IMMORTALITY

1. No Simplified Chinese, and the Traditional Chinese translation is terrible. Better play it in English. 2. Unique gameplay built around filmmaking and film editing. 3. The story is complete, but the writing feels outdated and formulaic, like an old man trying to imagine what women think and feel. 4. A Carnival of the Male Gaze in Disguise The game markets itself around female rebellion and autonomy, yet is full of female nudity, coercion, and objectification. It doesn’t deconstruct the male gaze. It makes players stare at women’s bodies to progress, then wraps it all up in an artistic package. It gave me the exact same feeling as Poor Things, turning women’s pain into a beautiful, self indulgent celebration of objectification. 5. I don’t think male creators can really speak for what women go through. They can try to understand, but they ultimately risk turning women’s pain into nothing more than raw material for their own art.

In an effort to be unique, Immortality trades Her Story's database lookup system for clicking on objects inside clips. This deadens the game experience. Her Story's constraint requires cleverness to work around; Immortality rewards purposeless exhaustive search. Key hints were broken and the control scheme makes little sense. Even after finishing the game, I doubt I understand it fully. The story contains "intentionally" bad film scenes. A little bit of "ironic" bad film is fine, but this game just has sooooo much bad film. At a certain point it becomes an admission that the game can only direct bad film.

Is this game worth your time? Well, if you're someone who just finished Her Story or Telling Lies and is looking for another mind-blowing story to discover, look somewhere else. I personally like Sam Barlow's work but this one just isn't it. First of all, the gameplay just consists of clicking on random objects or faces in movie clips that transport you to other movie clips - except this is completely RNG meaning the same objects can transfer you to multiple different clips so you're really just clicking randomly until you find something new. At first it's pretty fun...until you start going in loops through clips you've already seen 100 times without any guidance on how far you are to collecting them all or what you already have and haven't clicked. Not to mention this game is 60% sex scenes and perverse dialogue. Whilst I get that it's the premise of the story to be that way, it is a little bit ridiculous having to watch people have sex with each other for a minute straight only to then be rewarded with finding a secret clip that is just them ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in a different position. The craziest thing is that you can technically solve the story within 5 minutes of starting the game as the very first few clips already explain a lot. You'll probably spend hours surfing through clips hoping for more in-depth explanation of what's going on only to be disappointed to find out that there aren't really any twists and it's just an expansion of what's already known. There is like 1 clip every 2 hours that is actually interesting but because of the RNG, you'll find a really cool clip only to have the next few hours be boring ♥♥♥♥ that completely destroys the pacing of the game. Maybe make the intensity of the clips rise in a more linear way next time? If anything, watching the movies fully is more interesting than whatever this story is supposed to be. If this was more of a realistic horror story rather than being so artistic I think it would be more interesting and would match the energy of Sam's other games. The production quality is definitely great though and miles more impressive than the other games, even other FMVs. The actors, the sets and the originality are all fantastic. The only thing that truly brings this game down is the gameplay, the story and the pacing.

Legitimately terrifying to think about avant-garde mystery/horror. IMMORTALITY is, much like Sam Barlow's other game, Her Story, a game all about diving deeper and deeper into an archive to dig through information in order to make sense of its core mystery, Rather than diving into a police archive of interviews you're piecing together various film reels for three movies starting the seemingly ageless and ever elusive Marissa Marcel, whose three films never made it to screens. However, if unraveling Her Story's is designed to make the player feel like a detective as they enter keywords into a database, tugging the various threads of IMMORTALITY is designed to make the player feel like they're going mad, as they scrub through footage back and forward and zoom in on various objects to try and find new clips. IMMORTALITY's central mystery gives way to another, and another, and another, as what you think you've witnessed gives way to bigger, more shocking revelations in ways that genuinely haunted my brain for a solid week, and it'll likely haunt yours too for a while, if that's something you openly welcome from thrillers or mysteries. It is an iceberg chart kind of narrative where things extend further into the icy dark way past the surface layer of "What happened to Marissa Marcel?" in ways I did not think it would on a first blind playthrough.

I bought IMMORTALITY looking for another interesting FMV game (after finishing my first one), but this game did not really manage to hook me. For me the gameplay of clicking on random objects and getting transported to entirely different scenes didn't click. There were some intriguing moments that I do not understand to this day, because I couldn't push past the boredom which was almost ever present for me. After 2.5 hours of playing I didn't feel like I had progressed in any way - just that I had spent all this time watching snippets from weird movies. I did not get the controls before dropping the game as they seemed quite finicky.

Tedium the game. It's very unique and I appreciate what they were doing but it lasts far to long for me to give a positive review. The first two hours were awesome as I'm unraveling the mystery but then it just stalls due to the shear amount of content/info they're trying to get through. It's clearly made with love and intrigue but I think it would have worked better as a shorter game and/or included something more than just clicking random things.

Aimless and dull, arbitrary and tedious. The game does not introduce itself, it does not present a mystery, it does not have structure. It drops you in at a bad starting point with its lowest quality clip and only tells you how to go fishing for and navigate more. I spent my first hour just clicking at stuff without reason or purpose uncovering over a 100 clips and watching only a handful. At that point I read the store page and that was my introduction into what the hell this was even about because the game wants you to work to uncover everything, including the EFFING HOOK! I felt like an intern at a film company who was tasked with combing through disjointed, boring and at times cringe clips on the hunt of ---------. Wait what? I didn't hear that. What am I even looking for?! The interface is bad if you play with mouse and keyboard, because somehow they thought it better to use the mousewheel to "zoom" which determines the size of the clip-grid. Did no one think this might be used to scroll up and down? Like everywhere else? If you click on stuff (pretty much always randomly) to get to another clip you cannot go back to the previous one directly. You go back to the list of all clips centerd on the current one and from there I have to find my own way back. This was never intended for mouse and keyboard, obviously. It probably wasn't even designed for big screens and feels very mobile centeric. It also vexes me that I have to manually rewind every clip back to the beginning if I want to watch it from the start. And if you are directed to a different clip, it always jumps to some point where the object you clicked on can be seen and if you do this and end up circling back this way to what you were watching, the clip will now be at a different point from when you started and you have to rewind again. There is also no way to mark clips watched from start to finish which makes navigation more difficult. Another issue is the first movie, and I personally like to start at the beginning. That first movie is unbelievably cringe. A story about a pious monk falling for a young woman who snuck in disguised as a male monk. A story that could only work as a comedy in my opinion is delivered with pathos, taking itself way too serious. I unlocked a number of achievements accidentally, including "What happened to Marissa Marcel", which confused me profoundly, because I hadn't found out anything yet. Just uncovering the clip without watching it triggered the achievement. So stupid. But the last straw was when I, again accidentally, discovered a glimpse at the true intention of it all when I used the mouse to swipe a clip backwards for the first time it revealed secret footage that would not show up in the selection menu, kind of superimposed on the running clip and it was weird and surreal and superstitious, religious drivel. And suddenly I realized: Oh! This is a supernatural horror game. I hate horror as a genre and the game just wanted to rope me in unwittingly. So, goodbye trash! Huge disappointment after Her Story, which had a proper hook right at the start, a mystery that was presented, not hidden under a workload, and searching new clips via words felt investigative, while searching by clicking objects (and here hand basket equals handbag, candle equals fluorescent light, every picture equals every other picture) just feels random. Stumbling through the dark, just like the main protagonist in a horror movie, that I NEVER ASKED TO BECOME!

While my overall experience was mixed, I think the main narrative of the game was engaging enough that I would recommend IMMORTALITY as long as you heed my warning (see further down). For the positives, this is a unique project that basically involved filming three full movies. The pieces of the movies are interactive so clicking on a rose in one scene will take you to another scene from any of the three movies where a rose also appears. Through this interactivity, you find other clips and the mystery unfolds. It's incredibly ambitious and a great example of how games can tell a story in a way no other medium can. Each player's experience will be unique due to the randomness of what threads you choose to follow. The plots of the movies are B-movie quality at best, but are engaging enough to piece together. It all comes together in an interesting and satisfying way. On the negative side, it can become very frustrating to find clips you haven't discovered yet. I found myself going through clips I had already watched multiple times trying to find threads that would unlock missing clips. I spent several hours finding everything after I had reached the ending of the game. I regret this and would recommend not doing so. There was very little in those remaining clips that added to the story I had already experienced. This is where the game breaks down. The interface is not adequate for sorting through everything and there is no easy way to keep track of what you've done. Unlocking all achievements became a chore and had I known that there would be little to no payoff in gathering the nearly 300 movie scenes, I would have stopped when I essentially reached the end of the game's narrative. Everything you do to reach the credits is what the game has to offer and going beyond that is wholly unnecessary. Playing this way will probably give you a much more satisfying experience overall.

Un jeu avec une mécanique très intéressante au début mais qui se retrouve à s'étaler en longueur, à chercher le reste des scènes coupées pendant des heures, essayer de trouver les secrets sans aucune indication d'avancée, car oui, le jeu ne t'aide absolument pas à te donner une idée de ta progression. La méta-histoire est vraiment tirée par les cheveux et incompréhensible sans regarder des aides et solutions. Et finalement, l'histoire est glauque, tant de temps passé pour... ça ? C'est vraiment un jeu que je garderais en mémoire mais pas pour les bonnes raisons.