I'll be vague but blunt. If you've played either of Sam Barlow's previous two games you know exactly what you're in for here - spend a few hours collecting a bunch of disjoint video clips so as to figure out "what happened." As in the previous two games, you can get as much or as little out of the characters and the clips as you want; you're entirely responsible for your own inertia and your own trajectory through the experience. There is one twist - one - which you will inevitably encounter after anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of gameplay. It's an absolute mindfuck and it recontextualizes everything about the story you've been putting together, sending you straight back to every clip you've already seen and changing the scope and vibe of the game from that point forward. I had the... misfortune, maybe?... of discovering this twist fairly early on. It sent chills straight down my spine, but finding it so quickly may have made my gameplay experience shorter and shallower. But that's the way Sam Barlow's games work. (I found the climactic clip of Telling Lies like ten minutes in and then spent five hours filling in a story I just couldn't stay interested in.) Ultimately, I love the unconventional gameplay and - again, staying vague - this is easily Barlow's most artistic game so far. I'm sure I'll be reading discussions and theories and breakdowns for years to come. Play it alone in the dark late at night by yourself and make up your own mind.

Well that sure was a something huh? I have something to admit, I didn't care for Her Story. I didn't find the plot interesting, nor did I really like the way the 'game' worked. Immortality on the other hand? I was very much more into this thanks to a much more dynamic set of actors and an interesting mystery that unfolds as you go.

Toss in a real feeling of age as the game cycles through three quite different feeling film-making styles and a set of plots where you cant quite work out where the characters and actors begin and end and its a really intriguing display.

But then why is this a 3.5 and not a 4 or a 4.5? Well its the game mechanics getting in the way. As unique and odd the mechanics of shifting from scene to scene by picking out actors and objects from each clip, it leads to a general feeling that you're really not accomplishing much for the first hour or so. Then when you do hit that first accomplishment, probably by chance, you realise what you need to do to find more.

That alone would be fine, a lot of games do this and truth be told, the first time this happens its actually quite exciting, but the game just cant help itself and soon you'll actually be stumbling across HUGE plot reveals by casually clicking something innocuous and it slightly ruins any accomplishment in the process. After all, who needs to solve a mystery when a misclick accidentally leads you to the answer.

Without spoiling too much (I'm trying so hard), the end reveal does maybe justify that feeling but it still doesn't quite stop those moments of 'Oh. Right...' from spoiling the overall questions the plots throw up.

Dont get me wrong, its still very much a game worth playing through and if you happen to have games pass, its one of those titles thats best going in as blind as possible with the minimal of plot information on hand... I just wish it wasnt so eager to spill its secrets on a whim.

Certamente, Immortality é uma obra-prima. Porém, se eu falar qualquer coisa sobre o porquê a recente obra de Sam Barlow é uma das obras mais interessantes já criadas no gênero, estragarei a sua experiência. Então, enquanto eu pensava sobre este review, ponderei encher o texto de referências filosóficas usadas no game, mas isto de certa forma acabaria comprometendo algumas das coisas apresentadas. Portanto, decidi que em breve farei um artigo com spoilers me aprofundando nos motivos que tornam este título algo único.

Assim sendo, tudo que posso dizer é que Immortality entrega um mistério cativante, com atuações que se destacam por apresentar a profundidade que cada um dos personagens precisa. Enfim, a minha recomendação é: aproveite a jornada, explore tudo que as filmagens têm a oferecer e tente dormir a noite depois disso… duvido que você conseguirá.

i think both it's incredible strength and it's unfortunate weakness is how esoteric the mystery actually is.

I was absolutely floored during the opening hour of Immortality, in awe of how much substance there was to chew on - to unearth "what happened to Marissa Marcel." But i quickly felt my enthusiasm wane the more i scrubbed on. Many of the questions i thought i was answering veiled behind imagery in the frame didn't really lead anywhere fruitful, and that felt a little disappointing.

Maybe that's the point -- Immortality knows that i'm begging for more as i try to satisfy my theories. They're able to get away with it since the tellling of it's narrative is so good. There just wasn't enough bite beneath it all to really stick with me.

And yet, i still can't help thinking about what happened to Marissa Marcel...

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.

’That really hurts. But if you want to kill the mother of god, you'll need a better weapon.'

IMMORTALITY is one of the best games I've ever played, it is truly unique, it is everything I love in both game and film (combining both in an unholy synthesis that goes beyond any other FMV), whilst being a deconstruction of everything wrong with how we culturally treat both film and video games. The gameplay is novel and interesting, and once I realised I didn't have to use my mouse at all, the movieola-style interaction really came into its own, like I was in some alternate version of the movie Blow Out.

Immortality will not be for everyone, some may compare it to point and click games, or 2d puzzle games, or the work of Lynch or Jodorowski, but no comparison can truly prepare you for what this game has to offer, the only thing I can think to really compare it to is Silent Hill 2, and even then only loosely. Again, not everyone will want this, or enjoy it, it doesn't give you a clear objective other than 'find out what happened to Marissa Marcel', and for some that won't be enough, but for others (like myself) this oddity is exactly what I needed. This has energised my passion for both games and film, and has well and truly blown me away in every conceivable way. This is the first time a video game has been posed as 'for adults' and actually felt like something made for mature and fully developed people only, this isn't a gate keeping thing either, compare the likes of GTA and Outlast, posed for adults but also clearly for teenagers who want to feel adult, against this; a surrealist, slow burn character study and esoteric look at corruption in entertainment. It even does something I normally consider a cardinal sin, the presentation of sex as inherently gross or taboo, but considering the religious preoccupation of the narrative and the role sex and sexuality, especially as it relates to gender and the film industry, plays in the narrative, it completely works, even in the more shocking moments. Not only is this a comment on problems the film industry has had for decades, it looks forward to the games industry, comparing the medium of last century to the medium of this century, and asks us to not let the same thing happen in games (looking at you Activision, blizzard, Ubisoft, EA, etc)

However, there are some technical bugs, sometimes inputs can get confused by the game, and there are some sound issues with sounds playing when they shouldn't (and not stoping without a game restart) and the audio track for clips more than sometimes not playing at all unless you hit pause, wait, and then hit play. But these are bugs that won't severely hamper your experience of this phenomenal achievement.

I haven't even scratched the surface of my thoughts about this game, but I'd easily hit the word limit of Backloggd if I attempted to get it all out, I'll be thinking about and digesting this one for a long time.

P.S. I was not expecting this to be a horror game, but this unnerved and genuinely frightened me more than any game in recent memory, it did a lot of things no game in recent memory has done.

Con una premisa "peculiar" el juego nos invita a investigar la desaparición de Marissa Marcel, una actriz que empezó como modelo de una marca de jabones y que participó en 3 películas y ninguna de ellas se llegó a estrenar.

Como investigadores, teniendo en nuestro poder de un sofisticado programa de maquetación, deberemos recuperar ese metraje, recopilarlo y descubrir qué pasó con Marissa.

En nuestra investigación, descubriremos la "verdadera" historia de Marissa, la parte que se ha ocultado del público durante años y ahora quiere ser descubierta. Una parte que está llena de muerte, fantasía, e historias que ya conocemos, pero se nos habían contado de manera muy distinta...
-spoiler- (Adán y Eva, vampiros, dioses...) -Spoiler-

Immortality lo recomiendo si sois fans del cine, los creepypasta, las meta historias detrás de las películas (rodajes malditos) y os apasionan los juegos de investigación, este es vuestro juego. De lo mejorcito que he jugado en tiempo. Espero que arreglen el error de los logros, porque es una pena que el último logro no aparezca 😔😔

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.

This game is pretty special! Going into this game completely cold, I found the rabbit hole-esque gameplay loop, combing through hours of footage, to be enrapturing. There is a genuine mystery and sense of awe to the first hour of the game as you discover more and more details within each frame and what potential secrets may be lying underneath them.

The ways in which you engage with all of this this lost footage, scrubbing back and forth through scenes, looking for details frame by frame, encouraged me to analyze each film thoroughly and look for connections between each prop, character, actor, or even the themes of each film.

The nonlinear path through which you untangle each films narrative and their production leads to moments of genuinely satisfying discoveries. I found that it was hard not to want to keep notes on scenes for future reference or to mull over the vast amount of information that the game presents, even when I wasn't playing it.

However, I found myself losing interest in the overarching narrative as the game progresses as it never quite fully coheres. A narrative does not have to be conclusive to be satisfying necessarily, but it just loses some of its initial momentum.

Beyond the mystery of Marissa Marcel's disappearance, what I truly found the most engaging and rich part of this game, narratively speaking, is in exploring the production of the films themselves, their dissolutions as the film sets and personnel gradually untangle. A key part of this game is even in examining how film styles have changed so drastically over the past 30 years.

It helps that the look of each film is genuinely impressive, from the gorgeous matte paintings in Ambrosio to the frequent use of split diopter shots in Minsky, the films feel stylistically authentic. Perhaps the films look a bit too clean and digital at the times, especially the footage from Two of Everything, but it doesn't ultimately get in the way.

I loved amassing this collection of fragmented films, behind-the-scenes footage, and interactions between everyone both in front of and behind the camera, just don't expect it all to cohere (and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way!).

English | Español

Immortality is the story of a missing actress who starred in three films that were never released, but it is also the story of everything surrounding the production of those films. A tale in the verge of horror, but mainly about mystery. Its mechanics engage you, gameplay and narrative play along to offer you an amazing story in which you have a mystery to solve for which its answer has always been there but you just weren't ready to solve it. This game is a master class in using videogame narrative, but without giving up high standard cinematography that overpasses every previous Sam Barlow game, this is its best game though. In it, he has mastered a style that he almost invented and has let us one of the best games of the year, if not the best one so far.

Immortality es la historia de una actriz desaparecida con tres películas que nunca se estrenaron, pero es también la historia de todos lo que rodea la producción de esos filmes. Un relato que a veces roza el horror, pero que se mantiene siempre en el misterio. Las mecánicas te atrapan, se conjuga perfectamente su jugabilidad y su narrativa para ofrecer una historia genial en la que toca resolver un misterio cuya respuesta siempre estuvo ahí, pero aún no estabas preparado para resolver. Es usar la narrativa del videojuego con una maestría que muy pocas veces se alcanza. Sin por supuesto desmerecer la calidad cinematográfica que también es superior a la de sus juegos anteriores. Sam Barlow ha firmado su obra magna, ha terminado de perfeccionar un estilo que prácticamente se inventó él y nos ha dejado uno de los mejores juegos del año, si no el mejor.

Absolutely one of the coolest fucking things I've ever seen. Especially as someone who is in film school, getting a degree in editing, it's fascinating to see a game take that and turn it into a super compelling mystery. Editing is already inherently a puzzle to solve; you're sitting there staring at these rushes, trying to work out how it all fits together as one cohesive whole. Immortality does the same thing, you're piecing together these stories through the eyes of an editor, working out how all these different pieces slot into place, as the full picture slowly comes into view. It's absolutely wonderful narrative design, and that's before it twists itself on its head.

The ending had my jaw on the floor, horror doesn't usually work on me but god I could not sleep after that. This shit festers in your head like a parasite. Fucking amazing game.

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