{"id":23925,"date":"2022-09-09T15:21:37","date_gmt":"2022-09-09T05:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23925"},"modified":"2022-11-09T16:16:18","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T06:16:18","slug":"immortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23925","title":{"rendered":"Immortality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"immortality-poster\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Developer:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Sam Barlow
\nPublisher:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Half Mermaid Productions
\nPlatform:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Xbox Series X<\/p>\n

M<\/span>arissa Marcel is missing.\u00a0 The actress appeared in three movies in 1968, 1970 and 1999, none of which were ever released.\u00a0 As the player, you have access to footage from each of the films, as well some supplementary archival footage of Marcel appearing on late night talk shows etc. to try and solve the mystery of who she was and what happened to her.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Immortality<\/em> is the latest game from Sam Barlow, the acclaimed British developer who had previously worked on two\u00a0Silent Hill<\/em> games (Origins<\/em> and\u00a0Shattered Memories<\/em>)<\/span> before turning his hand to FMV mystery titles with\u00a0Her Story<\/em> and\u00a0Telling Lies<\/em>.\u00a0 There are few developers I can think of in the modern landscape that so prominently stand out in the interactive media genre.\u00a0 His name sits right alongside David Cage of Quantic Dreams and I’d argue Barlow’s work is generally far better received critically and much less divisive.<\/p>\n

There’s a clear through line that runs from\u00a0Her Story<\/em> to\u00a0Telling Lies<\/em> to\u00a0Immortality<\/em> with how they task the player with examining full motion video clips to unravel a mystery.\u00a0 Something I find noteworthy is that\u00a0Barlow seems settled in his niche that he’s carved out for himself with FMV mysteries\u00a0but he also seems set on reinventing the tools at the players disposal from game to game for\u00a0searching the video clips themselves.\u00a0 In\u00a0Her Story<\/em>, the game simulated a computer desktop from the mid Nineties and after playing a clip the player would need to search for keywords or phrases to unlock more content.\u00a0 In\u00a0Telling Lies<\/em> (my least favourite of Barlow’s games),\u00a0you could jump to new videos using highlighted keywords but the navigation was made frustratingly cumbersome as you would be taken to the mention of the keyword\u00a0mid video\u00a0<\/em>and the rewind function was extremely slow.<\/p>\n

Immortality<\/em> has a new approach entirely as you can now use a cursor to select objects or people in the videos to find the next breadcrumb in the trail.\u00a0 There seems an element of randomness to this where I assume an AI algorithm decides that if you click on a particular actor or object (e.g. a gun) and there are several corresponding videos, it will take you to one of them with no predetermined order of unlocking.\u00a0 This means that each person who plays\u00a0Immortality<\/em> will have their own unique experience which I think is an exciting new wrinkle to the gameplay, particularly if you know a friend who is also playing the game at the same time as you.<\/p>\n

\"immortality-scene\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the highlights that sets Barlow’s FMV games apart from his peers like David Cage is that the standard of writing and acting is, to be frank, of a much higher calibre.\u00a0 All three films that you scrub through –\u00a0Ambrosio, Minksy\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Two of Everything<\/em> all have fine production values with costumes, set design and even the video format itself convincingly replicating the era that they’re based in.\u00a0 The actors are shown both performing on-set and also unwinding during rehearsals.\u00a0 They all have an eminently watchable quality about them with lead actress Marissa Marcel (played by Manon Gage) and director John Durick (Hans Christopher) as stand outs.\u00a0 The nature of what you see in the films also explores uncommon territory for video games – a seductress tempting an 18th century monk into committing carnal sin, an erotic thriller set against the backdrop of an arts community in the Seventies and a late Nineties Lynchian thriller that explores the nature of fame.\u00a0 The wildly disparate and dynamic nature of each\u00a0movie production asks a lot of the role of Marissa Marcel and\u00a0this really allows Manon Gage to shine.<\/p>\n

Mechanically, I think this is Barlow’s most satisfying game to date and his writing has never been better.\u00a0 On paper these qualities alone would make\u00a0Immortality<\/em> an easy recommendation.\u00a0 What elevates the game further is the secrets you begin to uncover when you scrub through the clips one by one until eventually you find a particular revelation that really turns the narrative on its head.\u00a0\u00a0Immortality<\/em> is a game that absolutely goes for it<\/em> and it was a wild ride once the pieces of the mystery began to fall into place.\u00a0 I genuinely lost sense of time one night and put in\u00a0several hours<\/em> watching the underlying story unfold before me.<\/p>\n

This is a game that is best experienced knowing as little as possible going in and is arguably Barlow’s finest work to date.\u00a0 Its an\u00a0impressive feat and one of the most fascinating games of 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A promising actress Marissa Marcel goes missing after appearing in three films, none of which were ever successfully released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3006,3010,2351,651,2935],"class_list":["post-23925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-game-pass","tag-immortality","tag-sam-barlow","tag-xbox","tag-xbox-series-x"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23925"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23930,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23925\/revisions\/23930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}