There are already plenty of reviews on here talking about the artistic merit of Immortality, how good the FMV acting is, the novelty of finding new clips, etc. I mostly agree with those 5 star reviews -- there's some really cool stuff to experience here. Uncovering the plots of the three movies is very cool. The bigger picture is very cool. It's certainly a game worth experiencing.
That said, I found several key aspects of the game to hinder my experience.
The controls for watching the FMV clips somehow managed to be absolutely awful. I think the intent was to feel like your winding an unwinding actual film? I really don't know. I work in computer vision, so I spend a good amount of time scrubbing back and forth over videos. I can say with honesty that I have more fun doing it at work than I did here. The clunky controls actually almost led to me missing a key mechanic of the game and did lead to me having to rewatch a lot of video.
The mechanic for finding new videos -- clicking on something on screen to see something similar from a different clip -- is really cool at first, but it gets a bit frustrating by the end. There's some amount of randomness to the clip you end up at and no clear way to find new clips. So, as the amount of clips you've seen increases, it becomes proportionally that much more difficult to find a new clip. This was mainly an issue in the last couple of hours, but it contributed to a bit to souring the impact of the finale.
Finally, the game soft locked during the finale. What should have been an impactful, shocking, and dramatic moment instead led to 10 minutes of me confusedly wondering if I was just having issues with the controls again or if it really wouldn't continue past the point I was at. A google search and reddit post revealed that this has happened to others -- and that there was no way to retrigger the final sequence without clearing your data and starting over. I tried myself to make sure, but sure enough, no luck. So, I had to watch the last bit on youtube after that interruption.
On top of the gameplay issues, I just didn't quite connect with the thematic components of the game. As I said in the first paragraph, it was extraordinarily well done, but I think I'm just not the person to be strongly impacted by what Immortality offers. There were also a a couple of fairly basic mysteries that I wanted answers to and couldn't find one, even googling afterward.
All of the complaining aside, I'm glad I played the game and will almost certainly circle back to Sam Barlow's other games in the future.
That said, I found several key aspects of the game to hinder my experience.
The controls for watching the FMV clips somehow managed to be absolutely awful. I think the intent was to feel like your winding an unwinding actual film? I really don't know. I work in computer vision, so I spend a good amount of time scrubbing back and forth over videos. I can say with honesty that I have more fun doing it at work than I did here. The clunky controls actually almost led to me missing a key mechanic of the game and did lead to me having to rewatch a lot of video.
The mechanic for finding new videos -- clicking on something on screen to see something similar from a different clip -- is really cool at first, but it gets a bit frustrating by the end. There's some amount of randomness to the clip you end up at and no clear way to find new clips. So, as the amount of clips you've seen increases, it becomes proportionally that much more difficult to find a new clip. This was mainly an issue in the last couple of hours, but it contributed to a bit to souring the impact of the finale.
Finally, the game soft locked during the finale. What should have been an impactful, shocking, and dramatic moment instead led to 10 minutes of me confusedly wondering if I was just having issues with the controls again or if it really wouldn't continue past the point I was at. A google search and reddit post revealed that this has happened to others -- and that there was no way to retrigger the final sequence without clearing your data and starting over. I tried myself to make sure, but sure enough, no luck. So, I had to watch the last bit on youtube after that interruption.
On top of the gameplay issues, I just didn't quite connect with the thematic components of the game. As I said in the first paragraph, it was extraordinarily well done, but I think I'm just not the person to be strongly impacted by what Immortality offers. There were also a a couple of fairly basic mysteries that I wanted answers to and couldn't find one, even googling afterward.
All of the complaining aside, I'm glad I played the game and will almost certainly circle back to Sam Barlow's other games in the future.