Okay so. I played Immortality pretty much as it went live on Xbox Game Pass (I was having a good internet day, okay), and I grew to dislike my experience more with each passing scene. Don’t get me wrong; I LOVE FMV (Full Motion Vide) games; something about them makes me smile inside, and I hardly think I need to touch on my love for horror. Yet, even though Immortality combines two things I usually love, the result is something I just couldn’t.
Flash to me sitting down, ready to pour my heart out in a review. I saw this headline on Twitter: “Immortality – our highest-reviewed game of 2022”, and I paused. How could it be possible that one of the most dreary gaming experiences of the year so far could have been reviewed higher than treasures like Tunic and Stray? It didn’t make sense to me and had me questioning my own experiences inside the game.
After much reflection, I came to the only conclusion that makes sense: Immortality isn’t a game and isn’t a movie. The best description for it would be “art”, and I don’t think I need to tell you how the word “art” can bring out the inner pretentiousness in anyone.
Immortality is an FMV video game about an actress named Marissa Marcel, and over roughly six hours, I spent my time scrubbing backwards and forwards through film reels, looking for anything that would make all of this make sense and cast some light on what happened to her.
Marissa Marcel was all set to be her generation’s next big film star and had the film credits to prove it. Only none of those films ever ended up released, and that’s not even the biggest mystery, Marissa’s disappearance. Now, armed with decades worth of film footage, behind-the-scenes shots and interviews, it’s up to you to finally cast light on “what happened to Marissa Marcel?”
Now on paper, the set-up sounds excellent, and in theory, it is. However, the reality of Immortality is too pretentious, too lofty and values itself too high to be anything more than a shallow spectacle of the very point it tries to make – that video games are more than just toys; they are art.
The gameplay in Immortality seeks to recreate the experience of old Moviola editing machines, getting players to feel completely immersed in this cinematic world they’re trying to make sense of. Who does that hand in the back corner of the shot belong to? Why did that line delivery feel so off? These questions are designed to lead you down a seemingly endless rabbit hole of footage until you reach the bottom.
To further help the descent down the rabbit hole, the game boasts a “Match Cut” feature. Say you stop the footage and click on a vase of flowers on a table; the game will then match this selection with another scene from another clip. Which, in completely honestly – is a novel and new way to traverse through the story and one of the things that the game did right.
The “Match Cut” mechanic is a way to ensure the player is pulling at threads without ever coming up for air. It’s also a way to ensure that no two players’ journey through the game will be exactly alike. However, this system soon loses its appeal when combined with the lack of guidance on the game’s side. Sitting scrubbing through the same footage, over and over and over again, trying beyond all reason to find a path to something new, quickly starts to feel like work. Work that you aren’t getting paid to do.
Throughout my six-ish hours in the game, I couldn’t help but notice that Immortality was trying to be more than just a “video game”. But with every “arty” shot (read boobs) and every “transgressive” piece of dialogue, I felt more disfranchised from the experience rather than pulled into it. Immortality is trying to be a piece of high art, but it does so in a way that feels shallow and empty.
