Content warning for descriptions of sexual assault. Full spoilers below.
Oh, no. This is stupid.
People used to make jokes that Hideo Kojima never actually wanted to make games, and he was only in the industry because he couldn't make it in film. This is a very safe, paternalistic, mocking idea; the man includes a lot of cutscenes in his games, and — tonally speaking — they can be pretty silly, which movies totally never are. But it's a statement that's untrue. It ignores the contributions he's made to the field of game design. It ignores the way in which he uses the medium to paint his narratives, rather than create and pigeon-hole them into a video game post-facto. It ignores a lot of things about him to make a quip that'll make you seem epic and haughty when it actually makes you look like a rube.
With that said, I think Sam Barlow is only in this industry because he wouldn't be able to make it in film. The in-universe movies are constructed with an amazing amount of love, care, and technical prowess, and they're completely spoiled by two of the worst meta-plots I've ever seen.
God, can we put a halt order on media made by men where the entire framing device is "Wow, powerful men constantly exploit women! Not me, though!" Apparently this is the third time Sam Barlow has made a game about the voyeuristic portrayal of traumatized women, and I think the guy needs to take some time off to come up with a new plot. How many more self-flagellating men in the director's chair do we need to keep releasing high-profile shit like this while blaring it over and drowning out the work of women who have been talking about how badly society has been treating them for the past fifty years? Are we meant to be shocked when we see a titty for the nth time in Ambrosio, as if Doris Wishman wasn't already producing sexploitation films centered around misogyny and rape culture from a woman's perspective in fucking 1964? In a world where creators like Coralie Fargeat are making deconstructive rape-revenge films that take the entire industry to task for the shit that they've put women through, why the fuck does Sam Barlow feel the need to throw his limited perspective in? How many women do I need to namedrop before I get my point across?
What the fuck else is even going on here, anyway? Is the intent for me to feel disgusted when the reels swap in the middle of a sex scene and Marcel suddenly looks like she's about 50 instead of 18? Am I expected to do anything other than laugh my ass off when everyone is suddenly butt-naked during a table read while two people fuck on top of a copy of the script? Is there a point to any of this, or is it just here to "shock"? There's so much capital-I, italicized Imagery on display that your main means of interacting with the game is through a visual match cut system, and feels like it's in service of the most surface-level, meaningless symbology imaginable. An extra-dimensional being who is haunting the video game says that he invented "the snake and the apple" and then menacingly looks into camera while pointing a snake at me. Shut the fuck up!!!
Right, the match cut system. Conceptually very interesting. Forcing the player — viewer, I suppose — to pay attention specifically to props and background actors is an inspired choice. These are elements of a film that are often purposefully obscured and painted over; almost nobody watching a movie is actually taking notice of set design and extras unless they spent five years in film school, first. By gating progression behind the viewer's ability to break a shot down into its constituent parts, you force them to engage with the medium far deeper than they normally would otherwise. This game is likely going to make a lot of people feel very smart, because they're being encouraged to watch a film in a new way, and then being rewarded for their curiosity with more scenes.
And you do feel very smart when you're linking snake earrings to living snakes, or one actor in an older movie into one of their later appearances. You feel significantly less smart when you realize that this is all mostly just blind-luck fumbling around to try to uncover more clips, with little actually linking one shot to another. Despite being called a "match cut" system, the visuals of an object aren't actually matched; the objects themselves are. A spiky balloon ball links to an owl trinket on a dresser. An avant-garde, metal apple links to the same owl trinket. A gilded statue links to the same metal apple. This is because the game classifies them all as "sculpture". The match cut system appears to load in a clip with a "sculpture" in it at random, even when clicking the exact same object again.
Match cutting is also prone to breaking, or otherwise just not working in a way that a human would be able to comprehend. There was a painting in one scene that was clearly made by covering a woman's breasts in green paint and then stamping them onto the canvas; clicking on this inexplicably sent me to a zoomed-in shot of Marcel's face with her eyes closed. Her clothes were on, so it's not like it was linking "breasts". I don't have any clue how the game logic determined that they were connected. You can select accessories, but only sometimes. Wristwatches count as "clock", but only sometimes. Crosses and other jewelry around the neck can be selected, but rings around the neck can't.
As you're conditioned to keep an eye out for props, you'll inevitably start noticing ones strewn throughout the scene that look especially unique or vibrant, and then you try clicking on them and get nothing. It's not hard to feel like you've started thinking too far ahead of what the game is actually keeping track of, and it's frustrating. Why is the most reliable way of making progression not to keep a watchful eye out for unique props and actually pay attention to the movie, but instead to reel every clip back to its start and spam-click on the slates until Brownian motion sends you to a new piece of film?
Immortality has zero faith in its audience. A lot of what you're meant to click on gets long, drawn-out holding shots, where the camera refuses to break away for several seconds lest you miss out on spotting the special thing. It's like they hired Dora the Explorer to be the DP.
Even beyond that, though, the hidden "reverse" scenes start off interesting and end embarrassingly. The first one I discovered had what appeared to be an older, nearly-bald Marcel standing off in a corner while two actors rehearsed a rape scene. As the clip progressed, it zoomed in further on her face, and played distorted, echoed audio of someone yelling something to the effect of "hold the French bitch down" in German. The older "Marcel" then screamed, and the clip ended. I was intrigued. My immediate first instinct was that this was Marcel, decades later, reinserting herself into this old footage and releasing it to the public under the guise of an archival project to showcase how complicit many had been in the abuse she'd faced through her life, and how many more had perpetuated it.
I was wrong. It was sillier.
See, that wasn't Marcel, that was The One. Like Neo. The One is an angel, or demon, or God, or an alien, or something, and she's immortal. The One was Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary, and Eve, and all of Christianity was a story that she made up. Or maybe not, it's ambiguous. She's also Marcel, and also the director that Marcel was having sex with. Anyway, her entire thing is that she possesses humans and lives through them as a puppet master, carrying within her the thousands of essences of the people she's taken control of throughout her existence. There's another one of these entities, named The Other One, and The Other One is embroiled in an endless battle with The One. The Other One thinks that humans are all worthless monkeys, and The One thinks that humans have value because they can make movies. They kill each other a lot because they don't see eye-to-eye on this issue. I'm barely exaggerating. At the end of the game, The One deletes all of the clips and then possesses YOU, the viewer! You're now a vessel for The One! Metaphorically! The One is a cognitohazard! That's right, this was a fucking creepypasta all along!
This is the actual meta-plot stringing all three of the included films together, and it's fucking terrible. It's so bad that it retroactively sapped nearly all of the enjoyment that I had felt up until that point. I don't even think that it would be possible to rewrite this into something that isn't Daniel Mullins-tier. Scrap this entire idea. Get rid of the whole thing and try again. It sucks. It's so unbelievably bad. I don't know how you could see this and give it a pass.
Given how immaculately constructed some of these sets are and how few continuity errors I noticed, it doesn't seem like this was a production that barely made it out of the door because of COVID. You would expect that to be the case, but it seems as though the crew were able to work around it almost effortlessly, putting together some genuinely impressive film backdrops, faux-studios, and apartments for the sake of all of these shots. The actual films on display are the most polished things here, which is especially funny when you consider that, in-universe, they were never actually finished. If you really want to feel where the game has a limp, it's in both its writing and the fact that these actors seem to be getting inconsistent direction.
Less artistically and more objectively, however, technical issues abound. At one point, the game popped an achievement to celebrate me seeing "what happened to Carl Goodman". It was another hour before I even found out who Carl Goodman was, and another hour and a half after that before I actually saw what it was that the game thought I'd seen. Attempting to sort your clips by items and actors produces so many of them that the UI lags to the point of being borderline unusable. Sometimes unlocking new videos won't actually let you watch them, requiring you to back out to the main menu and reload back into the viewer. How in the world does a game where you do nothing but scrub through film clips still have issues that are both this obvious and this critical after a calendar year and boatloads of acclaim? You couldn't afford to patch the fucking thing with Game Pass money?
I admit that none of what's written above could be read as me being fair to Sam Barlow, but I don't think he's earned it. This is a game written and directed by the same guy behind the stories of Silent Hill Origins and Shattered Memories. Finesse, historically, isn't one of his strong suits. Ironically, I think the "and company" part of "Sam Barlow and company" did an outstanding job; I love how they managed to capture these faux period pieces, what with their matte paintings and their ever-shifting accents. I love the set design, I love the cinematography, I love some of the actors. Manon Gage does such a convincing job in the behind-the-scenes footage that it's hard to believe it isn't actually candid.
Honestly, I would have been happier just watching these movies. I would have been happier leafing through all of this behind-the-scenes footage in chronological order without the forced layer of meta-narrative and detective shenanigans looming over all of it. Ambrosio would have been a legitimately good watch; Minsky is kind of dreck, but the way production ended was interesting; Two of Everything is just bad. But I would have gotten more enjoyment out of just seeing the cast interact, and build and destroy their relationships, and build and destroy their films if they weren't all told non-linearly and chopped up like this. I'd seriously suggest anyone who's read this far and is still interested in Immortality to just watch a video online of someone putting the movie clips in order for you.
The worst parts of the game are the ones which Sam Barlow decided to put his fingerprints all over. If he could have gotten out of the way of this entire production, it could have been genuinely amazing. Instead, he manages to tank three entire movies with all of their extra footage by trying to tie them all up in one of the most embarrassing science fiction Christ parallels I've ever seen. Oops. Better luck next time. Hope your crew can find another director who can actually use their talents without making the fruits of their labor into a joke.
"I'm part of you, now." Give me a fucking break.
Oh, no. This is stupid.
People used to make jokes that Hideo Kojima never actually wanted to make games, and he was only in the industry because he couldn't make it in film. This is a very safe, paternalistic, mocking idea; the man includes a lot of cutscenes in his games, and — tonally speaking — they can be pretty silly, which movies totally never are. But it's a statement that's untrue. It ignores the contributions he's made to the field of game design. It ignores the way in which he uses the medium to paint his narratives, rather than create and pigeon-hole them into a video game post-facto. It ignores a lot of things about him to make a quip that'll make you seem epic and haughty when it actually makes you look like a rube.
With that said, I think Sam Barlow is only in this industry because he wouldn't be able to make it in film. The in-universe movies are constructed with an amazing amount of love, care, and technical prowess, and they're completely spoiled by two of the worst meta-plots I've ever seen.
God, can we put a halt order on media made by men where the entire framing device is "Wow, powerful men constantly exploit women! Not me, though!" Apparently this is the third time Sam Barlow has made a game about the voyeuristic portrayal of traumatized women, and I think the guy needs to take some time off to come up with a new plot. How many more self-flagellating men in the director's chair do we need to keep releasing high-profile shit like this while blaring it over and drowning out the work of women who have been talking about how badly society has been treating them for the past fifty years? Are we meant to be shocked when we see a titty for the nth time in Ambrosio, as if Doris Wishman wasn't already producing sexploitation films centered around misogyny and rape culture from a woman's perspective in fucking 1964? In a world where creators like Coralie Fargeat are making deconstructive rape-revenge films that take the entire industry to task for the shit that they've put women through, why the fuck does Sam Barlow feel the need to throw his limited perspective in? How many women do I need to namedrop before I get my point across?
What the fuck else is even going on here, anyway? Is the intent for me to feel disgusted when the reels swap in the middle of a sex scene and Marcel suddenly looks like she's about 50 instead of 18? Am I expected to do anything other than laugh my ass off when everyone is suddenly butt-naked during a table read while two people fuck on top of a copy of the script? Is there a point to any of this, or is it just here to "shock"? There's so much capital-I, italicized Imagery on display that your main means of interacting with the game is through a visual match cut system, and feels like it's in service of the most surface-level, meaningless symbology imaginable. An extra-dimensional being who is haunting the video game says that he invented "the snake and the apple" and then menacingly looks into camera while pointing a snake at me. Shut the fuck up!!!
Right, the match cut system. Conceptually very interesting. Forcing the player — viewer, I suppose — to pay attention specifically to props and background actors is an inspired choice. These are elements of a film that are often purposefully obscured and painted over; almost nobody watching a movie is actually taking notice of set design and extras unless they spent five years in film school, first. By gating progression behind the viewer's ability to break a shot down into its constituent parts, you force them to engage with the medium far deeper than they normally would otherwise. This game is likely going to make a lot of people feel very smart, because they're being encouraged to watch a film in a new way, and then being rewarded for their curiosity with more scenes.
And you do feel very smart when you're linking snake earrings to living snakes, or one actor in an older movie into one of their later appearances. You feel significantly less smart when you realize that this is all mostly just blind-luck fumbling around to try to uncover more clips, with little actually linking one shot to another. Despite being called a "match cut" system, the visuals of an object aren't actually matched; the objects themselves are. A spiky balloon ball links to an owl trinket on a dresser. An avant-garde, metal apple links to the same owl trinket. A gilded statue links to the same metal apple. This is because the game classifies them all as "sculpture". The match cut system appears to load in a clip with a "sculpture" in it at random, even when clicking the exact same object again.
Match cutting is also prone to breaking, or otherwise just not working in a way that a human would be able to comprehend. There was a painting in one scene that was clearly made by covering a woman's breasts in green paint and then stamping them onto the canvas; clicking on this inexplicably sent me to a zoomed-in shot of Marcel's face with her eyes closed. Her clothes were on, so it's not like it was linking "breasts". I don't have any clue how the game logic determined that they were connected. You can select accessories, but only sometimes. Wristwatches count as "clock", but only sometimes. Crosses and other jewelry around the neck can be selected, but rings around the neck can't.
As you're conditioned to keep an eye out for props, you'll inevitably start noticing ones strewn throughout the scene that look especially unique or vibrant, and then you try clicking on them and get nothing. It's not hard to feel like you've started thinking too far ahead of what the game is actually keeping track of, and it's frustrating. Why is the most reliable way of making progression not to keep a watchful eye out for unique props and actually pay attention to the movie, but instead to reel every clip back to its start and spam-click on the slates until Brownian motion sends you to a new piece of film?
Immortality has zero faith in its audience. A lot of what you're meant to click on gets long, drawn-out holding shots, where the camera refuses to break away for several seconds lest you miss out on spotting the special thing. It's like they hired Dora the Explorer to be the DP.
Even beyond that, though, the hidden "reverse" scenes start off interesting and end embarrassingly. The first one I discovered had what appeared to be an older, nearly-bald Marcel standing off in a corner while two actors rehearsed a rape scene. As the clip progressed, it zoomed in further on her face, and played distorted, echoed audio of someone yelling something to the effect of "hold the French bitch down" in German. The older "Marcel" then screamed, and the clip ended. I was intrigued. My immediate first instinct was that this was Marcel, decades later, reinserting herself into this old footage and releasing it to the public under the guise of an archival project to showcase how complicit many had been in the abuse she'd faced through her life, and how many more had perpetuated it.
I was wrong. It was sillier.
See, that wasn't Marcel, that was The One. Like Neo. The One is an angel, or demon, or God, or an alien, or something, and she's immortal. The One was Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary, and Eve, and all of Christianity was a story that she made up. Or maybe not, it's ambiguous. She's also Marcel, and also the director that Marcel was having sex with. Anyway, her entire thing is that she possesses humans and lives through them as a puppet master, carrying within her the thousands of essences of the people she's taken control of throughout her existence. There's another one of these entities, named The Other One, and The Other One is embroiled in an endless battle with The One. The Other One thinks that humans are all worthless monkeys, and The One thinks that humans have value because they can make movies. They kill each other a lot because they don't see eye-to-eye on this issue. I'm barely exaggerating. At the end of the game, The One deletes all of the clips and then possesses YOU, the viewer! You're now a vessel for The One! Metaphorically! The One is a cognitohazard! That's right, this was a fucking creepypasta all along!
This is the actual meta-plot stringing all three of the included films together, and it's fucking terrible. It's so bad that it retroactively sapped nearly all of the enjoyment that I had felt up until that point. I don't even think that it would be possible to rewrite this into something that isn't Daniel Mullins-tier. Scrap this entire idea. Get rid of the whole thing and try again. It sucks. It's so unbelievably bad. I don't know how you could see this and give it a pass.
Given how immaculately constructed some of these sets are and how few continuity errors I noticed, it doesn't seem like this was a production that barely made it out of the door because of COVID. You would expect that to be the case, but it seems as though the crew were able to work around it almost effortlessly, putting together some genuinely impressive film backdrops, faux-studios, and apartments for the sake of all of these shots. The actual films on display are the most polished things here, which is especially funny when you consider that, in-universe, they were never actually finished. If you really want to feel where the game has a limp, it's in both its writing and the fact that these actors seem to be getting inconsistent direction.
Less artistically and more objectively, however, technical issues abound. At one point, the game popped an achievement to celebrate me seeing "what happened to Carl Goodman". It was another hour before I even found out who Carl Goodman was, and another hour and a half after that before I actually saw what it was that the game thought I'd seen. Attempting to sort your clips by items and actors produces so many of them that the UI lags to the point of being borderline unusable. Sometimes unlocking new videos won't actually let you watch them, requiring you to back out to the main menu and reload back into the viewer. How in the world does a game where you do nothing but scrub through film clips still have issues that are both this obvious and this critical after a calendar year and boatloads of acclaim? You couldn't afford to patch the fucking thing with Game Pass money?
I admit that none of what's written above could be read as me being fair to Sam Barlow, but I don't think he's earned it. This is a game written and directed by the same guy behind the stories of Silent Hill Origins and Shattered Memories. Finesse, historically, isn't one of his strong suits. Ironically, I think the "and company" part of "Sam Barlow and company" did an outstanding job; I love how they managed to capture these faux period pieces, what with their matte paintings and their ever-shifting accents. I love the set design, I love the cinematography, I love some of the actors. Manon Gage does such a convincing job in the behind-the-scenes footage that it's hard to believe it isn't actually candid.
Honestly, I would have been happier just watching these movies. I would have been happier leafing through all of this behind-the-scenes footage in chronological order without the forced layer of meta-narrative and detective shenanigans looming over all of it. Ambrosio would have been a legitimately good watch; Minsky is kind of dreck, but the way production ended was interesting; Two of Everything is just bad. But I would have gotten more enjoyment out of just seeing the cast interact, and build and destroy their relationships, and build and destroy their films if they weren't all told non-linearly and chopped up like this. I'd seriously suggest anyone who's read this far and is still interested in Immortality to just watch a video online of someone putting the movie clips in order for you.
The worst parts of the game are the ones which Sam Barlow decided to put his fingerprints all over. If he could have gotten out of the way of this entire production, it could have been genuinely amazing. Instead, he manages to tank three entire movies with all of their extra footage by trying to tie them all up in one of the most embarrassing science fiction Christ parallels I've ever seen. Oops. Better luck next time. Hope your crew can find another director who can actually use their talents without making the fruits of their labor into a joke.
"I'm part of you, now." Give me a fucking break.
14 Comments
Fantastic review, this game sounds disgusting lol. There is a movie by the name of Perfect Blue, directed by Satoshi Kon, that is one of the few to connect to me and display my rage in an accurate and meticulous way. It was directed by a man, which shows me that there's nothing these dudes can say to make their works anything but voyeuristic trauma porn. There is a level of understanding and empathy and honest sadness that has to go into portraying it, and you can tell these directors motives for making a rape plot has nothing to do with any of these things.
It's a shame because the creepypasta part sounds like it could at least be funny, but I feel like the rest of the game must just sour it. Real good review, thanks for speaking out about it.
It's a shame because the creepypasta part sounds like it could at least be funny, but I feel like the rest of the game must just sour it. Real good review, thanks for speaking out about it.
@DemonAndGames honestly i was kind of left more flabbergasted once the game revealed its hand like that because it had the audacity to keep going for another four hours waiting patiently for me to discover more clips that said the exact same thing just in case i hadn't figured out what was going on yet
@moschidae you're not going to believe this but the in-universe movie Two of Everything is like if you pushed Perfect Blue through the filter of an after school special. it's got the SA-heavy cloud looming over it that infects the antagonistic women of the film but instead of having the part where Rumi fully immerses herself in misogyny through her actions, one woman just starts mocking the protagonist by delivering the most on-the-nose rape culture speech i've ever heard. straight up just telling her "he's a powerful man, he can do whatever he wants to you. you can't tell anyone because we have so much money we control all of the cops and media". it's unreal
@moschidae you're not going to believe this but the in-universe movie Two of Everything is like if you pushed Perfect Blue through the filter of an after school special. it's got the SA-heavy cloud looming over it that infects the antagonistic women of the film but instead of having the part where Rumi fully immerses herself in misogyny through her actions, one woman just starts mocking the protagonist by delivering the most on-the-nose rape culture speech i've ever heard. straight up just telling her "he's a powerful man, he can do whatever he wants to you. you can't tell anyone because we have so much money we control all of the cops and media". it's unreal
I felt crazy when everyone was praising this game when I had a very similar takeaway to you, so it's nice to see you express it so well. I got particularly annoyed with all the talk about how this game was Pushing The Medium™ despite its interactive elements being so badly implemented, which is starting to feel like this inevitable song-and-dance every time a game has some meta plot-twist.
I'd be curious to know what it was about the plot that bothered you so much. You say it's bad about 7 different ways, but never what you actually disliked about it. Specifically, I'm referring to "The One's" storyline.
I ask because this is a throughline I've seen in negative reviews of the game; it seems self-evident to some people that this is "just bad." I wonder if it could be influenced by the order you saw the clips in. The meta-plot didn't bother me at all.
I agree with a lot of the review but when it breaks down into "bad bad it's bad I hate it it sucks it's bad" it's just a little hard to follow along.
I ask because this is a throughline I've seen in negative reviews of the game; it seems self-evident to some people that this is "just bad." I wonder if it could be influenced by the order you saw the clips in. The meta-plot didn't bother me at all.
I agree with a lot of the review but when it breaks down into "bad bad it's bad I hate it it sucks it's bad" it's just a little hard to follow along.
Perfect Blue was... uh, perfect because it showed the way violence upon women from men and can alter women and make them violent themselves, but not in the same vein that men pursue it. The difference of Rumi and Me-Mania (was that his name? I always forget) couldn't be more vast, the way Rumi mirrors Mima, the implications of Mima continuing the cycle (no, I'm the real thing!) Is what that movie was about. It was about the women living in that world and how it affected them, which is why I love it.
But to this guy and these shitty directors its never actually about the women, it's about the men, if that makes sense. Even if they're portrayed negatively its still the man that gets the spotlight in the act and the woman is just a pitiful victim, or an accessory to how violent and Shocking that was.
nearly shit reading the last sentence in your response there. Who let's these guys keep getting away with it lmao... sounding more and more like a David Cage type game
But to this guy and these shitty directors its never actually about the women, it's about the men, if that makes sense. Even if they're portrayed negatively its still the man that gets the spotlight in the act and the woman is just a pitiful victim, or an accessory to how violent and Shocking that was.
nearly shit reading the last sentence in your response there. Who let's these guys keep getting away with it lmao... sounding more and more like a David Cage type game
I'm holding off on reading this in full since I am interested in it, but I will say it's appreciated to have more folks dissect and talk about how these voyeuristic approach can end up becoming detrimental instead of cautionary.
shit I loved it and even I was clapping at the last sentence, stellar review
@cowboyjosh I did think that I'd illustrated my points, but it is probably — like you said — because I feel everything about them is so obvious that I've done a poor job of expressing the reasoning behind my feelings. I'll say preemptively that my entire argument here can be dismantled with the line "well, I don't feel that way", and I apologize in advance for typing out another essay here.
For me, the entire plot of The One and The Other One takes away from the experience because I've seen this story countless times before. The game is haunted. Pony Island called. It reeks of such an incredible sense of self-importance that these godly beings war over whether or not humanity is special through nothing more than our ability to create film. The One seems interested in nothing more than film. Not paintings, not song, not sculpting, not video games, but film. Sam Barlow doesn't express through this meta-plot that he really finds anything as important as the act of making a movie, which is, like, second-year film student levels of narrative writing. I was getting the incredibly distinct feeling that this was made as a celebration of an industry that the director doesn't belong to in the hopes of gaining brownie points with the less-familiar and less-discerning market of game reviewers, rather than film critics.
That aside, I had anticipated this to be a story about the exploitation of women in media production (let's face it, a game about an actress quitting film released five years after #MeToo kicked off is going to obviously need to address this), and it was for a little bit. What was there was clunky and half-baked not just because of a lack of writing acumen and lived experience on the part of the main writer, but because it was sidelined in favor of a bland allegory as to whether or not we can "live on" through our art. The One acts as the authorial mouthpiece to insist that we can, and The Other One is the imagined opposition which says we cannot. In watching these two fight and gnash and kill one another, I'm watching a man write an argument with himself wherein he's already decided that he's got the correct idea, and he just needs to take apart what he expects are the contrary points to it. I thought it was boring, and obvious, and took up far too much time for a debate that wasn't complicated enough to warrant it.
Of course we can live on through our art. We still look at cave paintings, we still study runic carvings, we still listen to Beethoven, we still watch Metropolis. The Other One attempting to rebuke the idea that we can live on through art because nobody will be watching in "a hundred years" is a joke because we're still looking at art from thousands of years ago. Writing an argument against yourself isn't interesting when the points you're making against your own beliefs can't hold up to three seconds of external scrutiny. I was bored. I didn't like it, and I didn't think it was clever.
For me, the entire plot of The One and The Other One takes away from the experience because I've seen this story countless times before. The game is haunted. Pony Island called. It reeks of such an incredible sense of self-importance that these godly beings war over whether or not humanity is special through nothing more than our ability to create film. The One seems interested in nothing more than film. Not paintings, not song, not sculpting, not video games, but film. Sam Barlow doesn't express through this meta-plot that he really finds anything as important as the act of making a movie, which is, like, second-year film student levels of narrative writing. I was getting the incredibly distinct feeling that this was made as a celebration of an industry that the director doesn't belong to in the hopes of gaining brownie points with the less-familiar and less-discerning market of game reviewers, rather than film critics.
That aside, I had anticipated this to be a story about the exploitation of women in media production (let's face it, a game about an actress quitting film released five years after #MeToo kicked off is going to obviously need to address this), and it was for a little bit. What was there was clunky and half-baked not just because of a lack of writing acumen and lived experience on the part of the main writer, but because it was sidelined in favor of a bland allegory as to whether or not we can "live on" through our art. The One acts as the authorial mouthpiece to insist that we can, and The Other One is the imagined opposition which says we cannot. In watching these two fight and gnash and kill one another, I'm watching a man write an argument with himself wherein he's already decided that he's got the correct idea, and he just needs to take apart what he expects are the contrary points to it. I thought it was boring, and obvious, and took up far too much time for a debate that wasn't complicated enough to warrant it.
Of course we can live on through our art. We still look at cave paintings, we still study runic carvings, we still listen to Beethoven, we still watch Metropolis. The Other One attempting to rebuke the idea that we can live on through art because nobody will be watching in "a hundred years" is a joke because we're still looking at art from thousands of years ago. Writing an argument against yourself isn't interesting when the points you're making against your own beliefs can't hold up to three seconds of external scrutiny. I was bored. I didn't like it, and I didn't think it was clever.
@Lordg to be completely honest with you I'm waiting for the day that one of these big meta games drops and it bombs and people get scared off from the idea for a little bit. we could use a couple of years off to work on crafting narratives that don't live or die on your ability to trick the player into getting invested in the fake story before you pull the rug out from under them to reveal the real plot
@BlazingWaters what really caught me by surprise was the fact that i didn't think i'd have this much venom in me until i started actually thinking about what was being presented and how. the more i ruminated on all of this (and without spoiling anything to you further, i'll have to be vague about the specifics) the more i realized how much it was really just getting under my fingernails and staying there
@appreciations i'll be real i was kind of nervous seeing some of the people i follow review this highly because the last thing i want is to drop a nuke in the middle of everyone's fun and start calling people media illiterates or problematic because they got something from a piece of art that i didn't. a friend of mine mentioned that the creativity and faithfulness behind the recreation of these movies as well as the behind the scenes stuff was enough to justify a great score even though he hated the meta plot, and hell, i really did like Ambrosio
@BlazingWaters what really caught me by surprise was the fact that i didn't think i'd have this much venom in me until i started actually thinking about what was being presented and how. the more i ruminated on all of this (and without spoiling anything to you further, i'll have to be vague about the specifics) the more i realized how much it was really just getting under my fingernails and staying there
@appreciations i'll be real i was kind of nervous seeing some of the people i follow review this highly because the last thing i want is to drop a nuke in the middle of everyone's fun and start calling people media illiterates or problematic because they got something from a piece of art that i didn't. a friend of mine mentioned that the creativity and faithfulness behind the recreation of these movies as well as the behind the scenes stuff was enough to justify a great score even though he hated the meta plot, and hell, i really did like Ambrosio
@psychbomb don’t be nervous! if anything, I really like seeing the reviews that differ from my own scores and everyone else’s scores the most. hell I’ve straight up changed 4-5’s based on a new viewpoint before, this is another one.
for me, I still love the game and a lot of that probably has to do with my own personal attachment to fmv games but also possibly getting different clips in order. different narrative early so when things did change, it wasn’t as goofy and jarring as it definitely has been for a lot of people. I went in expecting ’Her Story’ part 2 and was appropriately thrown a left hook lmao.
It is a great review and 100% Ambrosio carries hard.
for me, I still love the game and a lot of that probably has to do with my own personal attachment to fmv games but also possibly getting different clips in order. different narrative early so when things did change, it wasn’t as goofy and jarring as it definitely has been for a lot of people. I went in expecting ’Her Story’ part 2 and was appropriately thrown a left hook lmao.
It is a great review and 100% Ambrosio carries hard.
Thanks for explaining! It sounds like you had a lot more expectations than I did going into this. I spent almost no time thinking about Sam Barlow or philosophy or (checks notes) "authorial mouthpieces" or any of that while playing. I went in pretty much blind and just soaked in the story, characters and spectacle. I'm attracted to narrative ambiguity, so uncovering the mystery was probably the biggest driving force to me.
Not trying to argue, just contrasting our experiences. I am curious how long it took you to finish the game? Mine was something like 23 hours but I've heard of people rolling credits in like 3 hours. It doesn't sound like there's any arrangement of clips that would have made you enjoy it more, but I'm still intrigued by how differently the game must be experienced by different players.
Not trying to argue, just contrasting our experiences. I am curious how long it took you to finish the game? Mine was something like 23 hours but I've heard of people rolling credits in like 3 hours. It doesn't sound like there's any arrangement of clips that would have made you enjoy it more, but I'm still intrigued by how differently the game must be experienced by different players.
@cowboyjosh I think my expectations were also pretty high because this came highly recommended from a few people whose opinions I put a lot of stock into. My disappointment was probably amplified pretty heavily by that, because I usually tend to align fairly closely with a lot of their likes and dislikes as a collective.
Game Pass is telling me it clocked in at 7h30, which is apparently over the HLTB par by an hour and a half. Per the achievement progress, I also got a little over 50% of each of the three movies, so about half of all the clips total. That said, I got the "I get it" feeling after about two or three hours, and the rest of my time was spent trying to find the triggers that would send me to the credits (which in retrospect seem like a pretty arbitrary collection of ten of the I-don't-know-how-many secrets).
Game Pass is telling me it clocked in at 7h30, which is apparently over the HLTB par by an hour and a half. Per the achievement progress, I also got a little over 50% of each of the three movies, so about half of all the clips total. That said, I got the "I get it" feeling after about two or three hours, and the rest of my time was spent trying to find the triggers that would send me to the credits (which in retrospect seem like a pretty arbitrary collection of ten of the I-don't-know-how-many secrets).
Well said. This game is sooooo fake deep and pretentious
DeemonAndGames
1 year ago
Incredible analysis, good job!