theKRAMNELLA
20 reviews liked by theKRAMNELLA
Far Cry 2
2008
When I first played Far Cry 2 in 2012 I was so drawn in that I played for thirteen hours straight and forgot to eat. I launched it for the very first time just before noon one day and finished just after midnight.
It would take me until late 2018 to find a game that was capable of doing something similar but this game still holds a special place in my heart. While later entries have an undeniable edge when it comes to polish and having a more fleshed-out open world, I don't think someone would find it as special if their intro to the series was one of those games. FC2 is more unforgiving than subsequent entries and takes its story more seriously.
It would take me until late 2018 to find a game that was capable of doing something similar but this game still holds a special place in my heart. While later entries have an undeniable edge when it comes to polish and having a more fleshed-out open world, I don't think someone would find it as special if their intro to the series was one of those games. FC2 is more unforgiving than subsequent entries and takes its story more seriously.
Super Mario Sunshine
2002
godlike 3d platformer with extremely versatile movement. only a handful of annoying/badly designed stages
Super Mario Sunshine
2002
hating this game is simply a skill issue
Max Payne 3
2012
This review contains spoilers
Max Payne 3 sticks out in my head far more prominently than it should for any 10-hour game I played only once, eight years ago. The experience of revisiting it this past week has been one of everything clicking into place, a series of realizations of "wow, yeah, I see why this lingers in the mind". It's impactful. Every second of Max Payne 3 feels like it matters, even if - no, especially if - all you're looking at is a fat, drunk American grumbling about being stranded in the middle of a São Paulo dancefloor with people half his age and four times his enthusiasm.
To complain about this game's aesthetic shift strikes me as such a shallow complaint when it works so well with what Max Payne 3 is trying to do. Max Payne 3 is about taking Max Payne - the leather-jacketed cliche - and kicking him in the ribs so hard that he finally tries to wake up, to open his eyes, to shed the short-sightedness. He is reduced from main hero to a gun with a price tag, and it's not particularly important for his employers that he's any more sober than they are. While Max was obviously never enthusiastic about going to Brazil, it's obvious that he held out some hope for a fresh start that never occurred. It doesn't really matter where it is - São Paulo is Max Payne's New York with a different color palette, and by the rules of the genre he must continue to be the same person he's always been and continue pulling the trigger every time he's given the chance.
"...but when was I ever about smart moves? I'm a dumb move guy. I'll put a big shit-eating grin on my face and let these assholes take turns trying to kill me. That's my style, and it's too late in the day to hope for change."
He sure does pull that trigger a lot! It's what he's good at and what he's being paid for! Max Payne 3's gunfights only rarely feel as glamorous as the earlier games, and when they do, it's not because your enemies are dying stylishly. No, it's not Sniper Elite, but every headshot requires the creation of a flesh & blood hole on the front and back of your enemy's skull, and a non-lethal bullet is soon to be followed by a lethal one as they gracelessly Rockstar Leg around before ending up face-down in the mud. Guns in cutscenes have a similarly weighty presence: people waving them around are not doing so for decoration, I'll leave it at that. Max Payne 3 still wants you to enjoy the violence - it's a AAA video game, after all - but with all the debris and blood and painkillers, each bullet should hit like a truck, and each enemy that hits the ground should make you feel something. Max has all the plot armor he needs, but he isn't particularly nimble and Rockstar does a lot to sell his age, making him feel less invincible than he truly is. Every shootdodge begins and ends with a forceful grunt through clenched teeth, every slow-motion trigger pull accompanied by such a rich sound that you swear you hear every part of the gun moving. It's half the reason scenes like the airport shootout are so effective. The other half, of course, is the fact that the soundtrack isn't afraid of crashing in just as violently.
The light at the end of the tunnel only really emerges when Max - finally pushed far enough to consider sobriety - stumbles into a mostly "clean" cop who is much further along in cracking the mystery. We see his mostly flat affect (which, in MP3, feels less like a pastiche of earlier noir works and more like someone who feels inconvenienced by having to work this particular job in between naked attempts at self-annihilation) break more and more frequently as he gets closer and closer to doing something right for once. It feels silly to say it, looking at the grime and blood of the later chapters, but it's... hopeful? The tail end of Max Payne 3 takes the whole formula and turns it on its head, allowing Max to change in a way he was never allowed to before, giving someone well past redemption one last chance to do some good. It's a better ending than Max deserves, of course, but it's satisfying nonetheless. Max has finally broken free from his archetype, and his happy ending is a life too quiet for a Max Payne 4.
To complain about this game's aesthetic shift strikes me as such a shallow complaint when it works so well with what Max Payne 3 is trying to do. Max Payne 3 is about taking Max Payne - the leather-jacketed cliche - and kicking him in the ribs so hard that he finally tries to wake up, to open his eyes, to shed the short-sightedness. He is reduced from main hero to a gun with a price tag, and it's not particularly important for his employers that he's any more sober than they are. While Max was obviously never enthusiastic about going to Brazil, it's obvious that he held out some hope for a fresh start that never occurred. It doesn't really matter where it is - São Paulo is Max Payne's New York with a different color palette, and by the rules of the genre he must continue to be the same person he's always been and continue pulling the trigger every time he's given the chance.
"...but when was I ever about smart moves? I'm a dumb move guy. I'll put a big shit-eating grin on my face and let these assholes take turns trying to kill me. That's my style, and it's too late in the day to hope for change."
He sure does pull that trigger a lot! It's what he's good at and what he's being paid for! Max Payne 3's gunfights only rarely feel as glamorous as the earlier games, and when they do, it's not because your enemies are dying stylishly. No, it's not Sniper Elite, but every headshot requires the creation of a flesh & blood hole on the front and back of your enemy's skull, and a non-lethal bullet is soon to be followed by a lethal one as they gracelessly Rockstar Leg around before ending up face-down in the mud. Guns in cutscenes have a similarly weighty presence: people waving them around are not doing so for decoration, I'll leave it at that. Max Payne 3 still wants you to enjoy the violence - it's a AAA video game, after all - but with all the debris and blood and painkillers, each bullet should hit like a truck, and each enemy that hits the ground should make you feel something. Max has all the plot armor he needs, but he isn't particularly nimble and Rockstar does a lot to sell his age, making him feel less invincible than he truly is. Every shootdodge begins and ends with a forceful grunt through clenched teeth, every slow-motion trigger pull accompanied by such a rich sound that you swear you hear every part of the gun moving. It's half the reason scenes like the airport shootout are so effective. The other half, of course, is the fact that the soundtrack isn't afraid of crashing in just as violently.
The light at the end of the tunnel only really emerges when Max - finally pushed far enough to consider sobriety - stumbles into a mostly "clean" cop who is much further along in cracking the mystery. We see his mostly flat affect (which, in MP3, feels less like a pastiche of earlier noir works and more like someone who feels inconvenienced by having to work this particular job in between naked attempts at self-annihilation) break more and more frequently as he gets closer and closer to doing something right for once. It feels silly to say it, looking at the grime and blood of the later chapters, but it's... hopeful? The tail end of Max Payne 3 takes the whole formula and turns it on its head, allowing Max to change in a way he was never allowed to before, giving someone well past redemption one last chance to do some good. It's a better ending than Max deserves, of course, but it's satisfying nonetheless. Max has finally broken free from his archetype, and his happy ending is a life too quiet for a Max Payne 4.
Max Payne 3
2012
Here's an opinion that'll get me kicked out of the Rockstar fan club within a second: I think Max Payne 3's aged better than GTA V. Come at me if you want to; I don't care.
Rockstar's output has always been staggeringly linear, with a few rare exceptions. Those exceptions, of course, don't come after the year 2001. They like to brag about the scale and minutiae of their worlds. But if you actually play the games as intended, you'll find an existing conflict between the open world aspect and the "follow the yellow line" approach to mission design compounded by (at this point) nearly two decades worth of stagnation. I suspect one of the reasons that so few people have finished Red Dead Redemption 2 is that the mechanical upgrades it received from its predecessor only serve to highlight the mechanical follies that it keeps retroactively chained up without questioning their context and purpose in a game that's not longer running on PS2-early PS3/360 hardware. I'm sure it's a similar story for GTA V, too, and I don't suspect it will change when their next game drops.
And this is where Max comes in. Max Payne 3 has no pretensions about what it is: it’s a linear, level-based, cover-based shoot-em-up that suggests at the greater freedom Rockstar usually affords their players but not once, for a moment, pretends it's ever more than a backdrop. What stops Max from being beholden to its console generation is that it has all of the polish and care of its more ambitious siblings, however. Ten years on, it’s still a striking game to look at. Environments may not have the same level of interactivity, but on a visual level, they’re staggeringly detailed. Cutscenes ooze style out of every pore, aided by performances that are directed to near perfection. Max might not come out of it feeling like the same person he was in the first two games, but there’s so much passion behind James McCaffrey’s performance that it’s easy to ignore that.
But undeniably, it’s the gameplay that seals the deal. Anybody who’s put a significant amount of time into F.E.A.R. knows the feeling of reloading checkpoints over and over again to see all of the ways in which you can approach a given scenario. Max Payne 3 captures this feeling and then some. It’s exhilarating to jump off of a staircase, cap five guys on your way down, and then finish off the last one as he tries to square with you. Outside of the game-feel, though, Max Payne 3 is shockingly violent. Like, more violent than the game that proceeded it. Bullets leave entry and exit wounds, which, along with death animations and blood decals, makes every gun feel about as brutal as it sounds. As a result, there isn’t a single gun in Max Payne 3 that doesn’t feel like a veritable killing machine. Given the game’s weapon limit, that’s one hell of an accomplishment. And on the subject of that weapon limit, I think it might be one of the few times it’s done right. It’s not that you have only two guns or three guns. You have two side-arms, which you can switch to at any moment. But you also have a big gun, like a shotgun or a machine gun. You can dual-wield your side-arms, but it comes at the cost of your big gun. There’s a layer of risk and reward that makes the system fun to engage with, rather than the grating ways in which it’s typically used. Since each gun has its strengths and weaknesses, you’ll find yourself trying to read situations. You could, of course, use only your big gun until it runs out of ammo. But say you’re dealing with close-quarters combat and you want something that’s quicker. Dual-wielding uzis absolutely shreds. Both work, and although they’re not equal, it’s the different feeling of both options that’ll keep you coming back.
The story’s a bit messy, although I don’t have much to say about it. Obvious plot holes and silly reveals aside, it’s wonderfully presented and inoffensive unless you’re opposed to the direction they’ve decided to take the series. The only big stick-up I have is that, unless you have a mod installed on the PC version, all of the cutscenes have arbitrary load times. If you’re playing the game for the first time or revisiting it after a few years, you probably won’t complain too much. But if you’re trying to 100% the game, I can see having to rewatch the same footage ad nauseam being somewhat of a nuisance.
Thankfully, there's a mod that addresses that and removes the wait times. If you’re going to get that mod, you might as well get the first-person mod, too. It’s janky as fuck; you rarely see the guns you’re holding in a way that almost harkens back to Goldeneye 64. Movement that feels solid in third-person can feel a bit clunkier in first, as well. Your head isn’t so much a different part of your body as it is removed from it entirely. And if Max’s character model has a hat on it, it’ll obscure damn-near half your screen. But the combat is good in that it transcends the jank, and the new perspective adds to everything in a surprisingly organic way.
Overall, I think Max Payne 3 is a ridiculously entertaining game and deserves more credit than it's gotten over the years. It's not just "the game that inspired GTA V's combat mechanics." It's its own can of worms, and each is fun to play with.
Rockstar's output has always been staggeringly linear, with a few rare exceptions. Those exceptions, of course, don't come after the year 2001. They like to brag about the scale and minutiae of their worlds. But if you actually play the games as intended, you'll find an existing conflict between the open world aspect and the "follow the yellow line" approach to mission design compounded by (at this point) nearly two decades worth of stagnation. I suspect one of the reasons that so few people have finished Red Dead Redemption 2 is that the mechanical upgrades it received from its predecessor only serve to highlight the mechanical follies that it keeps retroactively chained up without questioning their context and purpose in a game that's not longer running on PS2-early PS3/360 hardware. I'm sure it's a similar story for GTA V, too, and I don't suspect it will change when their next game drops.
And this is where Max comes in. Max Payne 3 has no pretensions about what it is: it’s a linear, level-based, cover-based shoot-em-up that suggests at the greater freedom Rockstar usually affords their players but not once, for a moment, pretends it's ever more than a backdrop. What stops Max from being beholden to its console generation is that it has all of the polish and care of its more ambitious siblings, however. Ten years on, it’s still a striking game to look at. Environments may not have the same level of interactivity, but on a visual level, they’re staggeringly detailed. Cutscenes ooze style out of every pore, aided by performances that are directed to near perfection. Max might not come out of it feeling like the same person he was in the first two games, but there’s so much passion behind James McCaffrey’s performance that it’s easy to ignore that.
But undeniably, it’s the gameplay that seals the deal. Anybody who’s put a significant amount of time into F.E.A.R. knows the feeling of reloading checkpoints over and over again to see all of the ways in which you can approach a given scenario. Max Payne 3 captures this feeling and then some. It’s exhilarating to jump off of a staircase, cap five guys on your way down, and then finish off the last one as he tries to square with you. Outside of the game-feel, though, Max Payne 3 is shockingly violent. Like, more violent than the game that proceeded it. Bullets leave entry and exit wounds, which, along with death animations and blood decals, makes every gun feel about as brutal as it sounds. As a result, there isn’t a single gun in Max Payne 3 that doesn’t feel like a veritable killing machine. Given the game’s weapon limit, that’s one hell of an accomplishment. And on the subject of that weapon limit, I think it might be one of the few times it’s done right. It’s not that you have only two guns or three guns. You have two side-arms, which you can switch to at any moment. But you also have a big gun, like a shotgun or a machine gun. You can dual-wield your side-arms, but it comes at the cost of your big gun. There’s a layer of risk and reward that makes the system fun to engage with, rather than the grating ways in which it’s typically used. Since each gun has its strengths and weaknesses, you’ll find yourself trying to read situations. You could, of course, use only your big gun until it runs out of ammo. But say you’re dealing with close-quarters combat and you want something that’s quicker. Dual-wielding uzis absolutely shreds. Both work, and although they’re not equal, it’s the different feeling of both options that’ll keep you coming back.
The story’s a bit messy, although I don’t have much to say about it. Obvious plot holes and silly reveals aside, it’s wonderfully presented and inoffensive unless you’re opposed to the direction they’ve decided to take the series. The only big stick-up I have is that, unless you have a mod installed on the PC version, all of the cutscenes have arbitrary load times. If you’re playing the game for the first time or revisiting it after a few years, you probably won’t complain too much. But if you’re trying to 100% the game, I can see having to rewatch the same footage ad nauseam being somewhat of a nuisance.
Thankfully, there's a mod that addresses that and removes the wait times. If you’re going to get that mod, you might as well get the first-person mod, too. It’s janky as fuck; you rarely see the guns you’re holding in a way that almost harkens back to Goldeneye 64. Movement that feels solid in third-person can feel a bit clunkier in first, as well. Your head isn’t so much a different part of your body as it is removed from it entirely. And if Max’s character model has a hat on it, it’ll obscure damn-near half your screen. But the combat is good in that it transcends the jank, and the new perspective adds to everything in a surprisingly organic way.
Overall, I think Max Payne 3 is a ridiculously entertaining game and deserves more credit than it's gotten over the years. It's not just "the game that inspired GTA V's combat mechanics." It's its own can of worms, and each is fun to play with.
Immortality
2022
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.
Immortality
2022
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.
Um Jammer Lammy
1999
this game brings me immense joy
creating a bunch of different sack characters was the main highlight of this game for me. well of course the levels were fun, but that feeling of excitement of seeing what new outfits I unlocked does so much for me. and then experimenting with different colors and combinations. a very good co-op game for sure.
This game is a true hidden gem among former Playstation exclusives. Incredibly strong presentation coupled with tight and varied gameplay across dozens of stages provides a spectacular fun time.