IMMORTALITY

Beware it's not for everyone: Mature themes smartly aproached and minimal gameplay. It is all about losing yourself in the puzzle. If you're the right public, this game will turn you into an obsessive and compulsive detective diving into the darkest side of movie business . The acting is great and the main actress is fantastic.

Definitely steer clear if you think you cannot handle the mature themes (obscenity, nudity, sex, anti-religion, violence, etc) Otherwise this is essentially a quality point-and-click extended with the scrubbing mechanic, letting the audience unfurl multiple storylines in a nonlinear and nonchronological manner, learning about the film plots and about Marissa and her seeming agelessness; starkly different from searching up keywords in transcripts as in the previous titles Her Story and Telling Lies Definitely enhanced by the attention to detail and effort in convincing the viewer that the clips come from certain eras, and that we get to see how the actors are like "off-camera" or "behind the scenes" Shame the same unique mechanic of the game becomes more cumbersome the deeper you get: trying to find the remaining undiscovered clips turns into a tedious quest of scrubbing through the other known clips and clicking just about randomly across the screen, spending lots of time jumping into the same clips repeatedly Could've been avoided by perhaps a few extra tools that might unlock later in the game: e.g. something to highlight what has already been clicked in a clip; a button to navigate backwards to the previous clip we came from... just some additions to cut down the tedium without revealing secrets easily Still I think this experiment turned out to produce pretty memorable results, and could inspire future iterations that add greater polish in terms of interface and mechanics

Two stars for the good, namely: 1. A heroic effort to try something novel 2. Excellent acting and production However, the game experience is ruined by several issues: 1. The storage of video clips is controlled by several icons, the meanings of which are not intuitively obvious and not explained. A small issue, but irritating. 2. You assemble a story by identifying and clicking on important people/objects in a video clip, and this action takes you to a different clip with the same person or similar object. Alas, the relationships between the clips and objects is often not logical or helpful. By necessity, I must provide examples and thus, spoilers. ***Spoilers*** Example 1: You receive a vial of green liquid to give to a character to make them appear to die but recover in 48 hrs. You click on the green vial and go to a video totally unrelated to the vial or character. Example 2: A protagonist holds up a book and tells a character to read backwards the 4th line of the 7th page. You click on the book and it takes you to a book that is totally unrelated. Thus, often you cannot follow the clues in a logical order. 3. Crucial clues are obtained only by playing certain parts of certain clips backwards. This is not something that I would have done if not for reading reviews with this spoiler. Maybe the clip I mentioned above is the "hint" to do this. I don't know. After all, this isn't a Beatles album. So you hunt and peck and play clips backwards until you suddenly and unexpectedly come to the end, which reminded me of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Three recent mystery games with novel approaches come to mind that provided me a far better experience: Return of the Obra Dinn, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, and The Case of the Golden Idol.

Read nothing about it and just play, it's amazing.