Review of Immortality – mystic film

Sam Barlow is already a true gaming industry veteran, best known for the 2015 interactive film Her Story. He also continued it 4 years later with the name Telling Lies and stayed in the same genre for his latest project, Immortality. . But did the game live up to high expectations?

• Platform: PC (Tested), Xbox Series X|S, Android, iOS
• Publication date: 30. 8. 2022
• Developer: Sam Barlow
• Publisher: Half Mermaid Productions
• Genre: FMV
• Czech localization: Not
• Multiplayer: Not
• Data to download: 26 GB
• Game time: 10 hours (very individual)
• Price: €16.79 (Steam), available on Game Pass

Immortality follows the story of fictional actress Marissa Marcel, who only appeared in three films in her career, none of which were ever released. Now Marissa has disappeared, and our task is to find out what happened to her.

At the beginning of the game, only a short tutorial awaits you, after which you will be taken directly into the game. But it’s not so much because the game hides mechanics that you’ll discover later, because the gameplay is really simple. You will be the first to chat with Marissa and you can speed up, slow down, rewind or pause the video. The most important thing is the “eye”, which can be clicked on a person or object to move to another scene.

And that’s really all. You gradually move to more and more frames and explore the individual films in which Marissa has starred. I must say that the performance is excellent. The acting is top notch and everything is filmed in such a way that the footage looks really vintage, including the costumes. But even this cannot save the fact that the gameplay is very primitive and quickly boring.

Unlike the famous Her Story, there is no detective mechanics here. Your job is to simply watch the footage, and the game quickly becomes more like a movie than a game. Also, the problem is that while you are exploring the frames in random order, the story itself is linear, there is no choice of what you can influence. You can accidentally get to the end credits in about an hour, but it took me about 10 hours. The ending is very disappointing and says nothing. Much more important are the hidden scenes that you can find during the game.

I must say that the whole mystery around the disappearance of the (un)famous actress is interesting at first glance, but in the end I didn’t really like discovering new leads. The game doesn’t even try to explain too many things to you. While the hidden footage is cryptic and even disturbing, it doesn’t reveal much, and much is left up to you. Paradoxically, I liked individual films more. As already mentioned, there are three of them: the historical and romantic Ambrosio, the detective Minsky and the very specific Two of Everything. There is something in every picture, and I liked to watch the footage from their shooting, the main thing is that the scenes should not be repeated.

And this is one of the main problems of the whole game – repetitiveness. Not only do you do the same thing over and over again, but you often view the same footage over and over again because your “eye” accidentally falls on it. It’s even worse with hidden scenes that you can find multiple times, and I kept discovering ones that I’ve already seen multiple times.

Immortality is a special title. Sam Barlow tried to do something a little different, but this time it just didn’t work. There are so few gameplay elements in the game that it’s hard for me to call it a game at all. It’s more of a fragmented movie that has some interesting scenes, but the fact that you’re watching them in random order detracts from the experience somewhat. In addition, the game almost does not give you a proper goal, even after the end credits and other hidden scenes, I simply did not feel any sense of satisfaction. I did practically nothing during those 10 hours, I just watched the footage and the game gave me answers to all the questions, which are not many on their own.

If you have no problem just sitting and watching for hours and don’t expect deeper gameplay, you can at least look forward to very well-crafted movie scenes or behind-the-scenes interviews with actors. etc. But if you’ve been looking forward to playing detective and finding out what happened to Marissa, then this game isn’t for you.