I made a rule for myself early on when I started reading reviews: don’t read anyone elses until after I’ve posted my own. The reason for the rule is simple, I was finding far too much of other people’s opinions in my writing, that lazy part of my brain defaulting to regurgitating what it had seen before rather than spend the cycles to create something new. It has served me well, for the most part, but sometimes I find the need to situate myself in the grander narrative about the game. So it is for IMMORTALITY, a game that has all the making of something I should really have thorughly enjoyed. Instead I find myself with mixed feelings about it, something that was not resolved by reading others’ thoughts on the game as it seemingly met with universal praise. Not to mention there seems to be a whole subplot which, whilst I was very much aware of it, had no clue about the actual story of it which upon reading would’ve elevated the whole experience for me.
I really can’t make my mind up here.
IMMORTALITY puts you in the seat of a film archivist, one tasked with going through some reels of film that never saw the light of day and cataloguing them for posterity. They track the career of a young French starlet, Marissa Marcel, who got her big break with Ambrosio, a film based on the gothic novel The Monk by Matthew Lewis. She then went onto star in another film called Minsky before having an unusually long break, some 30 years, before staring in her final film Two of Everything. On the surface this seems like a straightforward job but it quickly becomes apparent that there’s more this person’s story than what’s depicted on the film, and what couldn’t possibly be on it.
Given IMMORTALITY is stylized as a film archivist job the visual stylings are that of cinema and, to their credit, shift in line with the age that they were shot in. The older files using a 4:3 aspect ratio layered with film grain effects, punctuated with the use of black and white scenes every so often for dramatic effect. Later footage expands to widescreen, ditching the exaggerated film grain for a more subtle effect before eliminating it entirely in the more modern day equivalent. For someone who enjoys the art of cinematography it was a nice touch, even if it was obvious that most of the effects were from post-production rather than the use of period-correct equipment.
Like the other games by Sam Barlow you’re not given carte blanche access to all the video files to view at your leisure. Instead you must explore links between clips by identifying common objects, people and places that you can then use to jump to another clip. Where you’ll land though isn’t particularly deterministic, you’re just guaranteed to land in another film clip somewhere where that similar element is. This means you’ll be doing a heck of a lot of jumping around the game’s timeline, spending a lot of time exploring one movie before finding yourself smack dab in the middle of another. You can go back and review the timeline of videos you’ve seen up until this point which, if you’re brave enough, will eventually total 289. Make no mistake, this game purports to have 3+ movies worth of content in it and it very much does.
Thankfully it seems that Sam Barlow has taken the general feedback about his previous games to heart and has streamlined the interface for IMMORTALITY. This time around all you need to do is click on something interesting to be transported to another video although, annoyingly, it’s not really guaranteed that it’ll lead somewhere new (even if you’re clicking something new to you). I think this might have to do with the way the game is architected on the backend, I.E. they’ve spent a ton of time identifying key objects in the video, tracking them, and have then listed all those items in a database. Then when you click said item it queries the database for all videos that contain that item and randomly chooses one to transport you to. For objects that aren’t in many scenes this can make it feel deterministic at times but for others, like main characters, it’s a real lucky dip. Also included this time around is an automatic rewind to the start, a godsend considering how much content there is to get through.
The first few hours with IMMORTALITY are really quite fun as you get to know the people, characters and places that this game takes place in. This is made all the better by the stellar performances of all the cast, especially the main actor Manon Gage who plays Marissa Marcel. All of the characters, both “real” and their roles in the movies, are given more than enough time to grow and develop. Things start to take a very interesting turn as you learn that the footage might not quite be exactly what it is on the surface, opening up another angle to explore footage again. But, like all non-linear narrative games like this, it starts to stumble at a certain point and really fails to recover.
You see the trouble with non-linear, unguided storytelling like this is that there’s no way to control the pacing at all. For IMMORTALITY this can mean long sessions where you don’t really learn anything new or interesting which are then punctuated with a rapid fire line of revelations before it sinks back into tedium once again. After 4 hours or so I was really hoping to start finding more veins to mine until I read that, for most people, you just had to keep following one character for as long as it took to find a new clip due to the non-deterministic routing the game does. It was at that point I figured I’d seen as much as I’d wanted to and was going to leave it at that.
Except I couldn’t and so I thought I’d do what I did last time: peruse my way through the game’s video files and see if there was a quick way to speedrun my way through to whatever end the game had in mind. That’s when I discovered there’s no less than 289 individual files to find and that they were also Bink Video encoded (I.E. not readily decodable by VLC). Still I got the Bink player working and was able to watch some things I hadn’t seen already but, honestly, nothing I saw really hooked me enough to want to jump back in and continue exploring. So that was going to be that, my review would end right here and I’d give it a middling score before moving onto greener pastures.
Then I started reading reviews and a plot synopsis of the game…fucking hell.
PLOT SPOILERS BELOW
That’s when I discover that the whole reversed footage with creepy looking people thing is actually a story about 2 immortal beings who have been interacting with each other and humanity since the dawn of time. Suddenly all the broken bits of story, unresolved questions and perceived plot holes started to evaporate and the narrative starts to look a lot more cohesive. But the game wasn’t able to get me to see that story, nor piece enough together to understand that there was a plot like this lying in wait for me. So how the fuck am I meant to feel about something like that?
PLOT SPOILERS OVER
Honestly I’m not quite sure if the score I’m going to give here is going to make sense, even to me. You see there are parts of IMMORTALITY I really enjoyed: the cinematography, the actor’s performances and the initial few hours where I was enjoying bouncing round the clips and discovering the meta-story. But then I hit this wall and the game just fails to engage me any further, even “cheating” not doing enough for me to make it appealing again. Then, by breaking my rule around not reading reviews, I find it’s received universal acclaim and I agree with everyone that it should. But that doesn’t reflect how I felt about the game prior to reading that, so….what the fuck. I really don’t know anymore.
Rating: 7.0/10
IMMORTALITY is available on PC, Mobile, Xbox Series X/S and (soon to be) Netflix right now for $28.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 4.9 hours playtime and 29% of the achievements unlocked.
