Immortality *spoilers*

[therearerules]

So do I, but then the credits happened and I'm not sure.

[Benny]

Like a lot of the game it occupies a very special place in my mind where I can't decide if it's being very clever and self aware or if it's got a bit too high from huffing its own farts and undermined itself in the process.

[Stanley]

2 hours ago, Benny said:

Maybe it's just me, but I really hate that "two of everything" song. It's like nails down a chalkboard at some points during the lyrics. Maybe it's intentional though, it's so hard to tell with this game.

This is the spoilers thread just in case, but there is something special about it.

Spoiler

You can scrub the video when Marissa sings that song, and get another song sung (mimed in fact) by The One, and it’s amazing, my favourite part of the game. 

So considering the alternative choice, I’d say, yeah, they know exactly what they’re doing. 

[Benny]

45 minutes ago, Stanley said:

This is the spoilers thread just in case, but there is something special about it.

  Hide contents

You can scrub the video when Marissa sings that song, and get another song sung by The One, and it’s amazing, my favourite part of the game. 

So considering the alternative choice, I’d say, yeah, they know exactly what they’re doing. 

 

Spoiler

Yeah I've completed the game now and I saw that hidden part too. I still thought the song was mostly terrible. I think the conceit with that sequence is that the "real" song doesn't turn out as well as the song that The One had in mind for the movie. Seeing as the last film is being directed by The One so it's something she came up with for it. But the trouble is that conceit only really works if as a viewer you can see a clear qualitative difference between the intended song and the end result, but for me the lyrics were still awful in both.

 

I guess it's probably enough that they change, as we can assume The One thought their version was great either way. 

 

Also, something about the scrubbing aspect:

 

I found it was very cool the first few times, but the novelty very soon wore off, and I was just waiting for the ominous sound, then each time found it annoying to have to perform the delicate action to uncover the hidden part, as I already knew the mechanics of it and by that time had done it enough times that it became laborious, especially as by a certain point you start to get repeated "hidden" messages. I figure that's done because of the random nature of the clips you teleport to, the hidden ones have to be duplicated across several clips to make sure the player uncovers most of what they need to see to get the meta narrative that's going on. I mean it is of course always going to be smoke and mirrors, but towards the end I had got kind of tired and was going through the motions.

 

I know it's a completely different game not least in terms of scale, but one of the reasons Elden Ring felt like such a genre defining masterpiece, is that, despite its size, the sense of discovery and wonder never let up. I did not feel this was as consistently surprising after those initial shocks. Once you have had those you are then basically hunting for more of the same hidden bits until you have the whole story.

 

It doesn't continually reinvent itself or change much from those first ideas. Something like Inscryption is much better at this: it's constantly wrong footing the player and is going through a process of reinvention as the story progresses. When people talk about games being capable of telling stories that are not possible in other mediums, I think Immortality is a good example of a game doing something different, but I wouldn't say it was suddenly like we've not already had examples of games doing unique storytelling in their history, often in ways that are just as clever or use interactive elements in much more intricate ways.

 

Something like Virtue's Last Reward is also a very smoke and mirrors experience, and plays with player expectation but with a looping structure where the mystery is uncovered through replaying, and like Immortality the meaning of the narrative shifts depending on what you've understood the rules of the world to be up to whichever point.

 

I think if I wanted to compare the ending of Immortality to what I thought was a quite revelatory interactive narrative experience there's also the ending of Nier: Automata:

 

Spoiler

The whole fourth wall breaking in that I felt was a lot more interesting and more direct in how it interacts with the player, and felt like something quite genuinely meaningful.

 

There is also an interesting contrast in intent: Immortality feels almost combative and confrontational in what it's saying to you at the end, whereas Nier: Automata is somewhat the opposite: a message of hope and co-operation and of the power of collaboration as a force for good.

 

In the end of Nier the final choice of whether to be a part of something greater is left up to you. In Immortality you are "invaded" and have no choice but to accept.

 

I think Nier: Automata is a celebration of player agency, but Immortality ultimately delights in taking it away.

 

[Benny]

One thing this does do very well which you don't see often in games: the fact it's real actors mean that in the behind the scenes sequences that often bookend the film scenes between takes, you get to see the vulnerability of the characters and the small moments that make up the intimate aspects of their lives. Subtlety of performance that you just cannot get with CGI characters, even now. However, that's just something that's unique to what's possible in Film, rather than something unique to Immortality through it being an interactive experience.

[Alan Stock]

Definitely agree with what you are saying about the revelations drying up. One thing that was great about Her Story and to a lesser extent Telling Lies, was that even towards the very final clips, each new clip could fill in a big gap in the narrative or shed something in a new light. In Immortality its more of a fleshing out of an idea, which has led to less revelatory moments once you get the big twist and credits out of the way. It does this well earlier in the game like finally finding out how Carl dies or of course the first sets of backwards clips you get, but that tails off as the game goes on - not helped by the match cut structure which means revisiting the same clips tons of times and killing detective momentum.

[Stanley]

@Bennyare we talking about the same song here? 
 

Spoiler

I’m referring to Candy Says by Lou Reed with ANOHNI (Antony & The Johnsons)

Also you could attach so many meanings from that song in this game, it’s absolutely loaded no pun intended. 

[Banjaxed]

6 hours ago, Benny said:

Maybe it's just me, but I really hate that "two of everything" song. It's like nails down a chalkboard at some points during the lyrics. Maybe it's intentional though, it's so hard to tell with this game.

 

6 hours ago, Thor said:

Yeah, it's shit. I do think it's deliberately shit.

Agreed though it does get into your head, found myself humming it doing the dishes!! 
 

Got a clip of the acoustic version last night, I may have sang along!! ☺️

 

Have most of the story based achievements now but can’t stop coming back and finding more footage. 

[Benny]

1 hour ago, Stanley said:

@Bennyare we talking about the same song here? 
 

  Hide contents

I’m referring to Candy Says by Lou Reed with ANOHNI (Antony & The Johnsons)

Also you could attach so many meanings from that song in this game, it’s absolutely loaded no pun intended. 

 

Yeah we must be talking about a different song. It's possible I've not seen the clip you mentioned.

[Stanley]

16 minutes ago, Benny said:

 

Yeah we must be talking about a different song. It's possible I've not seen the clip you mentioned.

Thank goodness, I got upset when you said it was crap 

[Thor]

To my knowledge there are only two songs, Candy Says, and Two of Everything. Is there more than one version of 2OE?

[Alan Stock]

I've spent a few more hours trying to get the last few clips I need. Managed to get all of Minsky and 2OE but still missing something from Ambrosia. I'm at the point where I'm going to look up the last few online because I'm just going in circles. I think I've collected all the rewind clips as well but will check also. Be aware that some of them aren't annnounced by klaxons but very subtle hums, so if you are fast forwarding/fast rewinding listen out for any change in the ambience. The menu trick I mentioned earlier doesn't appear to work all the time, i.e. the functionality seems correct but it only sometimes happens. Maybe its a way for the devs to steer people to the last few clips they need, but its too inconsistent for me to rely on.

 

 

[Banjaxed]

1 hour ago, Thor said:

To my knowledge there are only two songs, Candy Says, and Two of Everything. Is there more than one version of 2OE?

Scene 85B. It’s a stripped down version of the song. Maria performing under the name of Christina Campbell, rewinding triggers Candy Says. 

[Alan Stock]

All done with this now. The missing Ambrosio scene turned out to be a minor one (I checked online to see what I needed), that I got to via clicking on the clapper board guy's face a bunch of times. Never would have found that without some prompting. 

 

If you are missing just a clip or two, check out these very handy screenshots of the full clip menu which can alert you to ones you are missing, and maybe how you could get there:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1350200/discussions/0/3430075523249289682/

 

I also had to look up the What Happened to Amy achievement. Turns out it is embedded in a multiple rewind scene that I'd missed the multiple rewinds because of my computer's performance in those kind of scenes! It ended up neatly tying the bow on the game's ending, and I would definitely recommend that people hunt this achievement down.

 

I'm still possibly missing a reversed clip or two, although apparently the achievement for getting all demonic clips is busted at the moment. The game has kept giving me hints with the drones on the menu but I can't be arsed reloading the game just to trigger that, or watch every clip in the game again to catch the last few drones I'm missing. A scan of a walkthrough shows I should have 99% if not all of them though. There are absolutely loads. I just wish I'd started watching the rewind clips as soon as I was aware of them, instead of saving them to preserve the narrative structure I wanted (i.e. work out the 'real life' stuff first and then delve into the demonic stuff).

 

For anyone eager to mop up there is a list of where to get all the reverse clips here:

https://www.trueachievements.com/a368955/another-reality-achievement

although I don't know if anyone's compiled a screenshot of thumbnails to help people narrow it down that way.

 

Quite mind boggling when you see that list in just how much extra content there is from the reversing technique. I'd say at least a quarter of the clips, maybe even half, have some demon fuckery going on. Some of its fairly superfluous, but others are really critical in understanding the game's underlying story. I'd at least recommend going for the game's major achievements that ask you questions. Whats really clever is how the reverse clips are implemented visually. Some ghost sequences as you 'tune in' directly compliment the footage they overlay, and this can be even more effective than just switching to the reverse clip directly. Others do teleport shifts but directly reference the theme of the clip they originated from. Others are very subtle, just showing a flash of an image at a critical moment. My favourite of these is probably the scene where Carl is modelling naked for Marissa and you see other arms coming out from his body for a split-second. There's just so much creativity in how this technique's been intergrated.

 

I think I'm raising my personal score to 9/10 for this game. It wore me out a bit at the beginning and I didn't find it super engaging, but the more you unravel the story, the deeper you get into the reverse stuff the better it gets. You get to really appreciate the actors/actresses ranges and the variety in scenes and script writing. Its a game I think about when I'm not playing. Thank you also forumites like Crichstand for sharing some of the religious lore I was poorly versed in, which has helped me grasp some of the history and symbolism in the reverse stuff. I'm sure as more people hop into this thread there'll be plenty more to pore over.

 

One last thought. Now I've seen everything, I do think the credits were very poorly placed in the structure. I got them way too early and they just left me really confused. They would have had a much greater and cooler impact if I had had the context from other reverse clips to understand at least a bit more what was happening. I think they should have gated the credits behind you seeing more of the story critical reverse clips. I don't mind not knowing the full 'why' when getting an end sequence, Her Story did that and there was still plenty to uncover. But considering I had only seen one or two reverse clips and maybe only 2/3rds of the overall standard clips, I got the end credits far too early. I hope they consider tweaking this in a future patch.

[Majora]

So I ended up looking up online how to trigger the credits as I was getting a bit bored going around in circles, then it turned out that I had missed an entire mechanic which meant I had missed out on most of the 'other' story 🤦‍♂️

 

I had long since realised drone noise + controller vibrate meant you should rewind but I was only ever seeing the scenes which just take over the game automatically if you're rewinding. At other points I would see ghostly overlays but just assumed they were there for effect or something, to let you know there was always something/someone inhabiting the background. I didn't realise going frame by frame backwards would play entire new scenes with audio.

 

That's my evening sorted tomorrow I guess. I had pieced together already there was some kind of demonic possession going on and I've already read this thread now but clearly I've still missed out on a LOT.

 

As for the game, I thought it was pretty brilliant on the whole. My main complaint I guess is that once you realised there was hidden footage through rewinding, that felt like the main 'wow' moment gone and from that point on you never got the same feeling of shock. You were always half watching the footage normally and then half rewinding for the secret footage. Even though I did miss how to access a good chunk of the secret stuff via the frame by frame I still felt a bit like it got stuck on that one idea too early so the novelty wore off the more it happened.

 

Still, even after I knew what to expect, some of that footage was still creepy as fuck. When the reel I was watching switched out of nowhere into the 'other' character for the first time.... Fuck me, that was a moment.

[Hodge]

Just completed it, give it 6/10

 

Great idea, poor execution.  The 3 films, along with the rest of the footage wasn`t that good.  TBH i prefered Sam Barlows Her story and telling lies to this. Ambrosia was by far the worst of the 3 stories and Two of everything was probably the best at a push.  Found myself later on just skipping through most clips.  And with the lack of narrowing down options towards the end, you just kept replaying clips like others mentioned. 

 

Technically it was very good how it was put together, but i think the concept would of been best served with one story/plot.  But for FMV games, yeah I liked what they did with it, very clever.

[Thor]

20 hours ago, Hodge said:

would of

Renders your whole post invalid.

 

Edit: Was drunk, this is a bit harsh... a bit

[Garwoofoo]

I've just finished this and thought it was an absolutely stunning experience that I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. I'm definitely going to go back and uncover more footage, it's just compelling trying to piece it all together. It's a 10/10 game for me without doubt.

 

I somehow managed to play for hours and hours without even realising the hidden footage was a thing (I did idly wonder why my controller was vibrating at random moments) and I was completely engrossed in piecing together the movie stories and the real-life stories. I'd been using the stick-click to rewind to the start of pieces of footage much more than the reverse scrubbing so I'd completely missed that feature. So when I spotted the demon figures in the background when I was rewinding something and realised there was this whole other layer to the game that I'd completely missed, it was a jaw-dropping moment.

 

Thanks to everyone in this thread for helping to clarify some of my outstanding questions, especially @CrichStand for providing a unique perspective on the game.

[K]

Who is the black guy who sometimes appears in the nested flashbacks / hidden footage / whatever the hell it is when you rewind and see something fucking weird? 
 

Is he a former host / incarnation of The One?

[therearerules]

I think so- is he the one who appears when you drown?

[Alan Stock]

Yep, he's one of her previous 'hosts'. You also get to see a few other incarnations of her too, mainly in the nested rewind clip where Marissa is in the black wig in 2OE looking in the mirror and rooting through her bag. The One does talk about other incarnations that she's had in a clip or two although doesn't directly mention what they were. Its clear she's been doing this for a long time. In one of the clips, maybe the drowning one, you get the sense that the black guy has probably been involved in slavery or some other kind of trauma due to the background noises. If you're ever unsure who a character is, just pause and click the face and it will usually port you to either Marissa or John indicating its The One, or Carl or Amy indicating its the Other One.

[Jamie John]

I'm one bastard hidden clip away from getting 1000/1000 and it's driving me insane. I must have watched every piece of footage in the game forwards and backwards at least three times each this weekend. Apparently this achievement was buggered earlier in the month but has now been fixed, though it just doesn't want to pop for me. According to the Xbox tracker thing, I'm three percent away from unlocking it. Argh!

[Alan Stock]

Yeah I gave up doing the same thing. There is a list out there with all the clips that have them, but going through it would probably just take as long as going through every clip. I'd suspect if you've been very thorough maybe you are missing some sneaky nested rewinds, which have very quick and easy to miss prompts. Of course that means going through every rewind clip again to check - no thanks!

[SomethingWitty]

Spoiler

I had similar, hunting for the last hidden clips and what I found was that the last ones I saw were The One talking about her aims in the films, and they were hidden in clips where I’d previously found the more generic, repeated, ones. My last one found was the one talking about Minsky, and was in the clip of Marissa talking in the car, which had previously held the hidden clip re the Great War. I don’t know whether these are in the same place for everyone, but may be worth revisiting clips you think you’ve already seen the hidden clip for.

 

[Jamie John]

6 minutes ago, SomethingWitty said:

  Hide contents

I had similar, hunting for the last hidden clips and what I found was that the last ones I saw were The One talking about her aims in the films, and they were hidden in clips where I’d previously found the more generic, repeated, ones. My last one found was the one talking about Minsky, and was in the clip of Marissa talking in the car, which had previously held the hidden clip re the Great War. I don’t know whether these are in the same place for everyone, but may be worth revisiting clips you think you’ve already seen the hidden clip for.

 

Spoiler

I haven't found that clip about The Great War at all, I don't think. Can you clarify where you got it? Marissa talking in the car during the filming of Minsky, or when, in 2OE, she's rehearsing the scene in the back of Hessenburg's limo, where they take drugs?

 

I've found the one where The One is screaming while Sofia is being raped by Ambrosio. There's a line of German which translates to 'Hold the French bitch', so I took it to mean that at one point The One was raped by Nazis during the occupation of France, or something similarly horrible.

 

[SomethingWitty]

5 minutes ago, Jamie John said:

  Hide contents

I haven't found that clip about The Great War at all, I don't think. Can you clarify where you got it? Marissa talking in the car during the filming of Minsky, or when, in 2OE, she's rehearsing the scene in the back of Hessenburg's limo, where they take drugs?

 

I've found the one where The One is screaming while Sofia is being raped by Ambrosio. There's a line of German which translates to 'Hold the French bitch', so I took it to mean that at one point The One was raped by Nazis during the occupation of France, or something similarly horrible.

 

 

Spoiler

It was the clip in the car during the filming of Minsky. The ‘Great War’ clip was one I’d seen a few times, talking of ‘sleeping through’ it to wake in another. I don’t recall the exact wording, but that’s the phrase I recall. 

 

[Jamie John]

1 minute ago, SomethingWitty said:

 

  Hide contents

It was the clip in the car during the filming of Minsky. The ‘Great War’ clip was one I’d seen a few times, talking of ‘sleeping through’ it to wake in another. I don’t recall the exact wording, but that’s the phrase I recall. 

 

 

That doesn't ring any bells at all, so it must be the one I'm missing. I've just played the clip of Marissa in the car in Minsky (she's sat in the front doing a location test, and at the end she says she's going to seduce Carl - that one?), but there's no vibration or cue to reverse, so different hidden clips must be in different places depending on the game.

[Jamie John]

 

Thank gawd for that. Stewth! (The final hidden clip was indeed 'The Great War' one - thanks @SomethingWitty! - but it was in a completely different place: for me, it appeared in the clip from 2oE where Heather is pretending to be Maria and is complaining about the apples being too round.)

 

Anyway, I can rest easy now.

 

Overall, I thought this was a quite staggeringly ambitious and entirely unique game that will live long in my memory. The casting was absolutely spot-on, and the performances across all three films from everyone, as well as all the behind-the-scenes footage, was as good as any I've ever seen in a film or TV show. I've not played either of Barlow's previous two games (though I definitely will now), but this surely must set a new bar for acting in a video game. The narrative framing of the entire thing - that fact that you are watching actors playing actors who are acting in different roles - is extremely successful at tricking you into forgetting that you're playing a game and immersed me in the game's world instantly. I was compelled to hunt down every last clip I could, and having only started it on Saturday morning, this game completely consumed my bank holiday weekend.

 

There are just two things I would do to make it better, and both are quality of life/UX changes:

 

1) Once you've unlocked a 'hidden clip', have it appear in a separate fourth 'film' at the bottom of the footage menu, or on a separate screen, and let the player filter and fiddle with this footage in the same way as they can with the other three 'main' films. This would make it a lot easier and far less tedious for the you to decode what the game's story is about. I'm all for ambiguity and interpretation, but having to remember, first of all, which of the main clips contained hidden segments, and then having to scrub through them each time I wanted to watch them so I could figure out what was going on (and then having to do this several more times for the 'nested' hidden clips) was just irritating. Ultimately, it put me off of trying to figure out things for myself and I ended up reading through this thread and watching a couple of story theory videos on YouTube instead. Had the clips been separate, and had I been able to put them in the correct order and play them one after the other more easily, I would have enjoyed figuring out the nuances of the narrative for myself.
 

2) It's too easy to get stuck in a loop of clicking through the same things over and over again when you're in search of a new clip. This happened to me a good dozen times when I was trying to find every piece of footage for each film. A particular one - trying to find the close-up of the scissors that Amy uses to cut Heather/Maria's pants off - drove me to distraction. It's obvious that, beneath the surface, the game 'knows' that you're clicking through all of the knives, or the crucifixes, or the masks, or whatever, and it must also know which ones you have and haven't found. So why not, therefore, each time you click on a specific prop, show you a clip featuring that same prop which you haven't yet seen? Maybe even include a total somewhere - 'You have found 6/10 red flowers'? It might sound crude, but many of the game's achievements are based on 'collecting' a certain number of these items and faces anyway - the game is already actively keeping track of this information - so why not make it more apparent for the player? And seeing as you're going to need to see more or less everything if you want a hope in hell's chance of figuring out what's going on, in both the three different films and the hidden clips, it should be easier for the player to get access to clips they haven't seen.

 

That's it. I wouldn't touch anything to do with the characters, writing, story or themes as they're all great, but these two improvement's I really think would improve the game for the player. I wouldn't think they'd be that hard to implement in a patch, either, but obviously I'm not a game developer and have no fucking idea. Does Barlow still write for Edge? Could we ask Nate or Chris Shilling to pass on some notes? 😅

 

But yes, a very special game. It get's a 9/10 from me, but I can definitely see why it's an Edge [10].

 

And I've attached below a few arty screenshots I took while playing, if anyone's interested (supermassive spoilers):

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jamie John]

Anyway, now that I've finished it, I had a few questions relating to the story that I couldn't figure out. I'd be interested to hear people's theories!

1. Why didn't Ambrosio ever get shown in theatres? I get why Minksy never did (Carl's death) and Two of Everything (Marissa's death), but why not Ambrosio? It looked to have been finished, and Marissa immediately found work afterwards in Minsky, which was a big enough film to attract at least two big names to it (Douglas Simons, the skeezy guy who originally plays Minsky, and Carl himself, who's presented as an up-and-coming icon), so what stopped Ambrosio coming out? There's no mention of it in the interview Marissa does with the talk show bloke, where a clip of it is shown before she goes on to talk about Minsky.
    
2. Are we supposed to infer that John left Marissa for Carl midway through filming Minsky, or at least had sex with him (there's the scene where Carl kisses John and Marissa yells 'No!' and tries to stop them)? Is this what caused John and Marissa's relationship to break down? Wasn't Marissa sleeping with Carl already, though? There's a scene off-set where he wakes up and she's had a camera set up, completely separate from the film, and then they go on to have sex. Plus, she openly tells John that she's going to seduce Carl in one scene, and later on he pretty much encourages it when she's coming onto him very heavily. I thought Marissa and John had a very 'open'/swinger relationship, and John didn't care that she was banging Carl, so why is Marissa so upset that John is doing the same?
    
3. Why does John get Marissa to star in 2oE? By this point, The One has removed herself from John's body and is no longer controlling him (I don't quite understand how John is even alive, seeing as The One killed John during the production of Minsky, I think, although this may have just been fantastical), so presumably the 'real' John decided to contact Marissa and arrange for her to be in the film - why? Moreover, originally Amy was going to play the Maria/Heather role that Marissa plays, and it's suggested that John is in a relationship with Amy when 2oE is being filmed, so how did Amy feel about being shunned for one of John's ex-lovers?
    
4. I really don't get the spontaneous nosebleed/fainting/head splitting open stuff in 2oE. There's the bit where John faints on set and then Marissa joins him; there's a bit where Marissa nearly dies in the drowning scene, and John then seems to fall head-first into the pool immediately afterwards; and then there's the bit at the end where the blood suddenly just starts to gush out of Marissa's head, which is also happening to The One. Que?

[footle]

Opinion.

 

1. there’s mention that the director ran off with half the film, so it wasn’t complete and couldn’t be shown. Later, he gives it back to the one as John.

2. I don’t think so, no. You later see Marissa/the one having sex with John and killing him.

3. my understanding was the one was both Marissa and John (there’s a hidden clip where - after getting the ambrosia film back - she states she missed Marissa) though I’d not caught the bit about Amy. 
4. this is because Marissa and John are the same person, though I missed one of those events.