It was too large a point to add to the review, but I want to add a comment about sleaze within Immortality. The game wants to have its cake and eat it too. Its movie clips frankly depict a world in which women's bodies are sexually exploited, but the game encourages you to search through lots and lots of nudity and sex scenes, which feature real actors paid to do this for the sake of the game. You can't finish Immortality unless you scrub backwards and forwards through these scenes at length. Women's boobs are one of the "objects" you occasionally have to click on to proceed, objectifying the women depicted in a very literal sense.
I'm reminded of a scene from The Wolf of Wallstreet, in which we are shown the excesses of bankers after they pay a drunken intern $20,000 dollars to shave her head. Once they've had their fun she is discarded and left alone and miserable. To make that scene, the makers of the movie shaved a real actor's head for a fraction of that sum. As I recall, she doesn't appear in the movie again. The actor's exploitation is as bad as that of the fictional characters, but the framing fails to show that self awareness.
The game did not have to tell a story this way but it chose to, and so it becomes an example of the thing it was criticising. Immortality isn't a 70s un-PC movie like it depicts, it is a 2023 game that gets to have all the elements of a 70s un-PC movie, just as long as it shakes its head and tuts whilst it shows them.
Book me today! I also review weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.Leave a Comment:
Nothing Beats that Eureka! Moment
In the same vein of other such Sam Barlow games as Her Story and Telling Lies, Immortality is a mystery in the most purest form. It presents you with a cache of unsorted film clips, gives you a brief tutorial on how to interact with them, and then says nothing else. Immortality won't tell you what to do. The game is a vehicle fuelled entirely by intrigue, and you can drive it in any direction of inquiry that you like. Given that the whole game is about presenting you with a mystery to solve, the less I can say about its plot or its characters, the better.
What I can do is compare it to the previous titles by the Sam Barlow. For starters, the scope has expanded. Her Story was a series of monologues in a small room, Telling Lies had a few different actors and sets. Immortality is lavish, with a huge cast of characters, a variety of locations, and dozens of potential leads for you to explore. The acting is top notch, and the film clips feel authentic, capturing the essence of the sort of seedy budget movies that end up lost to time. The fly-on-the-wall nature of a lot of the footage helps make the situations and story feel far more natural than in previous games, which is important in a story that's about determining fact from fiction, honesty from dishonesty.
Where the game falls down a little is its mechanics. The only way to unlock new film clips is to click on objects appearing within them, such as a plant in the background or a painting on the wall. Whenever you do this, the game will present you with a new clip with matching content; also with a plant or a painting. There is some dopey explanation within the game for why this is the case, involving some bug in the archiving software, but you're not meant to dwell on that contrivance. In theory, this approach presents you with a novel challenge towards following leads. In practise, it encourages you to just mindlessly clicking on faces, clocks, keys, boobs, and literally anything just to unlock the next clip to watch. When that happens, you stop engaging with solving the mystery. Also, I would strongly recommend playing with a controller, as the controls for scrubbing through videos on mouse and keyboard are annoying.
Eventually the penny will drop. You spot a certain element across the videos, and you switch to searching for that element across the entire library. The solution is interesting, if somewhat melodramatic, but it fits the tone. Even in the early moments of the game, the ambience is eerie, the game making you feel nervously voyeuristic throughout. And then the game effectively uses its mechanics to give you a jump scare, and set you off on a far more interesting line of inquiry.
As with previous titles, Immortality gets an easy recommendation from me. These Full Motion Video titles expand beyond typical game genres, trying to find what else the medium can really do, and it is well worth being along for the ride.