Immortality Review

Immortality tells the story of an up and coming actress named Marissa Marcel. By all means, she should’ve been a big star in Hollywood, unfortunately, things did not go as planned. While she made three films, they never released and she mysteriously disappeared. Can you figure out what happened to Marissa Marcel?

So Immortality is a FMV: Full motion video. If you’ve never heard the term, it’s basically an interactive movie where players have no direct control over the characters and the gameplay is reduced to making decisions. But Immortality flips the genre on its heads by having players act as a film editor. You need to browse through the footage of Marissa’s movies and piece things together in order to solve the mystery.

Once you pick a scene, you’re free to watch it through the end, fast forward, rewind and pause. When you pause a scene you can enter image mode which will allow you to move around the cursor and once you see an Eye icon, pressing A will match cut to another in which it appears and consequently, new footage will be added to the film grid (where you can select unlocked scenes).

One very important thing if you’re considering this game, please note that throughout the various situations, Immortality contains a lot of subject matter that may be difficult for some. Even some scenes for me were difficult to watch and endure. Subjects like suicide, murder, sexual assault, abusive relationships are seen throughout the game and its three movies. While other games use some of all these subject matters, it hits home when you see “real” people going through it especially if you’ve seen or experienced it yourself in real life.

As a big fan of FMVs, I was looking forward to Immortatily, unfortunately, they made this a convoluted mess. By trying to reassemble and link movie scenes makes the overall story confusing and annoying because it can sometime take a few minutes to figure if something is “really” happening or it’s a movie scene being filmed/acted out. Incidentally, not playing this in a single sitting can make it easy to forget about what happened when you last left the game.

Presentation wise, not much to say really given that it’s a full motion video; actors do their job well as a whole given it can be a bit tricky to play a role within a role. Their delivery is also pretty solid as well. It’s one of those rares FMV games where I can’t find an actor that sounds either bored or having issues delivering his lines with conviction.

I’ll definitely applaud the developers for taking one hell of a chance with Immortality, but it’s a clusterfuck of a game. Despite the tutorial, you never really know what you’re doing and everything you do feels random given the fact that you jump from one in-game movie to another. The acting is top-notch and I’d definitely recommend this to long-time fans of the genre. If you’re looking to get your first taste of FMVs, this ain’t it.