This is a spoiler-free rambling, up until the spoiler tag.
What a game! I cannot say I liked it! But what a game, though! FMV metroidvania, with a merciless prickly little shit of an RNG. Who would've thought such a game can exist!
Do I recommend this game? Answer these for me.
- Are you interested in movies and how movies are made?
- Are you interested in narrative design? How games can have some buck-wild narrative progression?
- Do you enjoy not knowing a damn thing and just piecing things together?
If you say yes to any of these three (but preferably all three), I think you will derive something from playing the game. It might not be enjoyment, or pleasure. It might even just be a headache (as it does for me), but it'll be worth your time, with some variable definition of "worth".
Which is to say, it's hard to say whether Immortality is "good" or "bad", quality-wise. It was certainly meticulously crafted and involved the work of dozens of extremely skilled people. The end result is kind of a mess, though! But a coherent mess. A mess that is kept together. There's definitive authorial intent to it. I might think some scenes are unnecessary, but I can see the director insisting it mean something, sure.
Immortality feels long. Bloated, even. But that bloat might mean something: filmmaking is long and arduous and we got footage of the process for three of them. As someone who knew jack shit about filmmaking, it was a really good look at what happened behind the camera. Or in front of it, for that matter.
The "gameplay" part, though, is tedious. Mystery games are about piecing things together, and how good they are to play depends on when and how you get those pieces as much as it depends on what those pieces are. Immortality has a masterful grip on the what---those scrumptiously acted and directed FMV scenes---but pretty much threw the rest to a random number generator. You could have a satisfying mystery or you could get booted to the credit scene without understanding what the hell happened. It doesn't help that the gameplay mechanic is deliberately vague; I ended up looking some of it online because I'm not gonna waste my time trying random things, thank you very much.
The story itself was, well, it was about the creation of three European-American movies in the mid 90s. As someone born and raised in Southeast Asia in the turn of the millennium, it was a bit of a cultural shock. Well, "shock" might not be the right words. More like rolling my eyes, I suppose. I was never a fan of movies to begin with, but I did appreciate the characters and characterizations and the overall skill needed to make this work.
I was not a fan of the conceit of the overall mystery though. I think it ruins what could've been good human drama, but thinking back, I guess in a way it still is human drama. Friendship, love, and the like. Sure. I can hate the ending and appreciate the process at the same time.
Ok endgame spoiler time
I love supernatural drama, believe me. I love stories about gods and immortal being who are distant from humanity yet wants to be closer.
I don't like it when it's just kinda of kicked in, when it's just used for a twist. "Ooh it's a dream all along!" "Ooh they survive because they're actually vampires!" that kind of thing. Up until the ending, Marissa Marcel's story would have worked just as well if it's a totally normal human drama. She was exploited as a teenager, got too much into being a film star at the expense of herself, felt guilty about it and was a recluse for thirty years, then returned. That's a good story already. You don't need to make it about, oh she's actually an immortal being wearing human skin.
I think it's good in concept? Like if you're the writer, and you've established to yourself that Marissa is an immortal being, it might sounds good. But if you play through the game, and the only way you found about the supernatural part is by uncovering the "hidden" footage, I dunno, it feels cheap. Shock factor twist. It kind of absolves the story from telling a human story, which it has done a pretty good job off up until you found the hidden footage. Afterwards, it just feel, somewhat cheap? After I learned more about the being under Marissa's skin, I feel a bit better about the story, but only a bit.
"The beings are immortal because they can be reborn when someone watch footage of them burning" is dumb. Dumb as hell. No basis for it. They did a good job (at least in my playthrough) establishing that they can't be killed except by fire, so why turn on that on the last minute? In the final scene, I had thought the being was tired of living and genuinely wanted to kill herself; why was she "inside of me" at the end?
At the end, what was the point of all that?
Shit, wait I just realised something. I see a few people saying they like the "horror" element to it. That they consider this "horror at all. And I wonder? I wonder if part of why I could not perceive it that way, that I thought the supernatural part is degrading to the story, is simply cultural. With the way I was raised, as a woman in Asia, it's a lot easier for me to humanize Marissa, such that I feel it's a cop out when they say "oh, she's not a human woman at all".
And I don't think the cut to the supernatural was spooky at all; I even thought at the beginning that this was just an older Marissa, revisiting her old film sets. I don't want to judge her based on her appearance; I would not say the beings looked spooky at all. If they were dressed that way as a way to signal their otherworldiness, the signal did not reach me at all.
By the way, I played this on an iPad. I've heard the control is much better with a controller that have haptic feedback. The iPad has been fine for me, though. It was fiddly at first but I got used to it. Just make sure you have sounds on when playing.
