Really sad to see the franchise go down in quality after the fairly good upgrade 2 was for the series.

The technical aspects are what kills this for me and for most that played/will play this. Movement is so janky, you consistently have to fight the controls to do what you are supposed to do, I had to restart the game at least 3 times because it would randomly get stuck.

Voice acting was overall really bad, kate and oscar do a very good job as always but the supporting cast had either really bad actor choices that didn't fit with the character or just didn't know what they were doing.

Those unfortunately tarnish what would otherwise be a very good experience. The story doesn't hit as hard as 2 but it has some nice beats, puzzles are fairly enjoyable and you don't get stuck or have to waste time nearly as much as in previous entries. The soundtrack is as always really well done.

Wasted opportunity, if you REALLY like the Syberia series then you probably shouldn't skip this one but otherwise, I can't recommend this in good conscience.

I did not expected to like Forbidden West as much as I did. I liked the original game, but by the end of it, I was over the game loop and I though there were several flaws in the game mechanics.

Forbidden West improve in almost every way over its predecessor and delivers an interesting story along with its improved mechanics.

Beautiful graphics, improved gameplay and a better animations/cutscenes mark an big leap forward over the original. I cannot wait for the next game.

The writing, the atmosphere, the art style, and the animation, it is such an excellent combination that makes for a really engrossing and immersive story while also not trailing away from the comedic undertone the series is known for, and easily the most adventure focused Monkey Island game (so far).

Similar from MI1 to MI2, Curse of the Monkey Island's gameplay is even more simplified from MI2, barring being able to highlight objects. You are now only presented three options: Use, observe, and talk, which changes depending on the context (use being swapped to "push", "talk" being swapped to "eat", etc.). This means there's a lot less creative puzzles, but also a lot less frustrating ones as well. I've used a guide to get past maybe 15% of the game, the rest I've figured on my own because they're a lot more intuitive compared to previous games. There are still unfair puzzles (the quicksand one) but overall, with a little bit of thinking, I was able to get past most without getting frustrated. Granted, I played on normal difficulty, I don't know how much different it'd be from hard.

Although I praise this game's story, I did feel like the ending was a bit lackluster. There was no real buildup to the final fight until the last moment, when it was way too late.

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.

I liked Her Story because of its mechanics - the weird in-game OS was set up specifically to facilitate actual deduction and creativity in a way I hadn't seen before. Immortality completely jettisons this in favor of something superficially similar: clicking on objects in a scene to match-cut to the same object in a different scene. But you have no control over which scene you get, and no reason to ever believe one object or person will lead to a more important scene than another. There's no cognitive work for the player to do at all. Plus, certain symbols like apples and snakes (ooh, do you get it?) get snuck into shots where they don't belong just to create additional pathways for you. Her Story had this problem too, to be fair, but the artifice of the script is a lot more obvious when the repeated motifs are visual.

As for the story? Well, when you write one game casting the player as a voyeur of women in vulnerable positions and call it satire, that's fine, I guess. But three games in a row? That's when I start to narrow my eyes a little.