IMMORTALITY

[footle]

Interesting that it was your final scene before the credits: I saw it about three hours before the credits, and then spent those three hours trying to work out why it happened.

[Thor]

Yeah, I got that early on as well, way before getting to the credits. 

[Jamie John]

I seem to have come to a bit of a wall now and the frequency of new clips has dried up a lot. The ones that I do find aren't the 'special' variety, either

Spoiler

With the ghost couple.

I want to keep going, though, as I still don't really know what's happened, even if I do have some ideas.

 

Is there a trick to making progress, or is it just clicking on everything and hoping you get lucky? I'll have a look at the achievement descriptions, as they seem pretty telling.

[Alan Stock]

Spoiler

It's worth going back through old clips to find rewinds you may have missed. There's loads of them, over a third of clips have hidden rewinds. As for ones you may have missed, yeah its usually stupid little closeups like of fruits and stuff, so often its props that get you there. Although there's some clips that just require luck by clicking on the main cast, clapperboards or clapperboard holders. Some sequences of events that are quite easy to miss are in Ambrosio, related to Sophia after her liasons with Ambrosio, and a side story near the start of the same movie of what happens to another girl and Ambrosio. If you want to 100% the non-rewind clips I have some resources listed in the spoilers thread.

 

[Scribblor]

Quick question: I know there are

Spoiler

sound cues for that mechanic everyone misses until they're told about it,

but every so often, seemingly at random, I'll hear a heartbeat. That seems like it should be significant but I can't get anything to trigger during it and then it goes away.

 

Am I missing something, or am I over thinking it?

[Jamie John]

2 minutes ago, Scribblor said:

Quick question: I know there are sound cues for that mechanic everyone misses until they're told about it, but every so often, seemingly at random, I'll hear a heartbeat. That seems like it should be significant but I can't get anything to trigger during it and then it goes away.

 

Am I missing something, or am I over thinking it?

 

Probably overthinking. There's a heartbeat as part of the background music. The sound cues you're referring to are a lot more obvious, like a sort of whooshing sound.

 

Make sure you're playing with rumble on, too.

[Scribblor]

Thanks.

Spoiler

I'm fine with the actual sound cues - once you know what they are they're unmissable. I expect I'm just hearing the heartbeat in the bgm and expecting the game to be hiding something else.

 

[panda_t]

This is by the by, but the first film's based on The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, which is a properly bananas gothic novel by a 20-ish-yr-old who later became an MP, and the hokiness/craziness of it in this is absolutely a fair reflection of the novel itself (the plot involves a woman who falls for a monk, and disguises herself as a male novice to get into the monastery, and also has a local artist paint a picture of her as the virgin Mary, which the monk buys and worships, not knowing it's her. When he's been corrupted and tires of her she later provides a magic mirror for him to watch another girl he likes bathing)

[Scribblor]

Dirty pervy monks. They're all wrong  'uns.

[Jamie John]

10 minutes ago, panda_t said:

This is by the by, but the first film's based on The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, which is a properly bananas gothic novel by a 20-ish-yr-old who later became an MP, and the hokiness/craziness of it in this is absolutely a fair reflection of the novel itself (the plot involves a woman who falls for a monk, and disguises herself as a male novice to get into the monastery, and also has a local artist paint a picture of her as the virgin Mary, which the monk buys and worships, not knowing it's her. When he's been corrupted and tires of her she later provides a magic mirror for him to watch another girl he likes bathing)

 

That's interesting. I saw the bit where one of the characters mentioned that Ambrosio was based on a novel and I wondered whether or not it was a true novel. I probably read parts of The Monk years ago when I did the Gothic at uni.

[Rex Grossman]

On 17/09/2022 at 07:44, dumpster said:

Remember Immortality? It was a Edge 10, released August 30th, was discussed here until the 8th of September and then everyone stopped talking about it.  The thread was languishing on page 4 before this post. 

 

Edge 10. 

 

I remember when Halo, Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time were released and all discussion ceased after a week then too. 

 

Edge 10.

 

 

 

I really like the idea of 'small' games like this being worthy of a perfect score in Edge. I rarely have time for epic games that take hundreds of hours. To experience something truly special in a much shorter period of time sounds wonderful.

[Scribblor]

On 19/09/2022 at 20:39, Scribblor said:

Thanks.

Spoiler

I'm fine with the actual sound cues - once you know what they are they're unmissable. I expect I'm just hearing the heartbeat in the bgm and expecting the game to be hiding something else.

 

Though, having said this,

Spoiler

I've found today three different definite sound cues that I can't get to trigger. I scrub back, forwards, one frame at a time, fast-forward, fast-reverse, the tiniest changes in the angle I'm holding the analogue stick at... Nothing. I'm starting to wonder if I've hit a bug where they just won't trigger until I close the game and restart it. But I'll have to try that tomorrow, as I won't get to play it again today. 

 

[K]

Rewinding with the left trigger revealed quite a few clips that I couldn't get to play any other way, but it sounds like you've tried that.

[Scribblor]

Goddamn it, no. I didn't know you could do that. The tutorial doesn't ever tell you that's possible, does it? I'm pretty sure they just tell you to scrub using the sticks and the d-pad! The instructions screen certainly doesn't mention it: I just checked. 

 

Spoiler

I just went back and quickly tried with the last clip I was struggling with and that made it work immediately. Thanks!

 

[Popo]

So there are three ways of scrubbing through clips? Using the fast forward/rewind in the analogue stick, using the dpad to skip through frames and using the analogue triggers?

 

Do I need to go back and watch clips I’ve already seen and explore them using the scrubbing methods I didn’t know about to see the end?

[Scribblor]

13 hours ago, Popo said:

So there are three ways of scrubbing through clips? Using the fast forward/rewind in the analogue stick, using the dpad to skip through frames and using the analogue triggers?

 

Do I need to go back and watch clips I’ve already seen and explore them using the scrubbing methods I didn’t know about to see the end?

I'm purely guessing here, as I haven't seen the end, but if you know about

Spoiler

scrubbing to see the hidden clips, and you know about the sound cue and rumble to tell you where they are, then the scrubbing methods should only help with clips you couldn't trigger, but already knew about.

 

Unless there are clips hidden without the cues? At this point it wouldn't surprise me, but I haven't found any so far.

 

[Monkeyspill]

Apparently, I’ve found 91% of the subverted scenes. I’d have to rewatch every single scene again to find the last 9% and I’m not doing that.

[Popo]

3 hours ago, Scribblor said:

I'm purely guessing here, as I haven't seen the end, but if you know about scrubbing to see the hidden clips, and you know about the sound cue and rumble to tell you where they are, then the scrubbing methods should only help with clips you couldn't trigger, but already knew about.

 

Unless there are clips hidden without the cues? At this point it wouldn't surprise me, but I haven't found any so far.

Ive played the game for a few hours, so there are about 100 or so clips on my slate. The trouble with that is

 

Spoiler

I’ve no idea which have as-yet hidden clips, so I’d need to watch them all to find them.

 

I hope that won’t be necessary to see the end game!

[Thor]

If you've already amassed 100 clips and don't like the thought of watching/re-watching them, then the game may not be for you. 

[K]

This is one of very few games I've played where I felt the need to take notes.

[Popo]

2 hours ago, Thor said:

If you've already amassed 100 clips and don't like the thought of watching/re-watching them, then the game may not be for you. 

To your point - I find I’m somewhere in between the polemics. I’ve enjoyed piecing together the story just fine, and been really thrilled by the turns the game has taken, albeit found them to be too few to maintain the pace set by the early game. 
 

Spoiler

What I find dispiriting is having to re-play potentially hours of game due to a mechanic that wasn’t tutorialised and which I didn’t find through experimentation. That’s something I’d be unhappy with even in the most universally praised games. 

 

Life is too short for that kind of rug-pull.

[Thor]

1 hour ago, Popo said:

What I find dispiriting is having to re-play potentially hours of game due to a mechanic that wasn’t tutorialised and which I didn’t find through experimentation. That’s something I’d be unhappy with even in the most universally praised games. 

You do have a point. I finished the game without using the frame scrub (easy to do on PC) ...

Spoiler

... and so had to go back through loads of footage to discover what I'd missed.  Their tutorial is indicative of a small dev team with minimal testing for new players, whereby they mistakenly assume the player has tacit knowledge of the game. I've noticed this with other games, specifically Elite Dangerous in its early days where I could not initially get past the tutorial because it kept telling me to "Retract Hardpoints" to continue, what the fucking fuck is a fucking hardpoint?? I had to google it and ... hardpoints means weapons? Really? The fuck?  The game just assumed I'd know what a hardpoint was ... er, no!

 

Back to this game, Immortality could definitely do with a better explanation of its controls, step-by step, and highlighting that the player will absolutely need to use all the functions to unravel the mystery. I almost gave up on the game early on because I was just watching seemingly random clips, and so was entirely non-plussed at first. Now, it's an easy Edge 10.  

 

[Scribblor]

2 hours ago, Popo said:

Ive played the game for a few hours, so there are about 100 or so clips on my slate. The trouble with that is

Spoiler

I’ve no idea which have as-yet hidden clips, so I’d need to watch them all to find them. I hope that won’t be necessary to see the end game!

 

Spoiler

So have you found any hidden clips? If not, you'll absolutely have to rewatch them and use the scrubbing mechanic to get them, yeah. There's a pretty hefty part of the story/mystery you'll miss out on if you don't.

 

As Thor says though, if you don't want to watch them again at all, this is maybe not the game for you. That's really the main loop - it's absolutely not just about watching the clip once. 

 

I've watched most clips I've got multiple times, either totally or partially, checking for threads I want to follow with the match cut mechanic, like the clapperboards, or microphones, or ashtrays etc. I think I'm getting close to having all Ambrosio clips, but I've barely looked at 2 Of Everything and I've only got half a dozen Minsky clips that I've watched so far. I've probably played 6 hours or so? I'm fully expecting another dozen hours until I feel like I've seen everything.

 

1 hour ago, Thor said:

You do have a point. I finished the game without using the frame scrub (easy to do on PC)

Spoiler

and so had to go back through loads of footage to discover what I'd missed.  Their tutorial is indicative of a small dev team with minimal testing for new players, whereby they mistakenly assume the player has tacit knowledge of the game. I've noticed this with other games, specifically Elite Dangerous in its early days where I could not initially get past the tutorial because it kept telling me to "Retract Hardpoints" to continue, what the fucking fuck is a fucking hardpoint?? I had to google it and ... hardpoints means weapons? Really? The fuck?  The game just assumed I'd know what a hardpoint was ... er, no!

 

Back to this game, Immortality could definitely do with a better explanation of its controls, step-by step, and highlighting that the player will absolutely need to use all the functions to unravel the mystery. I almost gave up on the game early on because I was just watching seemingly random clips, and so was entirely non-plussed at first. Now, it's an easy Edge 10.  

 

Spoiler

It's awkward - because the entire game is presented as a sort of documentary project rather than a mystery, they'd spoil the conceit if there was a 'how to find hidden clips' tutorial, so I can see why they didn't.

 

But on the other hand, the game absolutely needs a better onboarding experience, and the amount of people who didn't realise there was anything more to the game than just trying to piece these three pretty crappy films together despite what are (once you know the 'secret') pretty blatant clues that there's something else going on definitely speaks to a team that have assumed something about their audience - they'd pick up on the cues and be intrigued enough to scrub back and forth to try to find out what was going on - that totally isn't the case.

 

I'd had the gimmick spoiled a bit for me before I played: I knew that there was something more to it, so when I felt the rumble and heard the sound cue I was already primed to think that must be it and investigate further, but I don't know if I'd have discovered it if I went in totally blind.

 

It's something that playtesters should have raised as a red flag. I've made games that are far more obvious than this, with far more explicitly explained mechanics, and playtesters still consistently said they didn't understand how to do stuff, or that there was stuff to do so we had to make things so obvious we thought it was kind of insulting. But better that than risk a big proportion of your audience not know about a central mechanic.

 

[Benny]

Spoiler

Shouldn't the discussion of the developers not wanting to spoil the conceit itself be in spoiler tags?

 

I know it certainly wouldn't have been as revelatory to me if I had read about it beforehand.

 

[Thor]

@Benny You're right, I've edited my post. @Scribblor you may want to do the same, and edit your quote of me.

[BitterToad]

Yeah we're now just openly talking about aspects of the game that are massive spoilers. 

 

Spoiler

I genuinely think even talking about "hidden clips" is a spoiler. I had absolutely no idea going in and the first time I found one of them was honestly my gaming moment of the year and one of my top all timers overall. It's just incredibly creepy seeing a hint of something and then your brain kicking in and working things out and then that happens and if I'd known the nature of what I was looking for I'd have lost that moment. 

 

Absolutely stunned there's an idea that it would need to be "tutorialised." The whole point is that it's hidden. It's like saying that Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense should have been walking around in a big white sheet going "whooooooooo" just in case people missed out on clues throughout the film.

 

For me the idea that all of these old clips now had new meaning and potential secrets in them was exciting. I get that that wouldn't be the case for everyone but if you're playing with a controller (and if you're not what are you doing?) then even zipping through at a fairly high speed you can feel the rumble as a prompt for "let's play around with the footage."

 

[Popo]

Duly edited my posts @BitterToad

[Scribblor]

Same. I think I've caught everything but let me know if there's something I've missed and I'll spoiler it.

 

Sorry everyone!

[Garwoofoo]

58 minutes ago, BitterToad said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

I genuinely think even talking about "hidden clips" is a spoiler. I had absolutely no idea going in and the first time I found one of them was honestly my gaming moment of the year and one of my top all timers overall. It's just incredibly creepy seeing a hint of something and then your brain kicking in and working things out and then that happens and if I'd known the nature of what I was looking for I'd have lost that moment. 

 

Absolutely stunned there's an idea that it would need to be "tutorialised." The whole point is that it's hidden. It's like saying that Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense should have been walking around in a big white sheet going "whooooooooo" just in case people missed out on clues throughout the film.

 

For me the idea that all of these old clips now had new meaning and potential secrets in them was exciting. I get that that wouldn't be the case for everyone but if you're playing with a controller (and if you're not what are you doing?) then even zipping through at a fairly high speed you can feel the rumble as a prompt for "let's play around with the footage."

 

 

100% agree with this.

 

Spoiler

I had no idea about the hidden sequences going in, at all, and I'm so incredibly glad that was the case. In fact I managed to play for hours without realising it was even there, I was was finding piecing together the movies versus the real-life stories intriguing and was assuming the mystery would lie somewhere within.

 

When I finally twigged what was going on and triggered my first hidden sequence, it was an incredible moment. Shivers right up my spine. The fact that the one I got first was one of the best ones (the cliff scene in Ambrosio, where the character comes right up to the camera and addresses you directly) made it all the better.

 

Genuinely one of the best games I've played in years, creepy as fuck and so rewarding if you don't know what's going to happen. Tutorialising all this stuff would remove half the point.

 

[Jamie John]

I didn't know 

Spoiler

about the hidden clips but I got the feeling that *something* was up when my controller suddenly started rumbling very noticeably, so I guessed that it was indicative of something, and fiddling about with the footage at that point revealed...her. I think that was literally five minutes or so into the game, though. I find it interesting that some people played through hours and hours of game without realising something was up.