With Immortality, Her Story and Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow turns his now-trademark found footage style on its head. As in his previous games, you start with a restricted understanding of what and who you're watching, and the only way to learn more is to locate linkages between FMV clips, building up a larger and larger library on the way. But in expanding the scope of his storytelling and making some fundamental tweaks to how you navigate the narrative, Barlow has ensured Immortality doesn’t seem like a retread-even otherwise every ambitious gamble takes care of.
This time, the clips you're uncovering tell the storyline of Marissa Marcel, a young actress plucked from obscurity to star in Ambrosio, a (fictional) 1968 adaption from the (real) 1796 novel The Monk, about the corruption of the priest during the Spanish Inquisition. However the film never actually saw release, nor did another two movies Marcel starred in: Minsky, a 1970 New Hollywood detective story set in the New York City art world, and Two of Everything, a glossy 1999 thriller in regards to a pop star and her body double.
Even here, at most straightforward level, it's hard to overstate just how much artistry Barlow and his team have poured into Immortality. Everything-the film grain, the production techniques, the acting styles, the writing-reflects a spot-on interpretation of those different eras in filmmaking without ever descending into cheap parody. The theatrical sets and gorgeous matte paintings of Ambrosio give it a name wholly in addition to the grimy Ny location shooting of Minsky. Should you edited trailers of these films together and threw them up on YouTube, I bet you can fool some people into thinking these were real. They are not great cinema, of course, however they are entirely plausible as movies using their respective eras that you've never heard about.
What's truly fascinating about Immortality's method of narrative, though, would be that the framework of three movies is simply a jumping off point, the top layer of what is really going on within this mystery. The footage you find is all tied to the films-uncut takes, rehearsals, location-scouting shoots, making-of interviews, cast parties, and thus on-but the real meat of the story exists outside the frame of the movie screen: the moments following the director yells cut, flubbed lines, footage that was always meant for the cutting room floor.
This approach, of fake-real narratives clustered around fake-fake narratives, of art interrogating art, of real people playing fake people playing fake people, could easily descend into an overly philosophical, navel-gazing blob. However it never does. That's to the credit of Barlow and his writing team-Alan Scott, Amelia Gray, and Barry Gifford-but also to the performers. Manon Gage, particularly, does such a phenomenal job of imbuing Marissa with all the depth and variation the smoothness demands which i was shocked to understand that this is her initial role.
But if Immortality benefits from a more maximalist method of narrative, in gameplay (if that is the right word) Barlow's evolution far less straightforward. Whereas Her Story and Telling Lies both used language as the ligament you traced to discover their stories-unlocking new clips by searching carefully chosen keywords-Immortality spins a web that's entirely visual. At any point while watching any clip, you are able to pause it and pass a cursor over all you see. Objects and faces within the scene become hyperlinks, enabling you to “match cut” to a new piece of footage which features that person or object.
The big limitation in Her Story and Telling Lies-the challenge, if you will-was specificity. You were always can not puzzle the right word that might open a brand new type of inquiry. You could only view a lot of results for each search, which means you couldn't brute force everything by trying to find incredibly common words. You needed to constantly reassess knowing about it of the story, because if you weren't following along, you could never advance. You'd never find the specific word required to get to a new clip and generate new leads.
In Immortality, specificity doesn't seem possible. Each cut leads you straight to another scene, to not a summary of options. You've got no way of guessing where you'll end up in advance. All you are able know for several whenever you click a flower is that you'll visit a scene with another flower (or at best something flower shaped). Any logic underlying the connections is entirely opaque. The game certainly isn't always finding the right match cut. Clicking someone's face in profile may lead you to definitely a go where they're facing your camera, and a half-focused leaf without anyone's knowledge usually takes you to a clip of a very different-looking plant in the heart of the frame.
What's more, you can immediately click on the same object in the new scene and jump to a new scene, again and again, adding more clips to your library without ever actually watching any of them. Playing by doing this, you'll likely loop to a scene you've already visited, but it's not really a closed circle. Clicking the very same object around the identical frame can take you to definitely multiple different scenes, seemingly at random. I don't think it's possible to collect a full set of clips featuring anyone object or person this way-some things are trapped down one-way streets, I suspect, to ensure you aren't just hammering buttons. But without any transparency in the way the connections work, there's little room for strategy.
The consequence of all this, a minimum of in my opinion, is the fact that playing Immortality isn't about moving through a story inside a nonlinear fashion a lot as confusedly, recklessly spiraling around inside it. Playing Her Story for the first time, I felt like a detective. Playing Telling Lies, I felt like both a detective and a spy. Playing Immortality, I felt just like a chimpanzee with a vacuum. Instead of paying attention to each scene entirely and seeking to reason out my next lead, I just visited any object or face that seemed new or intriguing as soon as it appeared, hoovering up scene after scene for my collection. Piecing together the storyline, I figured, would come later.
But it didn't quite exercise like this. Instead, I kept getting achievement pop ups saying I had discovered the fate of some character before I'd even bothered to learn their name. Shockingly soon, I had a solution to the game's central question: What went down to Marissa Marcel?
Well, I ought to say, I'd one answer to that question. Like Barlow's previous work, there is a deeper layer to all things in Immortality that you need to put in a bit of intentional try to discover. I will not say an excessive amount of and risk spoiling the very best (and perhaps only) surprise the gameplay provides. However i will observe that this layer of the game is affected with repetition along with a insufficient interconnectedness that render it inelegant, even while it delivers eerie surprises along with a show-stopping climax. Although it demands a deeper level of engagement than the shotgun-blasting from the match cuts, it stills feels greatly, by necessity, like a brute force exercise. I still reached the loan roll with only the vaguest feeling of who characters were and what had happened to them, and basically no sense that I'd earned my progress.
I actually remember asking Sam Barlow about this exact possibility throughout an interview about Telling Lies. What goes on if, through blind luck, a player immediately looks for the best keyword and jumps straight to a clip that explains the game's central mystery? When i recall, Barlow told me that the idea didn't bother him much, because he doesn't write whodunits a lot as whydunits, stories in which a web of characters and motivations is just as essential as the “answer” to the plot.
With Immortality, I found myself living out the reality of this hypothetical. I assembled probably the most hidden, mysterious bits of the puzzle first, then gradually grasped the stories of the “real” people-the fictional actors and directors making the movies-and then finally understood the plots of the movies themselves. I wasn't digging deeper; I was clawing my way out. There is still something worthwhile in the surface layers, elements that enriched and contextualized what I'd already discovered, but not enough to battle anticlimax. Filling in the gaps was like watching a film backwards, or reading a novel with the exposition cut out and glued into the last hundred pages.
I know I'm to blame, but I don't believe I'm exclusively to blame. I keep coming back to the looseness of the match-cut system, to the misaligned incentives it makes. A well-designed game shows you how you can play it, not only literally but philosophically. Immortality never showed my min-maxing gamer brain a better way to engage until it was already too late.
I'm struggling a bit with my own argument, since i realize that most of the traits I find lacking in Immortality's interactivity reflect themes in its story: the flattening of time, the possible lack of fixed meaning in images, the struggle to communicate through art. I can appreciate that Barlow thought hard concerning the limitations of his central mechanic and built a narrative that both complements and interrogates it. But in the chance of going all Ambrosio you, confession isn't the same thing as absolution, not quite.
Of course, I'm well aware that the critique such as this is itself proof of the ambition from the work. Most modern games can't fail in thought-provoking ways because they be cautious with conservative, recycled designs. Though a successor to Her Story and Telling Lies, Immortality continues to be radically new. Even if Barlow missteps, he's stumbling into interesting territory.
The highest compliment and also the harshest criticism I can offer, then, are in fact exactly the same: Immortality is thrilling and imperfect, fascinating and messy-but it certainly isn't boring.
