Immortality

[one-armed dwarf]

Sam Barlow's latest game, who did Her Story (which I've not played and know nothing about) and Telling Lies (same)

 

 

I spent about 5 hours last night and saw credits, however I don't think I'm close to complete I just happened to trigger the scenes which lead into credits. I'm sort of frustrated by it and not sure where it lands with me. It's very hard to talk about without spoiling stuff but at the very least the premise can be explained (it's in the trailer), it's about an actress who starred in three films which never released. One made in the 60s, the other 70s and then 90s. You're reviewing footage of the films and behind the scenes stuff, and some other stuff that's a spoiler. You're supposed to look at the videos and click through different points of interest to unlock other footage, which could be directly connected (same people, same movie) or decades apart.

 

 

The reason I find it frustrating is there's some stuff it does really well and other stuff I'm not convinced about. The stuff it does really well is it's absolutely an impressive production that's all about fetishising the movie-making form and how it changes over time and between genres. You've got your sexy Chinatown style neo-noir, some weird Lynchian style thriller, some really schlocky yet to fun to watch erotica. It's very self-reflexive, looking through the films at itself sort of thing. That stuff is either going to hit with your or it won't and it will depend on your own movie interests and history with some of the stuff it seems to evoke, I think. 

 

It's just the interaction with it all leaves me feeling a bit weird. The three movies basically are a series of linear narratives broken up into a bunch of hyperlinks to each other. There's an obvious thematic link with some of the stuff they're going for and as you slowly thread all the fragments together some of the stuff will lock into your brain as being significant. It's a game about the act of viewing stuff obsessively over and over and unlocking these links. You don't just watch something once and leave it alone, you rewind that shit back and check again to notice stuff that maybe escaped your attention earlier. But the gameplay mechanics for establishing said links seem completely random to me. I ran into one which seemed very deliberate and hinted at a big secret behind one of the BTS events for one of the films, but I went back later and found out that the way the two scenes were laid out was completely coincidental. The thing I deduced was accurate but the act of the game showing it to me seemed like pure RNG. But I guess that could also be the point? 

 

I don't know. It's sort of challenging stuff, I think it getting a 10 from Edge and being on Gamepass means it will get put in the crosshairs of lots of 'games should only be fun' type of folk, but I do think the interactive part of the narrative struggles a bit to relay the clear ambition of this piece. I think my opinion on it will change a lot though when I find the rest of the clips and have actually 'beaten' it and can go back and study the footage more freely, rather than doing this weird whack-a-mole type thing unlocking it all

[Maf]

I might try it this week, but honestly only because Edge gave it a 10 and it’s on Gamepass. If it weren’t for either of these things I don’t think I’d bother. I’m not expecting to like it, but there’s also no reason not to give it a go. Hopefully It surprises me, but I’m not exactly excited to play it 

[one-armed dwarf]

Give it a go but don't really expect to take much out of messing around with it for a few hours. The point is you're kinda prodding through a mist of ambiguity and confusion before you start to lock down and construct some sort of meaning out of the different scenes. It's a bunch of cinematic metatext turned into a hypertext made out of video links, not really a literal video game as such.

 

Like last night I was about to make this thread and it was going to be more negative, but then I spent the night and morning thinking about it and found a bit more to appreciate with what it's going for. It's one of those things which is frustrating in the moment of pulling the pieces apart but I dunno, some parts of it can be pretty invigorating when you work out some of the stuff it's going for. Tho I still stand by what I said about the interactions being a bit weak.

 

Guess what I'm tryna say is don't run in and give the blow by blow like you did with Aliens lol 🤣

Cause it wouldn't be a productive way to play a game like this.

 

I wanna say that there's an interesting contrast between it and Netflix's Bandersnatch, where I felt like Bandersnatch was a pretty trite observation from TV people of how the creative process of games work but this on the other hand seems like a pretty well informed look into how movies are made, from the perspective of both game makers and cinema artists. I think it shows how difficult it is to straddle two different mediums like this, even tho it seems like making a game out of a bunch of FMV should be 'easy' it actually isn't cause of the different creative disciplines involved

[one-armed dwarf]

Played some more last night and probably have had my fill, as said the mechanic for searching for scenes is pretty annoying. That said patching the story fragments together until it coalesces into something is something which could not work in other media (film, book*, tv). Not enough games actually use the interactive part to do anything interesting with story telling so altho I might feel like Immortality can be a swing in a miss in lots of cases I think it's a cool thing overall. 

 

I wouldn't be totally surprised if it has appeal outside of the sphere of games, but who knows if it will get that kind of coverage

 

giga story spoilers, end game spoilers etc

Spoiler

Whole thing seems to be about a pair of immortal demons who introduced humanity to Christianity, and growing apart from each other when the biblical myth failed to elevate humanity to greater heights. Then one of them sort of falls in love with humanity's own stories and goes around possessing them to steal their mythmaking capabilities, but the finite lifespans of humans and their creative energy gets them caught in a rut over and over leading to multiple failed creative endeavors and constant extinguishing of their own lives (which they come back from as they are immortal, they just need a human host to come back). The other one of the demons tries to thwart the efforts of the original, which leads to things like on-set accidents.

 

On the 'mortal' plane there's lots of stuff with different characters playing multiple characters in films, multiple layers of performance where it's not always clear what is fake and what is 'fake', eg characters getting into and falling out of their character, or literally being possessed by demons. It's got a lot in common with Ingmar Bergman's Persona and a ton of David Lynch shit. Marissa in Ambrosio, who I think is actually a young french girl who was killed by German soldiers in WWII, is a host for a demon who saves her life and promises to let her live forever. She becomes the muse of the director of photography and she seems to take that film as a sort of identity constructing exercise for herself. It's a sort of mandatory form of method acting, because the demon needs to acquire the appearance of being human, but doing it too much can come at a great cost (very meta). Anyway something goes wrong on her second film Minsky and she 'accidentally' murders her co-star in the 2nd film, but you learn that it wasn't really an accident probably because her co-star got infiltrated by the other demon trying to stop her. Then 20 years later, the demon is occupying both Marrissa and John (the director from Minsky) and trying to keep creating art and directs a film called Two of Us (in this case, a Mulholland Dr style film with a character who has a doppelganger), but the film falls to pieces as Marissa/John seems to sort of 'die' from exhaustion and gets set on fire as its the only way to actually kill a demon, which is the end of Marissa entirely. Then the demon gets reborn by devouring the viewer of the material, living on that way

 

Pretty weird stuff, very Twin Peaks season 3 type stuff. Fun to piece it together but hard to know what to make of it all. I guess there's a message there about exploitation of others for selfish pursuit of your art or something. It get a bit heady at times and takes a lot of effort to wrangle something out of it while resisting the temptation to just read giant spoilers others have worked out from it.

 

I enjoy the way that searching for the bits of story with hyperlinks in the videos will lead to realising certain connections that aren't obvious at first, as well as how it naturally reinforces the idea of re-examining old content to see if there was something you had missed. But I think the game mechanics of doing it is badly tuned as it far too often promotes content which you've already seen. There is a lot of RNG behind the way the game selects videos for you but I feel like they set it to be too withholding which leads to lots of repetition.

 

* actually an exception there might be house of leaves, which is sort of a 'gamey' kind of book maybe.

[shinymcshine]

There's a niche of games, that get a bunch of critical acclaim, often look great and add some interesting new dynamic, but just don't click with me (in terms of actually being much fun to play).

 

So by the sounds of this one, it'll fall into that pile for me too -  alongside "The Return of Obra Dinn".

[one-armed dwarf]

It's not fun to play, it's not really a game at all I would say. That said the story can be cool, if a little on the nose and obvious (with its resolutions and, imo, the things it is influenced by).

 

Might be fun to watch someone else play it, maybe. Also I hated Obra Dinn, gave me a headache

 

to be honest tho, it's on gamepass so there's no reason to not just try it out. It's an interesting game to think about and will probably be my goty (not a lot of competition for that tho)

[retroed]

I had proper chills at points playing through this. A very unique experience, something you could only get via this platform. I'm not going to say anything else about the game, but it's certainly one I will not forget.

[one-armed dwarf]

Here's a list of films which inspired Immortality (not a spoiler)

 

https://letterboxd.com/halfmermaid/list/movies-that-have-inspired-our-videogame-immortality/

 

Lost Highway is on there, one of the writers of Lost Highway actually worked on this game.

 

Surprised that Persona is not on there (Ingmar Bergman). A lot of stuff on here I've not actually seen so some good movie viewing material here, maybe

 

edit Marissa Marcel herself talks about the making of Immortality, spoilers for everything and probably some titties as well

 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1590830445

[shinymcshine]

Gave this an hour this morning (via Gamepass) and I just don't know what to make of it.

 

It's like a bunch of disjointed clips and the world's worst hidden object game - pause and randomly click and you might link to something else!

 

But I guess that if you do it enough times things make more sense, but why do I care - the obtuse nature means I have no particular engagement to actually find out what's going on and why - you could argue that's sort of the 'discovery' but to work that way (for me at least) it needs to give you some quick wins to draw you in (i.e. why should I be interested in this person - aside from it being a 'mystery' ?) - not just more scenes with no direct correlation.

 

I'll likely give it a bit more time but.....

 

[shinymcshine]

TBH I probably failed the 'intelligence test' that was part of the intro tutorial.

 

After zooming in and out of the clips then being guided to click and watch the first clip, I then spent about 5 unsuccessful minutes trying to figure out how to get back to the initial screen full of clips .....

 

I'm now guessing you don't, but instead build up you own screen full of clips from hitting the marks within clips you're watching - which isn't /wasn't particularly clear at all. But then neither was later finding the intro narrative in the 'About' menu - where you normally would just find credits from the developers 

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah, they take that away

 

I think what makes Immortality interesting is you can basically take in the narrative from multiple angles. You can fixate on the plot of a particular movie and find out as much as you can (Ambrosia was my favorite, the book it's based off is real and has had several film adaptations). You can follow the directors and other creatives around and try to find out what links them, the chain of influence from movie to movie. You can focus on other things, which are a spoiler (if you know you know). You can dive into the deep end and claw your way back to the surface level, subtext before text. Or do it reverse, start with behind the scenes and plot stuff and dig into the layers underneath

 

In that sense I find it an extremely interesting experiment, but I think its execution can vary in quality. You hit a point with it where it becomes too difficult to find new clips, but I also think the point is that you're supposed to settle on an impression of what it's all about at some point, and actually finding all the clips is a redundant exercise which doesn't really elucidate any further meaning. 

[shinymcshine]

I went back to the earliest clip (5 people around a table doing a script run through) and that unlocked maybe 20+ more scenes, including a couple of prequel casting ones, some suspicious behaviours and later on a hidden scene within the clip too, so I guess that's progress.

 

But my logic means that I don't want to watch most of those scenes yet, since they are usually from much later parts of the chronology (assuming that linear chronology is a good thing). I was also surprised later at some of the achievements I seemed to unlock ("What happened to (character xyz)" - so I guess that's at least knowing how their story arc concludes).

 

I'm hoping that you eventually get to watch all the relevant sequences joined together (maybe at the end?).

 

I'm intrigued enough now to keep playing.

[one-armed dwarf]

You probably shouldn't try to tackle it linearly at all (sort of what my point was in the comment above)

 

You can, but it would be frustrating and limiting, and probably time consuming. IMO. YMMV

 

edit I guess really my point was that you can play it however you want, tbf. I just wouldn't save everything until the end personally. 

[shinymcshine]

It's been 2.5 hrs and I've got credits rolling (for what I can only assume is one of multiple 'endings'.

 

Here's what I got:

Spoiler

It was a lady crying "I am part of you now" - not sure if this is specific to predominantly watching the Ambrosio scenes, I barely touched on the other stories (I'd unlocked loads of clips for the other stories but just wanted to watch through Ambrosio first, I did see the final scene with the burning chair though).

 

I'm not even sure what triggered the 'ending' - I'd been watching a scene from Ambrosio that had a hidden part referencing the painting and the Virgin Mary didn't even wear blue'. Next thing the scene screen had a face in the background and scenes disappeared until crying face filled the screen.

 

Weird thing is, esp. reading @one-armed dwarf hidden part of post 01 Sep - I clearly stumbled into the ending without really revealing any of that 'plot' - I just followed themes through the scenes (eg clicking on an object on one scene then the same one on the next etc, then finding the occasional hidden frame by jogging the speed when the controller vibrated).

 

Object linking:

Spoiler

Object linking - some things like fire, scripts, ashtrays, telephones, chairs, kiss, crucifixes etc appeared in many scenes, and click cling one on one scene then led to a sequence of that object appearing (in different forms) in other scenes.

 

So overall it feels a bit of dissatisfaction.

[one-armed dwarf]

i'm not sure of the triggers for the credits/ There's a specific scene that triggers it but I'm not sure what that scene's prerequisites are. but I'll say 2.5 hours is probably just skimming the surface of the surface. Tho again it's largely the player's choice to go further with it or not, but you wouldn't have a great grasp of what it's going for with just 2.5 hours I think

 

But that's what I was saying before about how you can dive into the deep end and claw your way back to the surface level plots and events, and connect things that way. The credits is a bit of a red herring here

 

I had 14 hours with it, tho honestly I probably should have stopped at about 10 or 12

[shinymcshine]

It's a bit odd, having now read around, that there doesn't actually seem to be any branching alternative endings, and what I got is it.

 

But maybe that's just the game part (albeit if it's there surely it should only be triggered if it's in context of what you've watched - and in my case it certainly wasn't).

 

I get the whole layered drama thing, I'm happy to watch and rewatch Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive etc, but at least they provide (the vast majority) of things on screen for you to interpret - with Immortality my experience was like watching 40 mins of MD / or the first 2 episodes of TP S3 then being thrown into the finale and being told - yep that's your lot, wasn't that great ! (Well unless you know want to go back and watch the rest, that we rudely denied you, but the ending isn't changing).  

 

So yes, I would like to at least run through the other 2 movies, but in terms of a game structure, what I got, and how I got an ending, seems pretty poorly put together.

[one-armed dwarf]

Reading my OP looks like I said I got the credits at 5 hours, even at that I was similarily mystified and frustrated by the whole thing

 

There's two aspects to Immortality. The way the scenes are shot, edited in post production to achieve period-appropriate style of filming, the loose connections between them, the non-linear narrative framework. I think this part is neat

 

The scene delivery, the actual 'video game' part. Not so much. You would expect it to be a deeply nested tree of hidden secrets but it's more like whack a mole, and some of the moles have a secret.

 

I'll just say as a general recommendation to anyone browsing the thread to ignore the credits entirely and decide yourself when you've had enough. Whether it's 2 hours or 20 or whatever. There should be imo a bit more of an initiative required from the player to trigger them, as there apparently is in something like Her Story. Here, it is seemingly random. Looking it up, I think you could probably trigger them at 5 minutes if you want. After around 6 or 7 hours I think I got way more into it, not that I wasn't into it before that point but it's where the links started to really coalesce for me

[shinymcshine]

I figure that I must have unlocked sufficient scenes / hidden scenes for it to end, but I'd not actually watched most of those (I skipped back to the scene I was originally playing, with a view to save the new ones for later).

 

This situation could have been avoided if a runtime tally was kept for each clip (to designate whether you'd just unlocked or actually watched the content). Especially as I was so far away from actually being able to grasp what the main story was actually all about.

[shinymcshine]

I spent a couple more hours with it, again mostly just trying to follow the Ambrosio narrative, but it doesn't make it easy to actually view things in the whole, rather than as broken up segments.

 

So now after 5 hrs I'm done with it, I still haven't really watched the "Minsky" or "Two of Everything" segments - and I've still no great feel for the story reveals, but I've not the inclination to bother with it anymore (I would of, had these been linked together (post credits) like a mini film, but I'm not going through all the remaining disjointed clips).

 

It's a good looking something, but for me falls way short of being either a good game or a good interactive media piece.

[one-armed dwarf]

Just popped up in my subs 👀