s three films that always makes every scene dynamic and exciting. The amount of work that went into this game’s setting and contextualizing every different movie as a period piece meant to represent each film’s era is staggering. Even the little details like the subtitles being completely different go a long way in making each film distinct, and that's before you get into the sets, film styles, and attitudes that you’ll see in the over 200 clips. The immature and misogynistic pathos that permeates all of Ambrosio, the more rebel messiness and dingy feel of Minsky, or the very dreamy, pretty Lynchian feel of Two of Everything and all their behind the scenes work. It is a gorgeous game to behold, as someone who loves the aspect of filmmaking, watching a new scene in this game felt like a treat that there was constantly more of; helped by an incredibly charming cast that made everything feel that much more real.
But that offness never quite leaves, and as you scour more and more of the game, it very quickly became more and more terrifying to me. Very few games get under my skin in the ways this game does, especially with a controller in hand, which this game makes special use of. But when you discover the second layer to this game, it straight up horrified me. Not to spoil too much, as this is a game that you should go in knowing very little if at all possible; but the performances in these secret scenes are next level, and the ability to simply just look at the camera was enough to send shivers down my spine. That is, until you discover the third and final layer that this game presents to you.
Without saying too much in a review that I would hope helps inspire more people to go and check out this game, there is a scene, if you’ve played the game you already know what it is, that essentially forces you to recontextualize everything in this game. I was lucky enough to avoid spoiling it for myself beforehand, but it's an emotional bomb, one that made me weep almost on command, and was essentially the moment I realized how special this game truly was. Immortality isn’t just a triumph of Barlow’s style, a game that could only have been made after tweaking his style to fit a modern context, but its a celebration of art and why we love it and continue to make it. A game that can be hard to stomach, but oh so rewarding should you let it be. I have so much I want to say about Immortality that I cannot without spoiling the game, but it's truly something that will forever stick with me. An overwhelming masterwork that I cannot wait to get to talk about for years to come with my friends; I can only hope they will love it as much as I have.
Sam Barlow's Immortality doesn't fully gel with me from a story or game mechanic perspective but overall, this FMV game is a pretty good and interesting experience.
Immortality has you sift through the three films of former actress Marissa Marcel. These movies never saw the light of day and you will sift through these clips to figure out just what happened to Marissa and why these movies never came out.
You'll jump in between these clips by clicking faces/things in these things which will then take you to another scene that has that person/object in common. For instance, clicking on a microphone in one scene will direct you to another scene in one of the films that features a microphone. You can then play that clip where it starts or rewind/fast forward to the start finish. The game let's you go about it however you want.
Overall, this method of learning and exploring works, though it makes for the info you gain a bit random and can definitely lead to a mixed experience depending on how much sifting you're doing before getting any worthwhile info.
This method of exploring though near the end, when you are trying to locate the last remaining scenes or info can lead to constantly clicking and clicking and clicking since the jumping to random scenes is random. Click on a knife in the same scene and each time, it'll take you to a random other scene with a knife/blade/etc, so if you are looking for a specific thing, it's not a guarantee that you will get there.
The overall menus and layout of the game itself is a bit clunky as well so if you are a bit of an achievement hunter or looking to complete the whole thing, it can get a little annoying from that aspect. There are secrets amongst the clips as well and even where those are is a bit random so overall, the ease of the experience as you progress, does get increasingly tedious.
To add to that increased tedious nature, the secrets amongst the clips that you can discover aren't unlocked with much ease. Sometimes you can find stuff by rewinding through the clips to uncover other things but sometimes getting those secrets to play out takes some finagling. At times, these play out with ease, other times you have to keep going back and forth to get it to start playing out.
Outside of that and a few crashes here and there though, I don't have a ton of issues with this game. The story is pretty interesting, even if it doesn't completely connect and the way the story unfolds is done in a satisfying way, though results may vary on that aspect as well. It's worth giving a shot at the very least.
Immortality has you sift through the three films of former actress Marissa Marcel. These movies never saw the light of day and you will sift through these clips to figure out just what happened to Marissa and why these movies never came out.
You'll jump in between these clips by clicking faces/things in these things which will then take you to another scene that has that person/object in common. For instance, clicking on a microphone in one scene will direct you to another scene in one of the films that features a microphone. You can then play that clip where it starts or rewind/fast forward to the start finish. The game let's you go about it however you want.
Overall, this method of learning and exploring works, though it makes for the info you gain a bit random and can definitely lead to a mixed experience depending on how much sifting you're doing before getting any worthwhile info.
This method of exploring though near the end, when you are trying to locate the last remaining scenes or info can lead to constantly clicking and clicking and clicking since the jumping to random scenes is random. Click on a knife in the same scene and each time, it'll take you to a random other scene with a knife/blade/etc, so if you are looking for a specific thing, it's not a guarantee that you will get there.
The overall menus and layout of the game itself is a bit clunky as well so if you are a bit of an achievement hunter or looking to complete the whole thing, it can get a little annoying from that aspect. There are secrets amongst the clips as well and even where those are is a bit random so overall, the ease of the experience as you progress, does get increasingly tedious.
To add to that increased tedious nature, the secrets amongst the clips that you can discover aren't unlocked with much ease. Sometimes you can find stuff by rewinding through the clips to uncover other things but sometimes getting those secrets to play out takes some finagling. At times, these play out with ease, other times you have to keep going back and forth to get it to start playing out.
Outside of that and a few crashes here and there though, I don't have a ton of issues with this game. The story is pretty interesting, even if it doesn't completely connect and the way the story unfolds is done in a satisfying way, though results may vary on that aspect as well. It's worth giving a shot at the very least.
Immortality has a fantastic mind-blowing narrative that spans over three full movies wrapped into one game. While I can't say much on the story because of spoilers, it is a hell of a ride once you uncover it all. Despite this, the gameplay has RNG issues that sometimes need you to interact dozens of times to get to the desired clip. This was my only issue with the game, the rest of it is fantastic, especially the main cast. I was compelled by the acting from everyone involved. I recommend this game for cinema lovers as you will get three very decent movies that come together in a very intriguing overarching narrative.
I'm dancing between a 7 and 8 for this game, but what the hell, giving it an 8 for the ambition on clear display here. Firstly I recommend playing this game with a friend, as the fun of it for me was theorizing, speculating, and discussing constantly what was going on and what was happening, going back and forth with "play that again!" or "wait I have an idea". I do not believe I personally would have enjoyed or even finished this game solo.
I cannot talk too much about what the game's about based on the inherent nature of what it is, but my main issue lies in the total RNG nature of the progression. It could take you anywhere from 3 to 18 hours to find all the critical clips (as I've seen from dozens of forums and steam reviews) and while it took us precisely 10 hours to hit credits, the credits weren't really all of it.
In fact, we were still missing 3 critical scenes to piece the story together, which we'd been trying to do for hours up to then. The credits should have probably indicated the end of the game, but a major chunk of the story was still missing. In the end, we had to look up what happened, read about the critical clips we missed, and then spend an additional 45 minutes brute-forcing this match cuts by clicking on Marissa's face over and over and over to get those scenes.
I have seen dozens of posts of people who gave up on this because they kept looping into the same scenes over and over. I don't blame them. There was a good hour where we kept match cutting and got literally nothing new, and I was ready to give up. Immortality is one of the most experimental games ever, and while the concept is brilliant and the actors, especially Manon Gage, give award worthy performances, it just feels like it doesn't respect the players' time at all. It might just be too experimental, if that makes sense. I think this game is far, far better than Her Story but I also think Sam Barlow needs some editors to remind him about the practicality of a person spending their time to play a game. You have to trade players some indication of progress every so often or you're consuming their time for nothing.
I never had an "aha" moment, we figured it out very slowly but I had such a great time with my friend over these 10 hours that I'd be remiss for not complimenting Barlow and Half Mermaid studios on their ability to create one of the first, genuine mysteries I've seen in a video game. If this game was intended to convince me I'd be a terrible detective in real life, then it has succeeded mightily. But hey, filming three full movies to make a game? That takes guts.
I cannot talk too much about what the game's about based on the inherent nature of what it is, but my main issue lies in the total RNG nature of the progression. It could take you anywhere from 3 to 18 hours to find all the critical clips (as I've seen from dozens of forums and steam reviews) and while it took us precisely 10 hours to hit credits, the credits weren't really all of it.
In fact, we were still missing 3 critical scenes to piece the story together, which we'd been trying to do for hours up to then. The credits should have probably indicated the end of the game, but a major chunk of the story was still missing. In the end, we had to look up what happened, read about the critical clips we missed, and then spend an additional 45 minutes brute-forcing this match cuts by clicking on Marissa's face over and over and over to get those scenes.
I have seen dozens of posts of people who gave up on this because they kept looping into the same scenes over and over. I don't blame them. There was a good hour where we kept match cutting and got literally nothing new, and I was ready to give up. Immortality is one of the most experimental games ever, and while the concept is brilliant and the actors, especially Manon Gage, give award worthy performances, it just feels like it doesn't respect the players' time at all. It might just be too experimental, if that makes sense. I think this game is far, far better than Her Story but I also think Sam Barlow needs some editors to remind him about the practicality of a person spending their time to play a game. You have to trade players some indication of progress every so often or you're consuming their time for nothing.
I never had an "aha" moment, we figured it out very slowly but I had such a great time with my friend over these 10 hours that I'd be remiss for not complimenting Barlow and Half Mermaid studios on their ability to create one of the first, genuine mysteries I've seen in a video game. If this game was intended to convince me I'd be a terrible detective in real life, then it has succeeded mightily. But hey, filming three full movies to make a game? That takes guts.
I have fallen deeply in love with Manon Gage.
Works about voyeurism that directly confront the viewer for participating are nothing new (Rear Window, Blow-Up, The Truman Show, Finding Frances, etc.), but I do think there's sincere eternal beauty-genius in the idea that everything we see through a lens - whether fact or fiction, consensual or non-consensual - constitutes a perverse one-way violation of the natural world in pursuit of wicked desires that we can never fully suppress, layers of cultural coercion that build like a coastal shelf of pressure upon everyone who participates with a camera from any direction.
Immortality is at its best when it's gleefully reveling in this idea, a sort of hypersexxxual Day For Night that permits and often encourages luxuriation in watching beautiful people be flirty and sexy and funny on, off, and mid-camera, poring over a grand archive of film footage that successfully evokes a variety of eras without putting tie-dye lampshades on them. The game could be accused of titillation, but the aforementioned genius of works like this is that the word "voyeur" acts as a creative shield behind which the footage can justifiably hide, cheekily asking its critics if they'd like to see one more clip of someone with their boobs or dick out. It's unlikely you'll say no - you're part of the problem, after all.
The ideas here aren't particularly original to anyone who's watched a "movie about movies"-type movie (it made me think of Boogie Nights a lot), but that doesn't mean they aren't worth exploring in a new mode of interaction - disjointed narratives in film can be a real pain when executed poorly because of their reliance on the audience "jigsawing" data-points together in real-time, but Immortality gives viewers the patient pleasure of being able to tap and spin the film reels (via a very satisfying interaction metaphor) at their own pace, bolstered by a helpful "find {noun}" match-cut feature that makes digging through each character/actor/person's tapes much more enjoyable than trying to piece a picture from Momentos in perpetual movie motion. At a dozen-or-so hours long, it's easy to spend a whole evening just silently researching a single participant in the puzzle, naively feeling yourself like Jack Terry in Brian DePalma's Blow Out.
It's unfortunate, then, that Immortality simply can't resist telling a video game story. Without spoiling too much: about two-thirds of the way in, all the psychosexual intrigue dissolves away to make space on the cutting room floor for a plot that is so corny and clunky that I think even the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have passed it up in favour of another episode about that planet of Scottish ghosts. There's an unintentional sadness in seeing Charlotta Mohlin, a professional actress and beautiful interpretive dancer, gradually be reduced from an ephemeral alien to a static exposition device who speaks in the pronouns of Cromp and Wenbembo. When you're dealing with desire and bodies and valise of inner selves, why do you need to bring the fucking Chongo into it? What a shame.
Regardless, this is still absolutely worth your time if you, like me, like to write big pretentious essays on Letterboxd about all the ways dialectical Freudian analysis can be applied to Solo: A Star Wars Story or whatever. Haters and intermediary filmbros will claim the plot of Marissa's last picture, Two of Everything, is an almost point-for-point remake of Mulholland Drive, but true kinophiles know it's an homage to The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
Immortality is at its best when it's gleefully reveling in this idea, a sort of hypersexxxual Day For Night that permits and often encourages luxuriation in watching beautiful people be flirty and sexy and funny on, off, and mid-camera, poring over a grand archive of film footage that successfully evokes a variety of eras without putting tie-dye lampshades on them. The game could be accused of titillation, but the aforementioned genius of works like this is that the word "voyeur" acts as a creative shield behind which the footage can justifiably hide, cheekily asking its critics if they'd like to see one more clip of someone with their boobs or dick out. It's unlikely you'll say no - you're part of the problem, after all.
The ideas here aren't particularly original to anyone who's watched a "movie about movies"-type movie (it made me think of Boogie Nights a lot), but that doesn't mean they aren't worth exploring in a new mode of interaction - disjointed narratives in film can be a real pain when executed poorly because of their reliance on the audience "jigsawing" data-points together in real-time, but Immortality gives viewers the patient pleasure of being able to tap and spin the film reels (via a very satisfying interaction metaphor) at their own pace, bolstered by a helpful "find {noun}" match-cut feature that makes digging through each character/actor/person's tapes much more enjoyable than trying to piece a picture from Momentos in perpetual movie motion. At a dozen-or-so hours long, it's easy to spend a whole evening just silently researching a single participant in the puzzle, naively feeling yourself like Jack Terry in Brian DePalma's Blow Out.
It's unfortunate, then, that Immortality simply can't resist telling a video game story. Without spoiling too much: about two-thirds of the way in, all the psychosexual intrigue dissolves away to make space on the cutting room floor for a plot that is so corny and clunky that I think even the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have passed it up in favour of another episode about that planet of Scottish ghosts. There's an unintentional sadness in seeing Charlotta Mohlin, a professional actress and beautiful interpretive dancer, gradually be reduced from an ephemeral alien to a static exposition device who speaks in the pronouns of Cromp and Wenbembo. When you're dealing with desire and bodies and valise of inner selves, why do you need to bring the fucking Chongo into it? What a shame.
Regardless, this is still absolutely worth your time if you, like me, like to write big pretentious essays on Letterboxd about all the ways dialectical Freudian analysis can be applied to Solo: A Star Wars Story or whatever. Haters and intermediary filmbros will claim the plot of Marissa's last picture, Two of Everything, is an almost point-for-point remake of Mulholland Drive, but true kinophiles know it's an homage to The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
There’s a story I heard from an excerpt of Béla Balázs’ Theory of the Film. The story goes that a Moscovian’s cousin was visiting from Siberia. It was the early days of cinema, and she had never seen a film before. They had taken her to the cinema to watch a burlesque movie.
“The Siberian cousin came home pale and grim. ‘Well, how did you like the film?’ the cousins asked her. She could scarcely be induced to answer, so overwhelmed was she by the sights she had seen. ‘Oh, it was horrible, horrible!! I can’t understand why they allow such dreadful things to be shown here in Moscow!’
‘What what was so horrible then?’
‘Human beings were torn to pieces and the heads thrown one way and the bodies the other and the hands somewhere else again.’”
She had never seen a montage before. The hand, the head, the bosom, disjointed by time in the image, the Siberian girl had seen them as disembodied. The ability to mentally situate the montage and its subjects in time and space is not an innate skill. To understand a montage, you have to learn to reassemble a body.
We are privy to something similar in Immortality. We reassemble a body of work, that of Marissa Marcel. We must do it through an understanding of the movements of cinema. The central movement in the game is the match cut, and it’s story is unveiled through the process of navigating a complex web of them. A cup, a stool, a cross, a kiss, a rose, wings, water, windows. Move through them. In a sense, the player becomes the editor, but without real control over it. These images are broadened, too. A cup may also be a bathtub, smoke may also be static. A similar thing is done in Sam Barlow’s other recent games. The Her Story system does something a lot like this, but with language. Enter a word into the search bar, it shows you five videos with that word, no matter the context. In a sense, these games are about understanding relationship between context and sign. In Immortality, however, we navigate through the image. This is why the game is made of match cuts.
When a film makes a match cut, there is typically something meant. Something is always meant with a cut, but the match cut often has its own specific meaning. With this magic trick, we signify a relation between the object and it’s corollary. In Immortality, these cuts are dense and the correlation is often superficial. A cup may be a bathtub because they both hold water, but not because “cup” means the same thing as “bathtub”. It is direct, and that is felt. You can line up every single picture of a rose, every single picture of a microphone, every single crucifix. Unmoored from context, grafted into the network of images. Metaphor melts away; through the network of cuts emerges a symbolic différance, crude and indistinct denotation. Meaning is transfigured and debased. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
A more defensive approach would view this as decay in the visual language of cinema, but it is a strength of Immortality. A character in the game briefly speaks of cubism, saying that he finds it a shame to reduce a beautiful woman's body to a bunch of squares. Immortality is sort of a cubism of the cinema, splaying out its forms. The absence of the typical cinematographic structure, both in editing and in image, challenges the immediate response we have to the image. I’m not so sure the game is fully up to embrace that project, but maybe that’s more appropriate, since I don’t know how many people will take up that challenge. The narrative and the image of these games are dismembered like the burlesque show. There is a story here about many things. There are lots of things I could have written about instead of this: masks, religion, the frequent primacy of sex in cinema, lost media fascinations, the archetype of the Wandering Jew, the purpose of storytelling. Other stuff, I’m sure. That in and of itself will be a challenge, and now, anchored to the network of match cuts, we are challenged in the same way. You cannot avoid being a structuralist. Both in image and in text, Immortality asks you to engage meaningfully and directly with the act of making meaning. The Siberian girl must learn how to watch a montage, and then she must learn how to make one.
“The Siberian cousin came home pale and grim. ‘Well, how did you like the film?’ the cousins asked her. She could scarcely be induced to answer, so overwhelmed was she by the sights she had seen. ‘Oh, it was horrible, horrible!! I can’t understand why they allow such dreadful things to be shown here in Moscow!’
‘What what was so horrible then?’
‘Human beings were torn to pieces and the heads thrown one way and the bodies the other and the hands somewhere else again.’”
She had never seen a montage before. The hand, the head, the bosom, disjointed by time in the image, the Siberian girl had seen them as disembodied. The ability to mentally situate the montage and its subjects in time and space is not an innate skill. To understand a montage, you have to learn to reassemble a body.
We are privy to something similar in Immortality. We reassemble a body of work, that of Marissa Marcel. We must do it through an understanding of the movements of cinema. The central movement in the game is the match cut, and it’s story is unveiled through the process of navigating a complex web of them. A cup, a stool, a cross, a kiss, a rose, wings, water, windows. Move through them. In a sense, the player becomes the editor, but without real control over it. These images are broadened, too. A cup may also be a bathtub, smoke may also be static. A similar thing is done in Sam Barlow’s other recent games. The Her Story system does something a lot like this, but with language. Enter a word into the search bar, it shows you five videos with that word, no matter the context. In a sense, these games are about understanding relationship between context and sign. In Immortality, however, we navigate through the image. This is why the game is made of match cuts.
When a film makes a match cut, there is typically something meant. Something is always meant with a cut, but the match cut often has its own specific meaning. With this magic trick, we signify a relation between the object and it’s corollary. In Immortality, these cuts are dense and the correlation is often superficial. A cup may be a bathtub because they both hold water, but not because “cup” means the same thing as “bathtub”. It is direct, and that is felt. You can line up every single picture of a rose, every single picture of a microphone, every single crucifix. Unmoored from context, grafted into the network of images. Metaphor melts away; through the network of cuts emerges a symbolic différance, crude and indistinct denotation. Meaning is transfigured and debased. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
A more defensive approach would view this as decay in the visual language of cinema, but it is a strength of Immortality. A character in the game briefly speaks of cubism, saying that he finds it a shame to reduce a beautiful woman's body to a bunch of squares. Immortality is sort of a cubism of the cinema, splaying out its forms. The absence of the typical cinematographic structure, both in editing and in image, challenges the immediate response we have to the image. I’m not so sure the game is fully up to embrace that project, but maybe that’s more appropriate, since I don’t know how many people will take up that challenge. The narrative and the image of these games are dismembered like the burlesque show. There is a story here about many things. There are lots of things I could have written about instead of this: masks, religion, the frequent primacy of sex in cinema, lost media fascinations, the archetype of the Wandering Jew, the purpose of storytelling. Other stuff, I’m sure. That in and of itself will be a challenge, and now, anchored to the network of match cuts, we are challenged in the same way. You cannot avoid being a structuralist. Both in image and in text, Immortality asks you to engage meaningfully and directly with the act of making meaning. The Siberian girl must learn how to watch a montage, and then she must learn how to make one.
Hands down Sam Barlow's best work so far. Switching from textual to visual searches is a brilliant move in conjunction with a shift in storytelling from the literal to the symbolic, drawing the player's attention over and over again to the images that are shared across the stories. The mechanics themselves blur the line between the sign and its meaning, linking a picture at now to another picture and now to the person the picture depicts, harmonizing with the thematic focus on the dissolving boundary between actor, role, and audience.
Immortality is Lynchian, in the sense that it uses a nexus of symbols and raw emotion to argue that the banal humanity of everyday life affects and reflects the grand arcs of humanity. Although the initially-obscure narrative does eventually take clearer form once you dive deep into the depths of the game, it remains resolutely unwilling to sacrifice the breadth of its symbolic resonance at the altar of "lore" by answering every question the player has. It is a game that sticks in one's mind and demands to be mulled over again and again, rewarding this thought with glimmers of insight that feel deeply earned.
Immortality is Lynchian, in the sense that it uses a nexus of symbols and raw emotion to argue that the banal humanity of everyday life affects and reflects the grand arcs of humanity. Although the initially-obscure narrative does eventually take clearer form once you dive deep into the depths of the game, it remains resolutely unwilling to sacrifice the breadth of its symbolic resonance at the altar of "lore" by answering every question the player has. It is a game that sticks in one's mind and demands to be mulled over again and again, rewarding this thought with glimmers of insight that feel deeply earned.
Backwards in time to films of crime,
With mysteries to find to shiver your spine,
Immortality is like red wine to which is divine,
To one Marissa Marcel, whose lives are nine.
With mysteries to find to shiver your spine,
Immortality is like red wine to which is divine,
To one Marissa Marcel, whose lives are nine.
This review contains spoilers
It's been a long, long time since a game has disappointed me as much as this.
This game starts out phenomenally. The effort put into making the footage feel old and from its era is incredible, the mystery is intruiging, the acting is stunning, I had a strong desire to make sense of the clips and the greater narrative, the game clearly sets up some sinister undertones about the sexualisation of women in film and the abuse that goes on behind the scenes in that industry and I was prepared for a very subtle treatment of that where the difficulty of uncovering what had happened to Marissa was a ludological parallel to how stories of abuse are swept under the rug. The one big issue from the very beginning is that the player has no control over what clips they will get. Initially, I thought this disconnectedness was the point, and was expecting to be required to pay close attention to the clips.
Sadly those mechanics never build towards anything. Eventually you realise that the object-matching mechanic has very inconsistent interpretations of what it will take you to, and that you actually don't have to figure anything out in this game except for how to find the rewind clips.
The first time you rewind and discover a secret clip is an excellent moment. It's unexpected, disturbing, and raises a lot of questions. My first hypothesis was that Marissa had somehow hidden footage documenting her time between 1970 and 1999 in the newly discovered tapes so that people could discover the truth about her trauma-induced mental breakdown or something.
Unfortunately the true answer is not nearly as grounded as that. It's all supernatural bullshit! Turns out Marissa is not a human with motivations who can be empathised with but a creepypasta with the ability to possess people and make them die or something, also she's Eve from the bible or something and Jesus is here and there were no grounded human reasons behind Carl's murder it's just "The One" killing "The Other One" and...
Honestly I very rapidly stopped caring at this point because once this game reveals this, you suddenly realise that this is no longer a game about discovering what happened to Marissa Marcel, this is now a game where you repetitively fast-forward through clips until you hear "the noise" and then watch an actress with way too much gel in her hair look into the camera while spouting metaphors that just explain the message and themes of the game to you.
Even worse, these messages and themes are incredibly asinine. There are two currents to the concept of "artistic immortality" here, the first being the interesting relationship between abuse and forms of media that allow that abuse to be infinitely replayed for the rest of time, the second being the incredibly trite observation that art allows people to 'live' beyond their death. Unfortunately the game seems far more interested in the latter of these to have any developed exploration of the former. The game ends with "The One" stating that she is "part of you" now, which interpreted literally within the game is basically a creepypasta ending where the game is possessing you now!!! but interpreted non-literally I'm not pretentious enough to interpret as anything more than the basic truism that art affects people... wow, so deep!
I have nothing inherently against surrealism or ambiguity. I do not think that art needs to be realistic to be meaningful. This game evidently attempts to trade in it's coherence for some deeper meaning and all I can say is that it was not worth it. I hate the heavy-handed metaphors of this game, I hate it's incredibly shallow reflections on the nature of art. I hate people looking into the camera, I hate "meta". No, I don't care how "Lynchian" it is, it's not deep and it's not interesting. I don't want to sound too hateful but some of the word-salad I've seen written on this game is downright embarrassing. When you strip it all away this game has shockingly little of substance.
I guess I feel so strongly negative about this because I was so in love with the opening hour or two before the big twist, they had the potential to do something really subtle here but instead it's a game that almost wants you to feel like an idiot for taking it's premise seriously. At the start of the game I was interested in learning about what happened to Marissa Marcel, by the end I realised my true answer to that question is "I don't care".
This game starts out phenomenally. The effort put into making the footage feel old and from its era is incredible, the mystery is intruiging, the acting is stunning, I had a strong desire to make sense of the clips and the greater narrative, the game clearly sets up some sinister undertones about the sexualisation of women in film and the abuse that goes on behind the scenes in that industry and I was prepared for a very subtle treatment of that where the difficulty of uncovering what had happened to Marissa was a ludological parallel to how stories of abuse are swept under the rug. The one big issue from the very beginning is that the player has no control over what clips they will get. Initially, I thought this disconnectedness was the point, and was expecting to be required to pay close attention to the clips.
Sadly those mechanics never build towards anything. Eventually you realise that the object-matching mechanic has very inconsistent interpretations of what it will take you to, and that you actually don't have to figure anything out in this game except for how to find the rewind clips.
The first time you rewind and discover a secret clip is an excellent moment. It's unexpected, disturbing, and raises a lot of questions. My first hypothesis was that Marissa had somehow hidden footage documenting her time between 1970 and 1999 in the newly discovered tapes so that people could discover the truth about her trauma-induced mental breakdown or something.
Unfortunately the true answer is not nearly as grounded as that. It's all supernatural bullshit! Turns out Marissa is not a human with motivations who can be empathised with but a creepypasta with the ability to possess people and make them die or something, also she's Eve from the bible or something and Jesus is here and there were no grounded human reasons behind Carl's murder it's just "The One" killing "The Other One" and...
Honestly I very rapidly stopped caring at this point because once this game reveals this, you suddenly realise that this is no longer a game about discovering what happened to Marissa Marcel, this is now a game where you repetitively fast-forward through clips until you hear "the noise" and then watch an actress with way too much gel in her hair look into the camera while spouting metaphors that just explain the message and themes of the game to you.
Even worse, these messages and themes are incredibly asinine. There are two currents to the concept of "artistic immortality" here, the first being the interesting relationship between abuse and forms of media that allow that abuse to be infinitely replayed for the rest of time, the second being the incredibly trite observation that art allows people to 'live' beyond their death. Unfortunately the game seems far more interested in the latter of these to have any developed exploration of the former. The game ends with "The One" stating that she is "part of you" now, which interpreted literally within the game is basically a creepypasta ending where the game is possessing you now!!! but interpreted non-literally I'm not pretentious enough to interpret as anything more than the basic truism that art affects people... wow, so deep!
I have nothing inherently against surrealism or ambiguity. I do not think that art needs to be realistic to be meaningful. This game evidently attempts to trade in it's coherence for some deeper meaning and all I can say is that it was not worth it. I hate the heavy-handed metaphors of this game, I hate it's incredibly shallow reflections on the nature of art. I hate people looking into the camera, I hate "meta". No, I don't care how "Lynchian" it is, it's not deep and it's not interesting. I don't want to sound too hateful but some of the word-salad I've seen written on this game is downright embarrassing. When you strip it all away this game has shockingly little of substance.
I guess I feel so strongly negative about this because I was so in love with the opening hour or two before the big twist, they had the potential to do something really subtle here but instead it's a game that almost wants you to feel like an idiot for taking it's premise seriously. At the start of the game I was interested in learning about what happened to Marissa Marcel, by the end I realised my true answer to that question is "I don't care".
Intriguing game. Can tell a lot of work went into not only making three full FMV films to sort through, but having each feel convincingly part of their separate eras from the 60s to the 90s. The acting also does an effective job selling the idea of looking through real lost footage
I haven’t played Sam Barlow’s other titles yet to say how similar this is in structure, but it was cool piecing together what happened to Marissa Marcel out of order since you don’t know where clicking each person or item in a scene will jump you to next. And while combing through each scene, you’ll also get audio cues and vibrations that cause bizarre changes to the footage which made it more interesting to figure out what was going on. Though eventually it can feel a bit aimless as you go back to comb through all the scenes for the cues
I haven’t played Sam Barlow’s other titles yet to say how similar this is in structure, but it was cool piecing together what happened to Marissa Marcel out of order since you don’t know where clicking each person or item in a scene will jump you to next. And while combing through each scene, you’ll also get audio cues and vibrations that cause bizarre changes to the footage which made it more interesting to figure out what was going on. Though eventually it can feel a bit aimless as you go back to comb through all the scenes for the cues
the jacob geller video that i FINALLY got to watch after beating this is as good and moving a thematic summary as anything, i wont needlessly repeat it. instead ill just say: what rly rly earns the final beat, as unnerving as it is transcendentally beautiful, is the incredible Simulated Madness of the preceding play experience, wraps around yr brain and rewrites it in exactly the way i want from these kinds of games. idk how the emotional arc of this game managed to Surprise me when in hindsight its literally the same one as i had in her story...blank curiosity leads to uncomfortable voyeuristic secret seeking leads to destabilizing terror leads to Compassion Against All Odds leads to enrapturing emotional transcendence via the accumulation of a million brainworms. that this is preserved with the Incomparably Larger Scale is so impressive,,,this is in many ways one of the most lavishly maximalist games ever made, and no part of it feels untextured. i have been thinking nonstop ab how this game feels in my hands and in my head ever since i started it and i cant imagine itll leave any time soon.
lots of complicated feelings as a noted Hater Of The Physical Plane And Coil, particularly as highlighted in the clip geller's video centers. i gotta make art. it seems like everything is still yelling that at me.
ftr all three of these movies would probably be 5/5 azzy bangers in Your Letterboxd Feed if they were real
lots of complicated feelings as a noted Hater Of The Physical Plane And Coil, particularly as highlighted in the clip geller's video centers. i gotta make art. it seems like everything is still yelling that at me.
ftr all three of these movies would probably be 5/5 azzy bangers in Your Letterboxd Feed if they were real
Amo quando jogos brincam com outras mídias e Immortality brinca diretamente com cinema.
É um jogo não literal que me faz amar sua narrativa extremamente emergente que, apesar de ser altamente personalizada, não deixa de ser absurdamente pessoal.
Durante o jogo, me vi perseguindo o mistério, que de cara nem sabia exatamente o que seria.
E o jogo vai te dar porções dos mistérios na medida em que você, quase que como um detetive, clica escolhe objetos colocados PERFEITAMENTE tanto CINEMATOGRAFICAMENTE quando no GAME DESIGN.
Existe uma coesão cinematográfica com o game deisgn absurdo, talvez esse jogo seja o maior exemplo de gamitografia que temos até hoje.
Porém, esse mistério é colocado de uma forma tão maravilhosa, que comecei a não querer saber a resposta.
Comecei a pedir que o jogo não me respondesse e que terminasse aberto e livre para a interpretação.
Eu queria termianr o jogo com uma dúvida que me consumisse após a minha conclusão... aquele sentimento que existe algo a mais que eu não peguei.
Apesar dessa sensação existir, senti uma certeza que me satisfez, infelizmente.
vou buscar em outras obras do Sam Barlow buscando mais dúvidas, mas ainda assim, esse jogo é inteligentíssimo em seu domínio de ambas as mídias
É um jogo não literal que me faz amar sua narrativa extremamente emergente que, apesar de ser altamente personalizada, não deixa de ser absurdamente pessoal.
Durante o jogo, me vi perseguindo o mistério, que de cara nem sabia exatamente o que seria.
E o jogo vai te dar porções dos mistérios na medida em que você, quase que como um detetive, clica escolhe objetos colocados PERFEITAMENTE tanto CINEMATOGRAFICAMENTE quando no GAME DESIGN.
Existe uma coesão cinematográfica com o game deisgn absurdo, talvez esse jogo seja o maior exemplo de gamitografia que temos até hoje.
Porém, esse mistério é colocado de uma forma tão maravilhosa, que comecei a não querer saber a resposta.
Comecei a pedir que o jogo não me respondesse e que terminasse aberto e livre para a interpretação.
Eu queria termianr o jogo com uma dúvida que me consumisse após a minha conclusão... aquele sentimento que existe algo a mais que eu não peguei.
Apesar dessa sensação existir, senti uma certeza que me satisfez, infelizmente.
vou buscar em outras obras do Sam Barlow buscando mais dúvidas, mas ainda assim, esse jogo é inteligentíssimo em seu domínio de ambas as mídias
I love this game. I want to take a semester-long course devoted to discussing this game. I am at most six months out from wishing I could Eternal Sunshine this game out of my head so I could discover it all over again.
It's incredible how well this story unfolds given that it's split into hundreds of pieces that no two players will experience in the same order. I never felt like One Big Question was the only thing driving me; I chased my curiosity in dozens of directions and the more I did, the more my understanding of the overall geography of the story formed without me even having to try. Pieces of the story would rearrange themselves in my mind and fall into place even when I wasn't playing. More than once I'd be going about my day and suddenly make a connection between two clips I'd seen the night before, and that would inform what I went looking for the next time I sat down to play.
I hit credits about five hours in, and by seven or eight I was pretty confident I'd uncovered all of the game's major secrets, but I'm a completionist at heart and I kept wanting to do more and more. I chased down every clip, I unlocked every achievement, and then I rewatched all the game's footage in chronological order. And honestly, even being the kind of person who would do that, I was surprised by how much that paid off. I'd understood the broad strokes of the story before, but so many smaller moments came into focus that it was like discovering them all over again. Completionism usually involves diminishing returns, but the closer I looked the more Immortality rewarded me for it. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.
It's incredible how well this story unfolds given that it's split into hundreds of pieces that no two players will experience in the same order. I never felt like One Big Question was the only thing driving me; I chased my curiosity in dozens of directions and the more I did, the more my understanding of the overall geography of the story formed without me even having to try. Pieces of the story would rearrange themselves in my mind and fall into place even when I wasn't playing. More than once I'd be going about my day and suddenly make a connection between two clips I'd seen the night before, and that would inform what I went looking for the next time I sat down to play.
I hit credits about five hours in, and by seven or eight I was pretty confident I'd uncovered all of the game's major secrets, but I'm a completionist at heart and I kept wanting to do more and more. I chased down every clip, I unlocked every achievement, and then I rewatched all the game's footage in chronological order. And honestly, even being the kind of person who would do that, I was surprised by how much that paid off. I'd understood the broad strokes of the story before, but so many smaller moments came into focus that it was like discovering them all over again. Completionism usually involves diminishing returns, but the closer I looked the more Immortality rewarded me for it. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.
No game has made me feel more insecure about my media literacy than Immortality
we get it, you've seen movies before
Eu queria TANTO ter gostado de Immortality. Queria demais mesmo. Parecia meu tipo de jogo. Achei tudo ao redor fascinante. Só que... só que quando eu fui jogar não me pegou. Achei chato, não consegui ficar envolvida com a história ou ficar curiosa pra investigar e progredir.
As mecânicas são muito interessantes, mas ao mesmo tempo são obtusas. E isso é de propósito. Mas novamente, COMIGO não funcionou, porque só me deixou frustrada em vez de curiosa e engajada.
Eu amo Her Story demais, e talvez por isso minhas expectativas estavam altas pra esse. Uma pena.
Devo assistir alguém jogando pra saber o que de fato acontece na história, porque ainda fiquei curiosa. (mas não muito, porque já passou mais de um mês entre eu ter abandonado ele e estar escrevendo esse review e eu ainda não fui atrás disso)
As mecânicas são muito interessantes, mas ao mesmo tempo são obtusas. E isso é de propósito. Mas novamente, COMIGO não funcionou, porque só me deixou frustrada em vez de curiosa e engajada.
Eu amo Her Story demais, e talvez por isso minhas expectativas estavam altas pra esse. Uma pena.
Devo assistir alguém jogando pra saber o que de fato acontece na história, porque ainda fiquei curiosa. (mas não muito, porque já passou mais de um mês entre eu ter abandonado ele e estar escrevendo esse review e eu ainda não fui atrás disso)
an interesting twist on investigative/narrative based FMV games of this type. tons of stuff going on between the three films, the things happening with the cast/crew, and elsewhere. i feel like this could've been a disastrous experience if just a few things went wrong here but thankfully it clicked.
going for 100% or otherwise trying to get fully into everything there is to explore had a few hang ups. once you get down to only having lower double or single digits worth of clips left to find per film it becomes increasingly difficult to get to them. beyond this, i would've really appreciated it if the hidden clips that you get by rewinding/splicing footage would've been noted somehow in the menus/uis. those were mainly it in regards to major issues.
i passed on most of Sam Barlow's more recentish works because i wasn't wild about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (and even then, i think that's just more of a result of that being tried too soon in regards of the tech/platforms it was on) but this has me reconsidering. definitely gonna go back for at least Her Story, really soon.
going for 100% or otherwise trying to get fully into everything there is to explore had a few hang ups. once you get down to only having lower double or single digits worth of clips left to find per film it becomes increasingly difficult to get to them. beyond this, i would've really appreciated it if the hidden clips that you get by rewinding/splicing footage would've been noted somehow in the menus/uis. those were mainly it in regards to major issues.
i passed on most of Sam Barlow's more recentish works because i wasn't wild about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (and even then, i think that's just more of a result of that being tried too soon in regards of the tech/platforms it was on) but this has me reconsidering. definitely gonna go back for at least Her Story, really soon.
I have no clue if I finished this or not, I got to a clear ending and then the game froze, alt+f4'd and restarted and got no indication that I had done anything.
I'm 90% sure I rolled credits but just didn't get the chance to see them.
I find these games interesting but they've not fallen flat for me 3/3 times. I am excited to come back and see more (maybe I haven't actually got to the credits!) but I don't think it'll satisfy me. Also when I say fallen flat I mean I am usually in awe, inspired and blown away in the first half hour, then find the whole game a slog, then I resort to a guide (not this time!) and then am let down by the ending.
I do like that you can watch the whole story in chronological order now though, which is something I really wanted in Her Story and Telling Lies.
Also I can't wait for people on Youtube to explain this to me properly.
Even if I didn't love it, I can't deny this game (and the previous Sam Barlow/Half Mermaid games) are incredibly special. Like ok, I didn't fully get it, I got annoyed at some parts, I thought some of it was unintuitive, but in 7 years there are only three games like this. As a recently graduated game designer, there's just something incredible about this game.
I'm 90% sure I rolled credits but just didn't get the chance to see them.
I find these games interesting but they've not fallen flat for me 3/3 times. I am excited to come back and see more (maybe I haven't actually got to the credits!) but I don't think it'll satisfy me. Also when I say fallen flat I mean I am usually in awe, inspired and blown away in the first half hour, then find the whole game a slog, then I resort to a guide (not this time!) and then am let down by the ending.
I do like that you can watch the whole story in chronological order now though, which is something I really wanted in Her Story and Telling Lies.
Also I can't wait for people on Youtube to explain this to me properly.
Even if I didn't love it, I can't deny this game (and the previous Sam Barlow/Half Mermaid games) are incredibly special. Like ok, I didn't fully get it, I got annoyed at some parts, I thought some of it was unintuitive, but in 7 years there are only three games like this. As a recently graduated game designer, there's just something incredible about this game.
Manon Gage <3
Such a unique experience.
It is insane how much thought and work went into the creation of this game.
Such a unique experience.
It is insane how much thought and work went into the creation of this game.