I'm currently sick with the flu and dosed up on heavy-duty cold medicine, and lemme tell you, being low-key high while playing this all in one sitting is an absolute trip. It's basically five hours of stumbling down a rabbit hole of cursed YouTube videos but organised into a thrilling quasi-horror mystery game that makes discovery its most valuable reward. When it starts, you're blindly moving between clips, taking in the most surface level information while attempting to figure out why a 70s movie about a monk that's coerced by the devil into non-stop shagging has anything to do with a seedy 90s version of the Lindsay Lohan movie, Parent Trap.
But after around an hour, things start to click. You start linking themes together, seeing things that don't quite add up, solving smaller mysteries that raise wider questions about Immortality's unearthly world. More importantly, you crack the code on how to track down hidden sequences, and subsequently spend another two hours trying to figure out what the fuck any of them actually mean. Before you know it, Immortality becomes this five-hour long obsession, instilling this sense of independent self-discovery that's so rarely entrusted to the player in a modern game. It just hands you a bunch of clips and leaves you to figure out what binds them.
If there's ever a game that made you feel like that It's Always Sunny meme where Charlie is showing Mac the giant conspiracy board, it's literally this shit right here. And sure, I think the game's final hour or so exposes its flaws, forcing you to a point where you're just clicking on random tat to unlock the next major scene you need to watch to progress the story, but I still think this was such a gripping premise. Sam Barlow must've shot hours of footage and worked tirelessly to segment it into comprehensible, bitesize pieces, and the result creates something that couldn't be achieved in any other medium. Above all else, it's just super cool.
Plus, FMV games tend to feel pretty awkward, but the acting and writing here are top-notch. I don't know if Manon Gage has been in much, but she's phenomenal as Marissa; easily the best performance in a game I've played this year (sorry Chris Judge). Second plus, the game gets extra kudos because there's a cat that shows up in a few sequences and I kept clicking on the cat to see if there was more cat-related scenes and then an achievement popped that was almost like, yeah, the cat's pretty cool right? You've seen everything though, stop clicking on the goddamn cat. God-tier stuff.
But after around an hour, things start to click. You start linking themes together, seeing things that don't quite add up, solving smaller mysteries that raise wider questions about Immortality's unearthly world. More importantly, you crack the code on how to track down hidden sequences, and subsequently spend another two hours trying to figure out what the fuck any of them actually mean. Before you know it, Immortality becomes this five-hour long obsession, instilling this sense of independent self-discovery that's so rarely entrusted to the player in a modern game. It just hands you a bunch of clips and leaves you to figure out what binds them.
If there's ever a game that made you feel like that It's Always Sunny meme where Charlie is showing Mac the giant conspiracy board, it's literally this shit right here. And sure, I think the game's final hour or so exposes its flaws, forcing you to a point where you're just clicking on random tat to unlock the next major scene you need to watch to progress the story, but I still think this was such a gripping premise. Sam Barlow must've shot hours of footage and worked tirelessly to segment it into comprehensible, bitesize pieces, and the result creates something that couldn't be achieved in any other medium. Above all else, it's just super cool.
Plus, FMV games tend to feel pretty awkward, but the acting and writing here are top-notch. I don't know if Manon Gage has been in much, but she's phenomenal as Marissa; easily the best performance in a game I've played this year (sorry Chris Judge). Second plus, the game gets extra kudos because there's a cat that shows up in a few sequences and I kept clicking on the cat to see if there was more cat-related scenes and then an achievement popped that was almost like, yeah, the cat's pretty cool right? You've seen everything though, stop clicking on the goddamn cat. God-tier stuff.
adambaelish
7 months ago