7 years ago Her Story presented a very unique approach to an investigative adventure game, simulating the feeling of searching through the video archives of disjointed video clips and trying to piece together a more or less cohesive story out of it. A few years later, Sam Barlow followed the idea up with Telling Lies, a game that was criticized for having the same gameplay premise, but far longer video clips and more obtuse interface to turn the otherwise rather simple experience into a frustrating one. I haven’t played it myself, due to this criticism, but nonetheless was curious about what will come next. Immortality is yet another follow up to the idea first explored in Her Story, but this time the interface and the gameplay have been made less complex. Perhaps too much.
The premise of Immortality is intriguing enough – there’s archived footage from 3 separate movies one actress appeared in. Yet, none of them were released, no one knows what happened to the actress and why is that she looks the same in the early 70s and late 90s. So after a quick tutorial, in which the seemingly complete archive for some reason gets corrupted, you’re dumped into one clip and asked to retrieve the rest by clicking points of interest on the scene. Doing so will attempt to “match cut” to a different clip, meaning that clicking on someone’s face in one video will give you a new video with the same person, though starting from the match, not the start of the clip.
And if you have played the previous titles, you might wonder how does that combine with key words or tags and searching. The answer is – it doesn’t. You can’t manually search for anything, just click on a random piece of a scene and get transported to a new one, hopefully one you haven’t already unlocked. Because there’s no preview and no guarantee. And these match cuts make less and less sense, the more video clips you unlock. Which means that, the game basically lacks any kind of investigation feeling whatsoever. You’re never in control of this journey, you’re never making conscious decisions about what to click, because there’s no consistency apart from “bottle will bring you to another bottle” or “person face will bring you to another scene with this person”. Sometimes you can click fingers, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you can click eyes, usually no. Sometimes hair is an interactive zone. It just happens.
Here I also want to talk about the only real “mechanic” of the game, so skip this paragraph if you haven’t discovered this for yourself yet. It’s likely you will in the very first moments of the game, but still. So – there is secret footage that you can get by playing the videos forwards or backwards at different speeds. Sounds simple and discovering this is quite natural. But there’s a twist – it’s not 2 speeds forward, 2 speeds backward plus frame skip forward or backward. It’s actually 3 speeds forward and 3 backwards, because holding frame skip is also considered a speed setting that unlocks hidden footage. It’s just rarely required. Why not just make the UI to clearly have 6 speeds? Or even design the interface to fit with the concept of the moviola? Sylvio, a super neat indie title about ghosts and EVP, did the idea of recording ghost voices and playing it back at different speeds and in different directions so much more intuitive by just designing the interface to be obvious, so… why obscure this here?
Anyways, if you are to ignore the fact that Immortality wants to be a movie far more than it wants to be a game, it’s a relatively neat experience. The hidden plot points become quite obvious very quickly, but they’re still interesting on their own and presented in a super cool way. The actors did a terrific job too. It’s just that – I feel like I’d rather watched the movies Immortality invents, than play this experience that gives me snippets of them with superfluous interactivity that doesn’t really enhance the experience.
If you are interested in the investigative gameplay, like what Her Story has provided, Immortality has none of that. This is more of a movie watching experience than a game playing experience. I could enjoy it, mostly because I liked the idea behind it and did enjoy the performances a lot. But at the same time – it being a videogame doesn’t feel great. And it might’ve been better done as a mini-series with no interactive parts whatsoever.