Have you seen the credits for Immortality? (Spoilers)

What follows will be open spoiler territory so if you haven’t reached this point in the game stop reading.

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I’ve been making my way through Immortality recently and it was a rather bumpy journey for me. Out of Barlows catalogue I loved Her Story as it’s narrative really gripped me and I loved the performance of the lead actress. Similarly the interface was simple yet extremely effective allowing you to easily track keywords you’ve explored and narrow down leads. Immortality is a huge step up from Her Story both mechanically and narratively featuring much more footage and freedom in how you explore it. Once again I found myself trying to uncover a mystery through archival footage but one that wasn’t as cut and dry in its focus. The ability to skip through three distinct time periods proved to be vastly more disorienting than Her Story’s singular timeline and your tools are a lot less predictable. Visually highlighting objects in a scene doesn’t yield a comprehensive list of search results but rather throws you randomly into any of the three time periods where the algorithm located a similar object. Results are often mixed and highly unpredictable. Sometimes clicking a gun in one scene will take you to a gun in another but subsequently clicking that gun will return you back to the original scene you arrived from, closing a loop and forcing you to find an alternative way of locating more scenes. I found this to be slightly more trial and error based approach than I would have liked in my efforts to cyber sleuth my way to the heart of this mystery. Which brings me to the actual mystery.

Upon discovering a great many scenes from Marissa’s films and uncovering some of the reasons behind them never being released I had reached the end point of the game - or at least the game had decided this for me. This happened in the most unfortunate way as I was winding down for the night when the sequence leading to the credits began. I’ve been switching off between PC and Console when playing Immortality so while back at the grid of clips I started pressing Esc to Save and Quit back to desktop and make sure the cloud save synced. As I pressed the Esc key several times nothing was happening because unknown to me at the time the tile flipping animation locks out all inputs until you begin scrolling up or dow. I initially thought my game had encountered a bug and was stuck as I couldn’t bring up the menu and clicking frames similarly did nothing. I had a moment of panic that I would lose progress and was on the verge of forcefully shutting down the game when I finally scrolled up and the tiles started to switch over. The final chilling message played out and credits rolled to a great pop rendition of “Two of Everything.”

I wasn’t really ready for the end and had many more questions than answers. Immortality is incredibly unique and very impressive, but ultimately I felt strangely empty as I stewed in my doubts watching the credits play out. I had a great time “playing” it even if at times I thought my journey was a little more meandering than I would like, but this impromptu ending triggered by what I can only imagine is a % based count of frames uncovered felt abrupt and premature leaving me with mixed feelings.

Considering that everyone’s journey to this end point will be unique (which is obviously not a real end as you can continue uncovering more clips afterwards) I’m curious how everyone experienced it and what were your feelings as the credits rolled?

I just saw credits about 5 minutes into tonight's session on this game. I'm pretty happy with when they go off. In fact I went past 2 or 3 moments that I was sure would lead to credits but it kept going. (that being: a big fire, lady in theatre, a couple in a pool)

I haven't looked up a walk-through to see what sets them off. My guess is its uncovering a certain percentage off all of the clips combined with uncovering a few set hidden messages. I was at this point struggling to find new clips and was about to get frustrated randomly clicking on object to find them. If I stop now I've got a good idea of the plot of all 3 movies and the overarching story so I think this is a good spot to end it.

When I played Her Story i had a weird glitch that caused the fake dm chat log to glitch off the screen permanently. So I missed the “psst you’ve basically finished the game” ping. that didn’t have a huge effect on that game…

…However I had a similar problem with immortality (the “Bwoooaaahhhh“ noise failed to play maybe 5% of the time.) it really soured a lot of the game for me. I’d probably done 2 hours of pure achievement hunting shit trying to get credits to play by the Time I realised what I’d missed.

A shame, because the game is otherwise excellent.

I saw credits, and had a fair amount of playing after to contextualize them. Now, at maybe 14 hours, I feel like I fully understand what’s going on with the game, save for 2 mysteries (definitely do not look if you haven’t at least finished the game):

@magnetphonics: IF you play on console (possibly with a controller on PC) then your pad will wildly vibrate along with those noises which is a lot less subtle but makes it kind of hard to miss.

I thought the game was a cool concept and a poor execution. I think the game never pulls out of second gear once you figure out what’s going on with the bwoooaaahhh clips, and I got tired of the monologues by The One / The Other One fairly quickly. I rolled credits after about 6 hours (during which I wasn’t really looking for the way to roll credits, mostly just experiencing the game), and I have no desire to go back and see more.

For the record, I played on both a Series X and PC (via Game Pass), and I think the PC version is wonky. Definitely recommend playing on console, or at least use a controller on PC.

I'm with Jess on Sam Barlow's games. It's the same trick with the same tropes. I've played one (Telling Lies, unfortunately) and that's enough.

There's a subverted footage where The One talks about Arthur Fischer giving her the negatives to Ambrosia that he stole. Not sure if we get more than that.

In Two of Everything, The One was Marissa and John and The Other One was Amy. She was overexerting herself, which led to her dying. I haven't seen all the subverted footage yet so I'm not sure if they give us a clear answer of what exactly is going on, but I assume that Marissa and John were projections or husks being controlled.

I got credits at some random spot that didn't seem to mean anything and really didn't know what was going on at that point. My game also bugged and just soft-locked on the close-up of The One's face and didn't move onto credits, which was kind of a bummer.

One minor gripe I had was why didn't The One change Marissa's name when she brought her back in the 90s? I get her movies were never released and no one's going to remember a commercial, but it was kind of weird that she'd use Marissa as a 20-year-old actor in 1968 and then a 25-year-old actor in 1999.

Not being able to click on objects and get taken to scenes with the exact same object was also a pain. I managed to get to the end and only missing one clip. Turns out it was an insert clip immediately after another clip. There was a giant pair of scissors in both clips and it still took me clicking on the scissors from the first clip 7-8 times to get the last clip.

@ragtagbag: I platinumed the game, and so have seen every scene, and can confirm there’s no more info on my question #1. You’re right about 2; I think the subverted scene from the motion capture scene is meant to suggest that The One can project multiple people she’s consumer, but it’s a pretty weak suggestion. I’m also with you on the naming thing, though I guess the idea was maybe that 1) she didn’t care because she was dying, and 2) Marissa wasn’t famous enough for anyone to put 2 and 2 together.

@humanity:I've looked into it more since. And I'm not entirely sure if it's a technical issue or possibly a design decision to not always play the sound/vibration (which would be even worse) or to only do it under certain circumstances. eg. On VB's stream she plays clips that I know have backwards scenes in them, but there is no notice of anything from the game there.

I think a lot of the mystery goes out of the game after one of two of the big scenes. And the connection between the surface level footage and "the real story" is way too flimsy and arbitrary.

The Fuck Montage was the first one I saw and it was an incredible moment. The rebirth of the other one , the burning scene and The creepy unpassionate club sex-secene are all very good. After I'd seen those though, the game increasingly became 90% "Click on an apple 30 times in a row in the hope of seeing something new" and the like.

@magnetphonics: With some time to process the story and the game overall I have a very similar opinion of it as AlltheDinos did. I enjoyed the experience overall but with the disparate timelines I feel like this particular entry lacks focus. Because everyone’s experience will be very different in terms of what order you witness the story unfold I think you can potentially have a really bad run through it. Personally I think I must have stumbled upon the worst order of events possible, getting a ton of set dressing clips and not getting to any of the more story relevant revelations for a very long time. Even when I knew what I was searching for - like learning about the actor who “suffered an accident in set and died” it was strangely difficult to finally pinpoint the actual scene.

Unique experience and all that but Her Story remains my favorite of the Barlow games.

@humanity: I tend to agree. I'm increasingly negative on it the more time passes. After coming to the hypothesis that Sam Barlow's invisible hand is on the RNG to some minor extent, there's even less excuse for some of the nonsensical playthroughs I've heard of.

eg. I was amused that in VB's first stream of the game she got absolutely nothing from the game, and in the second one she got a maximally efficient triggering of key scenes and the game was over 90 minutes later.

Perhaps a player will get an ideal, fulfilling, well-ordered playthrough. But aside from that I think the best way to experience the game would be to luck into getting the ending comically early, and then enjoy the experience of browsing the clips and contextualising that for yourself.

Even when I knew what I was searching for - like learning about the actor who “suffered an accident in set and died” it was strangely difficult to finally pinpoint the actual scene.

There's a lot of moments like this. And the occasional useful, informative scene that gives you information you have no way of acting on.

There's one scene ("That's not how Carl hold's his cigarettes") that I think would be absolutely brilliant in literally any other game or even film. In the context of Immortality's UI and controls though one can either have the reaction of "I don't get it?" or "Thanks... this is useless to me."

@humanity: Haha I think I have the exact opposite opinion. Even though I really enjoyed the crazy storyline of Her Story, it never really incentivized me to fully explore the clips, which made the experience feel oddly incomplete. Telling Lies did that better, but in ways that felt really shallow; there wasn’t much of a reason to rewatch or engage with clips beyond the putting together of the story. Even though I think Immortality really suffers because of its UI and search mechanic, it feels like the first Sam Barlow game that fully works in terms of both encouraging players to really get into the hunting of the narrative while also provoking thought about art, movies, and even just scene construction.

@shindig: I'm curious, does Jess outline her views anywhere that doesn't require watching her do a full playthrough? I've only played Immortality and Her Story, and I don't think they're really all that similar besides the concept of searching through video clips to piece a story together.

What are the tropes that have her so riled up? I can see a reading of Her Story and Immortality where you come away thinking Sam Barlow thinks women are evil and manipulative and we should be scared of them. Is it something like that? I don't think that's what he was going for, but I would be interested to read Jess' thoughts on it.

@darkholmme: I would say this is the first one of his games where the hunting for the clues didn't really work for me because of how random it felt. I guess it just speaks differently to different people. Perhaps if I had a better run through it I might have had a better first impression but as I stated a few times before my awe at the structure and excitement for the mystery eventually gave way to growing frustration as I wanted to get things moving along and I couldn't find any real structure in making that happen.

I don't think it's the 'women are evil' that's riled her up, although Telling Lies also has a female character make a late turn. More that his games are about voyeurism and they all seem to be heavily centred around women. I'm sure Sam has other stories to tell but, for the last decade he's been trotting this out.

I tried playing it but wasn't able to due to some issue.

I just got credits from a very definitive clip after 9 hours of playing.

I love this type of thing, but I really don't get this game. I spent the whole time fumbling around looking for any new information I could, with no sense of mystery. I never had any idea what I should be looking for, but if I did, I wouldn't have known how to aim in its direction anyway. I feel like the game's only just started for me. I know half the plot of each movie, a few significant events from the productions and I only have a vague notion of understanding the supernatural side of things. I don't know how much more there is to uncover, but I feel like I'm missing a lot.