Immortality Reviews
Immortality is one of those games that take you by surprise and keeps surprising you even after the credits. Even if the gameplay can feel a little stale after a few hours, the mystery behind Marissa Marcel is crafted meticulously with a fantastic payoff in one of Sam Barlow's best games.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Throughout its gameplay, you are going to ask question about the game and explore the movie itself. The interesting story tells you about an immortal art and ugly reality, also an unknown phenomena time to time. However, the lack of interaction in gameplay was highlighted even more, under Sam Barlow's intention. That is why someone is talking about its perfection, while others point out its insufficiency.
Review in Korean | Read full review
Immortality is many things: a superb character drama, a compelling mystery, and a deconstruction of the relationship between films and their audience. It is a scathing critique of the film industry; it is a biting social commentary. It is terrifying, it is bleakly funny, it is delightfully ambiguous. A leap forward for interactive fiction, Immortality is as playful with form as it is function. Simply put: Immortality is a must-play game.
Sam Barlow's Immortality switches digital footage for celluloid film, and it's a better fit. His fixation with scrambled narratives has found its natural home, not in the realm of computers, those ghost-free machines, but here, on coils of vulnerable tape.
Even days after seeing the credits roll, I can’t quit IMMORTALITY. I want to understand more, dig deeper, and find more clips. There’s so much to see here and so many mysteries hidden inside this game, seemingly just one moment of intuition away. I enjoyed Sam Barlow’s past work, particularly Her Story, but I was unprepared for the depth of feeling I found within IMMORTALITY. What he and his team have created is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Immortality is a game that will haunt you. Its sinister atmosphere is exceptionally powerful. Its layered narrative about art and artists will leave you with more thoughts, ideas, and questions than answers. It will have you clambering for someone to seek solace with afterwards. It may very well see you diving back in, hunting for closure with any clues you may have missed – just a few more hints. Something, anything. Immortality is a remarkable piece of work, and an outstanding example of the potency interactive storytelling can have.
Immortality stands alongside Her Story and Telling Lies as a must-play experience that will leave you with a lot to chew on.
Immortality is an experience in itself. The game is hugely ambitious, but manages to deliver on every level. You will be on the tip of your toes for many hours trying to discover the fate of Marissa Marcel. Immortality is a total success. I guarantee you will be surprised by what you discover throughout the story reels.
Review in French | Read full review
Sam Barlow continues to explore the ways in which the image can be made interactive with his first explicitly cinematic video game.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
This is one of the, if not the best gaming experiences of my lifetime.
If you are a fan of games with thoroughly deep stories, a brilliant cast of characters, and a video game that will undoubtedly spawn a wide array of essays on YouTube, look no further than Immortality. This is a game that, in the beginning, may frustrate and annoy you with the non-linear direction of storytelling. Still, by the end, you will awaken to an experimental medium that truly elevated your thinking.
Even with Barlow's previous games in mind, I've never played anything like IMMORTALITY and might never again. It's a 10-15 hour experience that speaks to people who love stories, and to those who love creating and consuming art. It's a love letter to the oral tradition, to cave drawings, plays, films, dance, music, and games. It blends so many mediums, it contains so many different forms of art, and it examines it all through these displaced films — and through its characters, it reveals in the end that at the root of humanity are stories and storytellers. And we can't wait to see what else these storytellers do because it sure does feel good to just feel human in this chaotic time. It's for that reason, and a million others that could add to our pages and pages of notes we took during our playthrough, that VGG is giving IMMORTALITY the highest honor we can bestow.