Immortality (2022)

What an experience! A twisted lynchian plot about art, obsession and cinema with layers of meaning and depth. Actors with amazing talent and a trio of fake movies that I actually would like to watch in real life.

You can read my full review in spanish here. Why now? Because it was finally ported to PS5 and I was finally able to play it.

But this is also a nightmare for completionist. The random nature of the match-cut mechanic makes extemely frustrating trying to get all the scenes for the Platinum. Do not reccomed going for the 100% on this one. Once you're satisfied with what you learned about the fate of Marissa Marcel, let the game go.

I’ve always been a fan of FMV games even dating back all the way to the Sega CD, so I was very eager to play this one and it’s my first game for the Xbox Series S. First of all, it didn’t disappoint. The story was very intriguing even if it starts off a tad bit confusing but that’s mostly due to the fact that you’re just starting to try and piece things together. It’s also well acted and has an impressive amount of nudity. My issue is with how the game ends. It can end without having a complete understanding of the story because there’s a good chance you’re still missing a lot of clips that fill in the narrative. So for me it ended, I sorta knew what had transpired but I went back to gather more clips and this is when I found the scrubbing (rewinding the footage), really tedious and discovered that the missing clips didn’t do much in fleshing out the story. Overall I enjoyed it though. I found “Ambrosio” to be the film that contained the most interesting footage and then “Minsky” was the one I didn’t care much for. Looking forward to playing more FMV titles.

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.

A very special story, unlike anything I've experienced before, that will stick with me for a long time.

• Brilliant concept.
• Impressive film production -- I can't believe they wrote and filmed so much content for this game.
• Nails the period-appropriate film vibes.
• Generally great performances. Not all the acting you will watch is good acting, but 9 times out of 10 that's on purpose.
• The match-cut feature is good, but not enough. Eventually getting new clips is too random, and the game would have benefited from more search tools introduced as it went on.
• Some of the UX is quite poor.
• The concept is so good it makes up for the rough edges.

I feel terrible giving Immortality a bad review, because it clearly is a masterpiece. It's an incredibly well-realized work and a unique experience. But I had a very bad time with it, and I want my note to reflect that.

I won't spoil anything here. In trying to understand what went so wrong in my playthrough, I can't help but compare Immortality with Sam Barlow's two previous games, Her Story and Telling Lies, which I both loved. In these games, if I wanted the answer to a specific question, I could steer the search engine with clever keywords; sometimes with success, most times with surprises. In contract, interacting with Immortality's system felt especially unrewarding. You may be able to click on a dozen objects in a clip, but what does it change if you can't predict where any choice will take you? It was fun at first, when everything was new. But the moment I started to go for answers to my questions, and my only option was to navigate clips at random until the game decides it's time for a new piece of information.

However, I can see the benefit of this system. It was easy in Her Story or Telling Lies to get to the twist quickly by accident. Immortality's system allows for a more controlled narrative... but why then is the story so unclear and cryptic? I was legitimately angry when the credits rolled, because I was still so clueless about the central mystery of the game. At the same time, it felt like I was supposed to understand something, which made me feel stupid on top of angry. I persisted after the credits for a while, but as I lost patience I went online to have everything explained to me. I get it, now, and can confirm the subtext is very profound.

Again, Immortality is an amazing game. The reason I'm so bitter is that I feel like I've been denied this great experience. I sincerely want to believe my bad experience was just an accident, that I wasn't in the mood or something, and that if I come back in a few years, when my memory of it is less fresh, I will have that experience.

"Throw your Bible out because that was just vampires messing around."

-Great line from the Sam Gowing interview with Charlotta Mohlin (The One in Immortality)

Yea, IDK I loved it. It's great. You should play it. You shouldn't unblur my text above unless you've played it. Is this Sam Barlow's best? IDK. It is certainly his most complicated, and I believe it features his best performances... Maybe if I understand the message of the game, this is not how one should think of this game. I guess I just want to say I think it is great, and you should play it and just fiddle around and have a good old time.

Ultimately, one's enjoyment of Immortality is going to depend entirely on two things: if they like art house films and if they have the patience to sift through over 200 clips of mostly-boring footage to get the story's full picture. The story itself is interesting enough that players will find themselves compelled to keep returning to the game to look for more clues, even if they're otherwise bored, but gameplay-wise, it doesn't have much to offer beyond its one genius trick.

Immortality is something that everyone should at least try through Xbox Game Pass, but they should go in understanding that the game is going to demand a lot from them and not always offer much in return.

I really enjoyed my time. I waited to finish because the first time I got credits it bugged out and I missed seeing everything. All those issues seem to be fixed now!

This is a game but the way you manoeuvre through it is kind of awkward. The game, for good or bad, craps you out with minimal intrusion. The game is very confusing at first but if you just diddle around until you figured it out there is a very cool experience held within.

The story is very interesting. The "match cut" main gameplay mechanic is actually pretty technically amazing and makes this the first of these Sam Barlow games that is easier on a controller.

Speaking of, while being vague, progressing through the game is easier with a controller! The rumble feature and right stick are... pretty useful.

I really do not want to spoil it at all but if you are all interested I would say give it an hour to see if you get into its groove.

It's hard to talk about Immortality without spoiling it. As a ‘game’, in the vein of most FMVs, it doesn't have much going for it. You are essentially tasked with restoring 3 films in order to find out what happened to an actress. You do this by clicking on things in a particular scene - like someone’s face or an object - to uncover related pieces of content. As you carry on, you realise there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye, and that’s where the game's centrepiece mechanic comes in. As far as this particular gameplay mechanic goes it's original enough, yet it also feels a bit hit and miss at times in terms of how well it works, especially if you're playing without headphones and a controller - the latter means you might miss out on the important tactile clues. The whole thing can feel finicky even when you get the hang of it, which isn't ideal. However, this tool is merely a means to an end: by using it, you uncover a mysterious, ominous, hypnotising narrative that uses outstanding writing, superb acting and pungent fourth wall-breaking moments to leave you glued on to the screen until you get an understanding of what's going on.

The vibe it conveys, particularly in the first stages of discovery, is virtually unparalleled in any game I've played. Calling it a game, however, is misleading. More than anything, Immortality is a cinematic experience, one charged with a heavy layer of visual and thematic atmosphere, at times unsettling, at times highly sexual, at times bizarre, at times simply dramatic. Some scenes are incredibly stylised. Others are surprisingly beautiful. Others even are downright visceral. A few of them will probably live in your head for a while after you watch them. For its tone alone, Immortality deserves to be interacted with firsthand, and the only miss it has in this regard is the puzzling choice of background music, with often feels incredibly at odds with what's being played out in front of you. Muting it immediately improved my experience.

Triggering the ending won’t necessarily mean you’ll understand everything you've seen, and the threads are intentionally vague enough throughout that there’s a decent chance you’l be left scratching your head when that happens. This may happen because you haven’t uncovered enough footage, or because you have uncovered it in a weird order that made your whole interpretation of it muddled. At that point, reviewing the footage in its proper timeline will help you. However, this is also one of the game’s shortcomings: if you happen to understand what’s behind all of it decently well, much of the pull Immortality has is lost, and you might struggle to go back and uncover the remaining clips.

The specific allegory-type feel that Immortality comes with makes it unique in the medium. I’ve seen (and loved) it in some movies before, but not in games. If you like the weird, are comfortable with heavy imagery and content, and okay with abandoning the notion that this will be a game-like experience, Immortality might definitely be for you, even with its finicky mechanics and poor background music. The only caveat is that you may reach the ‘end’ without fully understanding what you’ve just witnessed, which can nevertheless be solved by what I said above, or even by watching a Youtube video if you can't be bothered going back. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience overall, and would wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of David Lynch’s work or films like Mother!, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Enemy or Black Swan. 8/10

Easily my favorite game of the year so far. Also one of the hardest to review, so apologies for the wall of text.

Immortality tells the story of a promising young actress who disappeared from the public eye. She starred in three films, but none was ever released for various murky reasons. This basic plot setup slowly expands into a multi-layered, genre-bending, surreal narrative journey. If you like unusual interactive story games and Mulholland Drive, just skip the review and get the installation started. Otherwise, let me explain.

The story is extremely nonlinear, told by jumping around through a timeline of short live-action clips. Pausing and selecting a point of interest, like a certain actor's face or a cup of coffee, takes you to a matching visual in a different clip. Often this is one you haven't seen yet, and in this way, you can slowly uncover hundreds of clips and piece together what happened.

If it sounds random and unorganized, in some sense it can be. On top of literal randomness at times in which relevant clip comes up, players will naturally find things in totally different orders. There's not a clean ending point either, as you'll likely have hours of investigation left after the credits. There's no way around it; this open-ended approach of storytelling driven by player curiosity and persistence will understandably be a dealbreaker for many.

Still, there's a very intentional, planned feel underpinning it all. The camerawork and dialogue do a lot to highlight key points of interest throughout the game. There are also subtle sound and vibration cues that give hints. I recommend you play either with headphones, in a quiet room, or with a controller with rumble. It's the hidden parallels, themes, and throughlines that provide some of the game's richest moments. The core game design of matching images in seemingly-unrelated clips ends up greatly reinforcing that.

This rejection of normal narrative and game structures also just makes it more fun. It led to some jaw-dropping moments of discovery that I never could have seen coming. Seeing bizarre or shocking things out of context that slowly start to make sense later felt so interesting here. That's in large part because you're often only one piece away from understanding, but you'll rarely guess when or how that piece will reveal itself.

Each of the fictional films featured here is distinct in genre, tone, look, and the circumstances of its production. They do share several strengths though: intriguing shots, recurring motifs for you to follow, memorable characters + cast & crew, an in-the-moment mixture of behind-the-scenes footage and "real" acting that I loved, and lots of plain-old compelling drama. Sometimes I was just as excited to see what happened in the fake film or in a random press interview as I was to continue the overarching mystery.

I am pretty impressed by the work put in to let you pause on nearly any frame of video and click from a range of hotspots, have them recognized, and go somewhere at least semi-logical. More than anything this is a great triumph of planning and production design, but the UI part works well too. I generally like how the game organizes clips and objects. There are also some nice filtering and sorting tools that let you focus through the noise on your own mini-investigations.

There are cracks in the UI/UX though that can be especially grating when you get stuck. Precise rewinding and fast-forwarding can be a hassle, with finicky mouse gestures and on-screen button controls. Returning to the prior scene you were on is annoying when it could be a single button press (an ordered "history" page would be nice too). Crucial hint sounds can be hard to hear and differentiate from ominous BGM. I've also been debating whether the game could use an indicator when you're "done" with a certain scene. Sometimes I felt stuck with a massive list and little direction, but admittedly a completion indicator could spoil some of the surprises you can accidentally stumble into.

I've already said so much, but there's much more I can't say without spoiling the experience. Be cautious reading and watching videos about this game to keep your own experience as pure as possible. I really loved this, it's just so thought-provoking and interesting. I hope to see others playing it and sharing their experiences as well.