Episode 188 - Pretty Cute - Immortality

Artists create, podcast, and destroy. Welcome back to the podcast
where today we’re going to be talking about Immortality.
Immortality is a game from Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story and
Telling Lies and it follows in the same tradition as those games.
Largely player-directed, the game involves watching clips of three
films and footage associated with them in order to gain an
understanding of what happened to the people involved. There is a
set point at which the game shows you its credits, but whether you
feel done at that point is largely up to you. Differing from the
previous games, rather than inputting text to find clips, you click
on elements in scenes to cut between them, following actors or
props or other elements to see new things, and you can control the
speed of playback and even play in reverse. Your understanding of
these mechanics and how the internal logic of the match cuts works
really determine what kind of agency you can exercise in solving
the mysteries, so your milage may vary depending on how much you
liked the core loop of Her Story in comparison to this one. Even
so, the technical prowess on display here is still incredible, with
a surprising dedication to capturing the feel of the eras of film
each of the game’s three movies represent and performances that
don’t feel like an imitation so much as part of film canon
themselves. We’re going to be talking about the feeling of playing
Immortality as compared to other games, the surprising directions
the narrative takes and how it differed from our own
interpretations, and in a spiritual successor to Haunting Those
ROMs, we discuss what may be haunting THIS footage. Thank you for
joining us again this week! Immortality has been on the list for a
while because we have a particular soft spot for Her Story and how
different that game felt to anything else, and while this is more
refinement than innovation, it’s still a really impressive title
and would probably give you a similar feeling to us if it is the
first of Sam Barlow’s games you’ve played. Did you pick up on the
game’s secrets? Did you struggle to rewind because you were playing
with a mouse? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord!
Next time, we’re going to be talking about Monster Hunter Wilds, so
I hope you join us then and that you have some free time in the
coming weeks.