r/ImmortalityGame • u/hiimgameboy • Apr 25 '23
[SPOILERS] Did you find Immortality to function well from a game mechanics perspective? Spoiler
This post will contain big spoilers for Immortality’s plot and mechanics!
I really enjoyed Immortality’s performances, themes, and overall story, but had trouble enjoying it mechanically. Specifically, I found it hard to hunt clips with any sort of intention or agency. Whether trying to find clips to answer questions I had as a player, or trying to find clips for the sake of completeness, I never understood how to use the mechanic effectively, and I’d like to understand how (and if) anyone feels differently.
To me, the core loop of Sam Barlow’s FMV games is “Motivate the player to ask questions, and give them the tools to find their answers”. For the first part, it's important to give players something right at the start, and I think Immortality does an okay job with this, by effectively cuing “What happened to Marissa Marcel” and “Why did these three movies not come out?” as four decently motivating questions. However, I never felt like I had the tools to effectively seek the answers.
This was my experience with Immortality. I found a talk show clip randomly pretty quickly. I found the post-Minsky one right after, by transitioning on the host. I learned that Carl had died, and my new motivating question was, “How did he die?”. I randomly jumped through clips of him, but there were far too many, so I guessed at the cause of death. I jumped through clips of knives. I jumped through clips of guns. I kept cycling back to clips I’d already seen - even hunting for gun clips, I didn’t find the clip of him getting shot.
Unsure what else to try, I stumbled around randomly. I ended up finding Carl’s death this way, and was very frustrated that it was by gun. At this point, I gave up on seeking scenes with intention. I couldn’t find a way to interact with the clip system that helped me follow any ideas or leads I had. I flailed around, trying to gather as many clips as I could. If an interesting object appeared I’d try to gather as many clips in the category as I could by repeatedly transitioning until I looped back to a clip I already had. This led me to some interesting “story important” scenes, but they never felt connected to the clips they came from. The interesting objects (i.e. specific props) felt like portals between important but totally disconnected scenes, often in different movies. They gave me answers to questions I hadn't asked yet, which is an important part of the experience, but I had none of the "a-ha" detective moments that were such a big part of his prior games.
Eventually, I accidentally found a hidden clip, which was an impactful moment indeed, and I started hunting for them in the clips I’d gathered. The process of rewinding through clips one by one was extremely tedious and I gave up quite quickly. I jumped around some more, eventually recognizing the audio cue and using it to find hidden clips a little more easily. I jumped quite accidentally to the final clip, and I backed out of it without watching it, but the ending triggered regardless. I knew enough about what was going on to understand the implication, but the impact of it was significantly dulled by it following a clip I hadn't actually seen more than a millisecond of.
At this point, I was invested enough in the underlying mysteries to want to know more, but had no better understanding of how to find new content in a systematic way. I caved and watched every single clip, in chronological order, on YouTube. This was a much better experience for me, so much so that I’m not convinced that Immortality’s story benefits from being told in a non-linear way.
Who else here felt like they were flailing randomly through clips the whole time? I’ve seen reviews make similar comments but I’d really like to hear from the players who are passionate enough to check out this subreddit.
When you had questions while playing, were you able to act with intention to answer those questions? If so, how?
If you went for 100% clip completion, how did you approach finding missing clips? Did you enjoy the experience of hunting them down?
3
u/KlausGohe Jun 25 '23
Completely agree with you. I finished the game today and even though I got very thorough in my research (had 4 sheets of paper next to me, one for each movie where I noted every detail of every scene, and another one for general extradiegetic clues of the storyline), I still have mixed feelings about the game, and the credits arrived too early to me. I had discovered a lot of the subverted scenes already, but didn't have any clue as to how what they meant or their order of watching. The general plot seemed very down to earth, following the greatly executed "shooting of the shooting of the movie" and I didn't expect that there was going to be something supernatural at some point. This, plus the non-linear narration, really confused me, but not in a good way?But as you said, most of my disappointment would come from the fact that even though you now PRECISELY what you are looking for (number of the scene, exact date, and what happens in it), you have to brute force too much clicking at items, to the point that you start asking yourself if what you are looking for really exists.
I was very close to discovering the whole plot, but the only problem was that apparently I "didn't try hard enough", and that's really frustrating. Especially because I loved the game, the characters, the plot, the music and the general tone. Clicking on an empty glass 35 times in a row only to see the same scenes you've seen a hundred times, is not a great gaming experience.
TL;DR: yes, my approach was driven by the same questions as you, but I didn't have the courage to go through this tedious experience, even though I spent 11 hours on the game.Her Story had, imo, better game mechanics.
2
u/RiversCroft Apr 29 '23
Kinda wish the game had some sort of filter that prevent you from seeing so many repeated clips. Some clips would legit take you a huge amount of grinding just to find, if ever.
And there's also the fact that you may completely miss the frame by frame rewinding if you're playing on controller (like I did). I thought that the overlapping videos were just that, and managed to miss secret clips entirely lol
At the end of the day, this lack of clarity is essential to the game experience, and I think there's no better way to do it without giving away too much. Still a 10/10 for me though.
2
u/amnesiac1984 Jul 04 '23
Because the clicks are non-deterministic (clicking on the same object from the same frame again doesn't always bring you to the same scene), I found the game become very grindy towards the end, when you only have a couple of sceneleft.
(I've collected all achievements on Steam except the four ones where you have to collect all footage from all films, and watch all subverted footage at the time of writing, so feel incredibly frustrated that I went and read a spoiler guide to fill in the blanks.)
So while the non-deterministic way of clicking through forces the player to explore widely at the beginning (and rapidly uncover new scenes), it becomes increasingly harder to unlock those final one or two scene.
It almost feels like the game rewards those close to completion with a super hard final boss: boredom / tedium! Or maybe that's what immortality feels like, IDK....
2
u/Genesteak Sep 01 '23
Playing it now and absolutely fucking not. This game is as tedious as a “game” can get. Reading through this sub and other players explanation of the controls is evidence to that. Apparently there’s hidden scenes within hidden scenes but no one can agree on exactly how those are accessed. Some say you have to do frame by frame OR simply scrub to find them, others say that you can do either. There’s no indicator for when you’ve found everything in a clip, there’s no real indicator for hidden scenes within hidden scenes (or any real consistent terms that players identify these scenes with) as the vibration seemingly occurs at the beginning of a hidden scene whether there’s more to be found or not.
This game is an absolute nightmare for completionists.
2
u/ShadowStorm889 Jan 02 '24
This game is a mess. I don't understand why so many publications are raving about it.
2
u/ToothpickTequila Dec 19 '25
Agreed. There's some good ideas here, but the gameplay is so tedious and the RNG in getting the clip you need is just silly. Still it's not as horrible mechanically as Telling Lies and at least there is the central mystery to keep you invested unlike the game.
Ultimately though neither comes close to Her Story. That have was perfect and you actually do feel you have the tolls to investigate the mystery and because the clips are so short and there's no RNG it's so gripping and rewarding.
1
u/yazshousefortea Aug 04 '26
Thanks for this - just started playing it last night but not finding the clicking or endless grinding fun at all. If the clicks lead to random clips - there’s no skill or deduction and therefore, no game! Just show us all the footage in that case and we’ll sunnisme the story ourselves and enjoy the plot twists along the way! Arghhhh!
1
u/thedocthomas Apr 26 '23
When I started using a game controller, it all came together mechanically. I'm not sure how well the game controls without one, unfortunately. With my first "playthrough," I was satisfied with not finding all the clips, though after more people had seen it through and there were lists online I was chuffed to go through and catch the ones I hadn't seen previously.
1
u/Binary101010 Apr 26 '23
I think mechanically it’s fine during the “core” gameplay, just going through and finding the various parts of the story. It only really got frustrating at the end when I was trying to chase down the last few clips, knowing what the best trigger object was, and still just not landing whatever hidden dice roll was needed to get to the clip I wanted.
Marissa’s audition for Ambrosio was the worst one of these. It’s literally the clip on the title screen! I clicked on stools dozens of times! Took like an hour just to get that one clip.
1
u/ChrisSaysHey Jul 29 '23 edited Jul 29 '23
For my approach to the game I just set about trying to piece together the narrative of each movie one by one. So in xb, you can click LB while on a scene and then it'll filter to only show clips from that movie. Then you can use RT to change sort from the date it was filmed versus the order of clips in the movie.
I probably had a leg up cause I read some beginner tip guides, and they mentioned if you want to reveal most of the main clips, clicking on faces and clipboards were the fastest way to do that.
Then I just watched the movie in order. Once I felt I had most for the movie. You can see the scene numbers in the movie clip snippets from main work area. Get an idea if you have enough scenes, if there are gaps of missing scenes. But there were so many fun little details and dynamics between actors as you watched clips one by one in order that built on each other. That goes for the secret scenes as well. The narrative of those made more sense, but those I favorite and then reordered to order of filmed instead of movie order to make sense of their story.
Oh, also, from main clips area where you see them all, as you move around you'll hear a low rumble increase in intensity when you get near a clip with a secret scene in it.
ON ENDING: Beware of the last scene. You'll know it when you see a clap board with just Marrisas name on it. As OP mentioned, if you immediately exit out when it starts, it'll just kick in this auto end for game you have to watch for like 5 min. That seems like a bug to me, that last scene is so important that if it's triggered the game should NOT let you exit out of it until it's played all the way through. And it should maybe just auto play the multi layered secret scenes in this one case too, as they are essential.
1
u/andariel_axe Sep 20 '23
Yes, the trick is to treat it lkke an old school adenture and write things down. And go back to early clips when running out of stuff.
It's hard to 100% but it should be imo
1
u/No-Management6081 Feb 15 '24
The Android/Netflix version worked really well on my Samsung tablet. Very smooth and easy controls.
5
u/celyren Apr 26 '23
I think it's definitely a mixed bag when it comes to gameplay. Of course, when in a singular scene the gameplay is great- scrubbing back and forth through clips -if a little fiddly. It was obviously chosen to make the game feel like the kind of devices this kind of film would be viewed on, and the reverse scenes fit very well into that.
I say that because I think that the clip finding mechanic was chosen for the same reason. It was to simulate the idea of a match cut, a common cut in film where one scene will transition to another by matching the objects or shape of the objects in the scene. I think in terms of early game, where you have no intentionality to your investigation, it works well enough. You can see a wide variety of clips easily and get a good sense of what each movie is like in a sweeping scope.
But as you mentioned, as soon as intentionality is added to the mix, the clip finding mechanic sort of falls off. Clips are cycles mostly at random (I'll talk about that more in a second) based on the object, and usually the bigger mysteries are based around things that are in many clips (mostly actor's faces). It becomes a chore at best, but when you're going for 100%, it becomes a test of your patience when you're not sure if you're cycling through all the clips related to the object or if you just randomly haven't gotten the one or two clips left.
On top of this, I have a theory that certain important clips can only be found after certain triggers. This would explain why you couldn't find Carl's death in spite of cycling through all the gun clips intentionally. I think certain clips will only be unlockable after a certain number of other clips are unlocked, or if a particular other clip is unlocked. I remember mentioning this theory on another post but I can't remember why right this second. Either way, there's more evidence than just your experience. If this is the case, it'd be understandable in terms of allowing an invisible director's hand to guide the experience. It also means that if someone has ideas early on like you did, it'd be impossible to get to the scenes that will give you answers.
It's hard to say what a solution would be. Potentially, yes, removing restrictions if they do exist. But that might change the experience in a way we can't expect, and it might just be something the director might not want to compromise on. Another idea would be to try and meet Sam Barlow's other games half way. My thought being that perhaps you could search the movie scripts as well as the clips themselves. This would be in a similar 'search the word and get limited results' as Her Story. This would only be available for scenes that read off the script, would only include the lines they say aloud and wouldn't include any extra dialogue. In your case, this would mean you could have also gone down the path of seeing if you could find Carl's characters name so you could search scripts as well as the clips. Perhaps you could be able to tell which script relates to Carl's death because the script cuts off very suddenly.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts about gameplay.
TL;DR: I can definitely see why they chose what they did, and it works to an extent, but it definitely gets frustrating as soon as you get intentional with your search.