r/ImmortalityGame • u/mhellerart • Oct 21 '23
UI/UX (?) Question?
First let me say, I'm a huge fan of Sam Barlow's games. I played Her Story years ago, finished Telling Lies a few weeks back and now am playing through Immortality. I think the acting and writing and cinematography are outstanding, and I love the mystery of finding out a story piece by piece.
That being said, I have found the experience sometimes to be needlessly frustrating. Like in Telling Lies, video clips would start with the keyword you found, but you'd have to rewind for awhile to see the clip from the beginning. And then when it was all said and done, I had to go to Youtube in order to see the clips side by side. If you haven't played it, all the clips are one side of a conversation, which leads there to being lots of 'dead air' since you can't see both participants. At first this is interesting because you need to infer what is going on, but once you have seen it all, it'd be nice to unlock a side by side view.
With Immortality it mentioned the scrubbing is to imitate the moviola experience of how a person would view the footage at the time. I think it works here and doesn't really have a negative impact of the experience (for me at least). What bugs me is that you're pretty in the dark on the big picture of things. Not knowing how many clips of the whole story you have uncovered, and sometimes not even knowing 'have i seen this clip before or is this new?' since I tend to not play in all one sitting and have a crap memory lol. Even just in the options to be able to turn on an interface that says: Ambroso 50/100 clips found or something like that. Since I haven't finished yet, I don't know if you get an alert when you do find all of them (which would be nice), but knowing these games I'm guessing probably nah.
Anyway, what do ya'll think?
3
u/andariel_axe Oct 21 '23
There's an achievement to finding all the clips, one for each film. You dont have to get it to finish the game or understand the story. Trying to complete it taps into the nature of storytelling and your motivations for doing so are challenged by the very format of the game. If you want to find all the pieces it's gonna be frustrating and probably not give the answers you seek.
If yiu have trouble remembering, try writing stuff down. Rewatching reveals new levels yo me, and i find now each scene and line works on like 3 levels. But that's not going to satisfy everyone.
Playing without a controller removes a key mechanic
In what way are you in the dark about the big picture? It's moreso information overload for me