This review contains spoilers

Disappointed to see that, regardless of all the improvements in production, acting, and writing since Her Story, Immortality represents such a massive step back in gameplay design and interactive mystery storytelling. The game's systems seem to inherently reject any sort of actual deduction rather than accommodate it. The match-cut mechanic feels unmotivated and arbitrary enough before you realize the same image can lead to several different scenes. This is only compounded by the fact that it seems no effort was put into accounting for the mechanic in the scenes they filmed--several times I thought I was being clever by selecting a image during a tight timing window when it was revealed or by trying to track certain objects throughout scenes only to either be sent back to another plain clip I had already seen or whisked away to a completely unrelated part of a completely different movie. From all I can tell, no thought was put into making the major mechanical twist an interesting discovery, and instead the developers hoped the player would just stumble upon it at the right time (I for one figured it out in the first half-hour of playing due to just wanting to rehear something early on). Even with the discovery in hand, there's no way of telling which clips will have a second layer, and if the second layer will tell you anything relevant to the mystery or not. I eventually resigned myself to just going through the clips in roughly chronological order and trying to piece the stories of the movies and the meta story together as I moved on--I got enough to understand the shape of the narrative before I hit the end but not nearly enough to feel any sort of emotion as the credits rolled. The mastery of the design of games like Hypnospace Outlaw, Outer Wilds, and yes, even Her Story comes not just from their freedom, but in the ways those games withhold information behind structured player discoveries. Immortality just lets the player loose in the middle of a field a hopes they find an interesting narrative by the time they pass out of exhaustion.

Reviewed on Nov 28, 2022


Comments