Immortality is not a game like this yet, and it won't happen again

While major publishers try to achieve realistic graphics using incredible engines and expensive technologies, Sam Barlow continues to push his line and uses real actors in his games. Risk always pays off, and the results are brilliant every time. Scenariowriter Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has spoken loudly of himself as a terrific Her Story, continued experiments at Telling Lies, and now released Immortality, his most ambitious, bold, and five-minute genius project.

♪ Disappeared

The game is dedicated to an actress named Marissa Marcel, who spent her entire life in only three films, and none of them finally saw the light, and it's odd that the first two tapes were released in 1968 and 1970, followed by a long break — only in 1999 did the woman decide to return to the screen.

We're playing the part of whether it's a researcher, whether it's another outsider who got access to a lot of video footage. The footage from the footage and rehearsals, the interviews, the personal archival records of Marissa and members of various film groups... it's as if we're using a device invented a hundred years ago called Moviola -- it's been used by directors and operators to cut off unnecessary footage from the taken fragments.

The main idea of Barlow's last games has remained here -- at the beginning of the course, we only get access to one video, and through it we'll gradually unblock everything else. But if you have to cling to words spoken in dialogues and monologues, you're only gonna need subtitles for reading. Now we're working with objects and people in the frame, you're gonna pause, you're gonna push it, you're gonna push it -- and you're gonna have to move on to another fragment. If you see a cross on someone's chest, you can end up in a cemetery next time. If you click on a candle, you're gonna see a frame with a light bulb.

There are, of course, some limitations -- if you press Marissa's face indefinitely, the scenes start to repeat themselves quite quickly, so it's desirable to pay attention to different objects. There's a lot of them: bags, phones, knives, masks -- if there's something in the frame, it's mostly interactive. At first, it's scary that from 1968 you can get to the 1999 and vice versa, when you lose the story thread, you're gonna have to go back and forth all the time. There may even be a desire to ignore the late fragments and go back to the old ones. But the scenes are so remembered that it's not necessary.

♪ Three colors

The first thing to do is to thank the writers. They had the difficult task of telling a story broken up into three different time intervals. So it's literally necessary to create a whole universe -- where the films actually exist, there's a lot of rehearsals and auditions really have been, and it's going to be smooth from one to the other.

To say that the work has been brilliant is to downplay the quality of Immortality. It's all done and written so amazing that it doesn't feel like for a second that actors play -- they literally live the lives of other people. It's true for all of Barlow's recent games, but because of the scale that has increased, everything has come to an incredible level -- you actually look at real videos found by someone after decades. How actors fool themselves at rehearsals, how they read the script, how they come up with something on the move, they argue and fall in love. Even though the movies themselves don't see anything at all, the scenes of them show quite a lot, and these tapes could easily exist in reality.

The first picture is the film of the old Gothic novel The Monk, in which the monk Ambrosio has the charm of a girl who has entered the monastery and becomes a criminal. This film is the most interesting one in the plot, so it's not surprising that the scenes are the most shown. But the rest of the tapes are good, one tells about an artist whose murder is suspected of being a muse, and the other about a superstar and her doppelganger. The films themselves are not very interesting, but it's interesting to see them, but it's not that often we think that even bad works are worth a hard and hard job.

So you literally hunt for new pieces -- every time you find something fresh, you're happy as if you're unpacking a New Year's gift -- especially after the final credits that you can get to the opening of all the rollers -- the task gets a lot more complicated, but the author certainly doesn't plan for all the players to see the whole stuff that's been made. By jumping from one era to another, you're impressed by how cleverly the atmosphere of those times, especially the beginning of the '70s -- with the appropriate haircuts, with the yellow filter of the film, and so on -- how the format of the image changed, how the cellphones came to replace the notes -- the map year immediately guesses, even the menu doesn't need to come out.

♪ The tree of life ♪

And at some point, the player gets to know why he's been told this whole story for years, and that's the last time I've had this feeling in The Witness -- when something clicks, and it suddenly starts to play in completely different colors -- and that's how neither Her Story nor Telling Lees could be bragged, and that makes Immortality not just another interactive film, but something bigger -- something that can only exist in this genre and that makes the game truly phenomenal.

It's all going to happen at different times, but it's almost certainly gonna happen by accident. It's gonna be easy to understand how to repeat it, and it's gonna be a new hunt. It's gonna take a lot of common concepts, but it's not just that the developers didn't mention it in an interview or in a trailer -- it's an amazing idea that turns Immortality from another good interactive "Kin" to a new word in a genre. It's doing great to get back into memory for a long time.

The idea is so brilliant that it's guaranteed to cause a lot of discussion among those who choose to play Immortality and, as they say, get to the bottom of it. It doesn't mean that the game doesn't answer the questions -- there's a lot of them here if you look for them. Will you like them? Will the community be able to put everything together and understand every detail? It's very interesting, but it's even more interesting to do it all by writing it all over, hoping that this information will come in handy in the future. Believe me, it will come in handy.

It's worth saying that the game doesn't just start with a warning -- it throws out a whole list of topics that might seem to some people to be repulsive -- blasphemy, murder, depravity, nudity, substance use -- it's all there. Barlow's like he's out of control and decided not to limit himself to anything at all. At the same time, it lets writers tell a story that's out of the ordinary and makes every fragment unexpected. Even when you look at a grid with open videos and you realize that there's got to be something else between them, it's impossible to try to predict the content of a missed video.

The important thing is that Immortality was able to get the player to believe that he was the pioneer of all these videos. It wasn't the Half Mermaid studio, and Sam Barlow himself sold him some game, and he got access to real records of real people's lives. All the heroes become like family -- if you start with the description of the game by doing a remote investigation and looking for "wilders" in every dialogue, it gets really interesting to find out what all these actors and directors were living, how they played their roles and what they were doing at all, and when it's all over, it's pathetic to break up with these people. People, not characters.

***

Immortality even seems to be weirder to measure how the rest of the games are made by artists, which is separate from everything else. What was promoted as an interactive film by the creator of Her Story turned out to be a much more significant release. Nothing like this has ever happened before, and it's unlikely that anything like this will ever come out.

Dignity:

• It's an original and exciting story, every piece of which is interesting to explore; it's an amazing acting game of all artists without exception; it's a genius idea -- it can't be spoiled, but it completely transforms the game; it's a great atmosphere in each of the times shown.

Disadvantages:

• How's Barlow gonna jump over his head next time?

Graphics

Very high-quality videos with convincing effects like stripes and disturbances on a tape film that's used to the seventieths filter and so on.

Sound

The mysterious soundtrack from an Amy-nominated composer can only be praised, and the sound is generally great — as in the case of a map, its quality varies depending on the conditions of the film.

Solitary game

An original interactive movie that at some point opens up on the other side and makes you look at it in a new way.

Estimated passing time

Ten o'clock.

Collective game

No provision.

Overall impression

It's an amazing piece that brings not only genre but also, in a sense, the whole story game industry. Immortality has every chance of becoming a cult classic.

Graphics

Very high-quality videos with convincing effects like stripes and disturbances on a tape film that's used to the seventieths filter and so on.

Sound

The mysterious soundtrack from an Amy-nominated composer can only be praised, and the sound is generally great — as in the case of a map, its quality varies depending on the conditions of the film.

Solitary game

An original interactive movie that at some point opens up on the other side and makes you look at it in a new way.

Estimated passing time

Ten o'clock.

Collective game

No provision.

Overall impression

It's an amazing piece that brings not only genre but also, in a sense, the whole story game industry. Immortality has every chance of becoming a cult classic.

Evaluation: 10/10

Further details on the evaluation system

Video:

Immortality Immortality_review_1.jpg See all images of Immortality_review_2.jpg Immortality_review_3.jpg Immortality_review_4.jpg Immortality_review_5.jpg Immortality_review_6.jpg Immortality_review_7.jpg Immortality_review_8.jpg Immortality_review_9.jpg Immortality_review_10.jpg Immortality_review_11.jpg Immortality_review_12.jpg.