I make no secret in other reviews of how highly I think of knowledge-based investigation games, with Her Story being one of the early examples that really kicked off the popularity of this interesting little genre. Not only is this game another work from the very same director, but conceptually it blows the original out of the water with a massively expanded scope - you've got the plots of three movies, the fates of several actors, and a little something extra special all to keep track of. The amount of work it must have taken to put this all together is staggering.

Unfortunately, on the gameplay side of things, I do have a couple of qualms. While the mysteries are compelling once you've got more context, at the start before you really know what you're looking for, things can feel very aimless, making it hard to figure out what amongst the information overload is important to note. Conversely, while jumping between clips with shared objects is a novel idea that helps broaden your search early on, later when you're trying to find the last few new clips, the lack of control and inability to try specific things, as with Her Story's keywords, can be really frustrating, especially when trying to hunt down the secrets. By the end of the game I was pretty frustrated with the pace of progress, and when the credits rolled I felt a sense of relief more than anything, which isn't a great sign. Maybe this was just a skill issue on my end? But that took me out of the experience and made it harder to emotionally connect to the themes the game wanted to explore. It also left me missing some crucial scenes that I only found about later, despite the game declaring itself to be over.

Very ambitious continuation of the mechanics introduced in Her Story (I haven't played Telling Lies). The zooming in on stuff to move through the archive is more thematic and less contrived than searching for keywords, but it is also less controllable. What is generously free and loose when you first plunge into the maze, becomes more frustratingly limiting once you start looking for specific things. Still though, figuring things out and making the right connections is interesting.

What keeps this from greatness is the banality of the plot and its numerous twists. Once you have figured it out, it all just lays there as a murky puddle of disconnected symbols. The gameplay mechanics are sophisticated but the story is not. The acting is a strange beast in its own right, stuck somewhere between fmv camp and a dead serious indie drama / A24 elevated horror snooze fest.

For similar ideas in cinema (with better execution), I'd recommend Portabella's Vampir Cuadecuc and Rivette's Duelle. Immortality, just like its predecessor, remains at a level of "fun game that hints at the greater potential of future games".

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.

Sam Barlow does it again. And by that I mean he presents a very unique, memorable experience that has many excellent aspects to it but is frustratingly held back by a few utterly horrible aspects.

The cardinal sin of this game is that the gameplay starts and ends with you randomly clicking on items and characters in hopes that you get a new scene, along with scrubbing some clips in reverse, forward, reverse again. For the first several hours, it's actually really easy to get new scenes, and this isn't a big deal. But after a certain point, it gets MUCH harder. You have to start going back through footage you've already seen a dozen times and blindly clicking every object you didn't think to click earlier. I can actually forgive the bizarre UI because it does add something of a nice touch to the immersion, but the core "gameplay" becomes severely frustrating the longer you stick with it. Immortality is really all about its story-beneath-the-story, so I would love it if the game actually let me see the damn thing without forcing me to throw ♥♥♥♥ at the wall and hope it sticks.

And yet, for those first several hours...I was really enjoying this! I firmly believe this is Sam Barlow's best game overall. The acting and cinematography are great. The secret clips make the game way more creepy and intriguing as soon as you hit your first one. The game had me sticking to my screen for hours, clicking and scrubbing like a madman just to keep finding more clips! Honestly I'll keep buying and playing Barlow's games because they're always challenging in several ways (some good, some bad). But the important thing is that no one else is making games like these, and that's great for games as art.

My recommended method of playing this interactive movie is to find as many clips as you can, find as many secret clips as you can (the game helps you find at least a few of them quite well), see the ending (which is possible only if you find enough secrets), and then go on YouTube to watch all the other secret clips you missed. That way, you get the meat and potatoes of the experience and also minimize the frustration that comes with the endgame.

(This would have been 3.5 stars were it not for the awful repetition in the last few hours.)

Possibly the first ever truly ‘Lynchian’ video game. It’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ the videogame. And I absolutely adore it for that reason.

This might be the most fascinating experience I’ve had with art this whole year. There are few games, even movies, on its level.

I don’t really want to talk about the story here. It’s best to experience it, engage with it fully, really discover it piece by piece. It’s shocking, it’s twisty, it’s scary, it’s moving, it’s a lot more than you think going into it.

Manon Gage, and specially Charlotta Mohlin are on another level. Performances like these are only rarely seen.
The way this is played is fascinating as well. Play with a controller, it’s extremely tactile.

I only wish there was an easier way to pick up the last missing clips after you roll credits, kinda like in ‘Her Story’. It´s not really necessary, I believe that by the point you reach the ending you’ll me more than satisfied, It’s just to make it simpler to complete the movies.

Writing about Immortality is extremely challenging. It's unlike anything else out there, and discussing its gameplay too much could spoil the experience. Rest assured, I'll steer clear of anything that might ruin it for you.

I can begin by explaining that Immortality is a blend of a game and an interactive movie, featuring real people.

The game begins with a video featuring an actress on a talk show. Within the first few minutes, you realize that by pausing the video and selecting a person or object, a new video will start, similar to your selection. Your task is to unlock new videos by doing this.

As you unlock new videos, you're introduced to the life and career of Marissa Marcel, a talented actress. Her story is compelling and well-crafted.

I can't reveal much more, as even how to progress in the game is a spoiler. It's not very clear to the player how to move forward. At some point, I felt satisfied with the experience and understood what I needed to do, but still struggled with how to finish. Towards the end, I became fatigued and eager to complete it.

I played the iOS version and found the controls to be unreliable at times. There was a particular video where I knew what I needed to select, but it took me about 20 minutes to do it correctly. I wouldn't recommend this version, to be honest.

One more thing to note is that the game contains explicit scenes, including nudity and sexual content, so be prepared for that.

In summary, Immortality offers a unique experience despite some minor issues. I wish the game offered clearer guidance on what the player needs to do and was a bit shorter. Nonetheless, I recommend playing it on a PC or console, avoiding the mobile version.

A singularly interesting game, with fantastic performances, tone, and mystery. The DIY approach to figuring out the story is both the game's greatest strength and weakness. It's awesome to get disparate pieces of information and construct the narrative of what happened, but the "random" nature of progression through the clips wore on me, along with the annoying rewind mechanics. Absolutely one of the most fascinating games I have played, and there is nothing quite like it. I eventually stepped away from the game once I felt like I "got" what was going on, which made the ending of the whole experience somewhat lackluster. But the performances, unsettling atmosphere, and astonishing production value will stick with me. The trust that the creators have in the player to "figure it out" themselves is commendable, and it's great that it's up to the player to follow the clues for as long as they want to.

This was another game that I wanted to finish before it left Game Pass this month, and I am extremely happy that I did. Immortality is best experienced blind, so I won't say too much, but this is an insanely impressive interactive movie that I loved going through. There's a really great narrative here with strong performances and I definitely have never played anything like it before. I will say it was a little tedious trying to 100% this game, and I finished the main story without realizing I was near the end, but that was just my experience and depending on how others interact with the game they might not feel that way.

Overall Immortality is something really special. While the gameplay itself isn't particularly gripping, the story and construction of it all definitely is.

So unapologetically experimental and it gives the player more freedom and trust than I've ever seen a game have the confidence to do. The concept here is so bafflingly ambitious that it's a miracle it works at all, much less this well.

Immortality is a non-linear detective game that will always lack complete truths, with every discovery raising more questions than answers. It's a beautifully shot, massive project that is unlike anything else out there. By giving you the unpredictable control that you have, the game controls you as much as you control it, and that makes it so uniquely haunting.

It's not a puzzle with paths and direct connections, but a mosaic that reveals itself piece by piece that's never fully filled in - even in the end it's half formed with an image you can only partially make out.

But that's the point of Immortality - not knowing things is much scarier, and because of that, it sticks with you long after the 'end'.