Same. I’ve found 94% of the “subverted scenes” according to the achievement and it’s quite the hunt now but I think they put those in many videos so the likelihood of organically discovering them is higher. I wish they’d take them out after you find them but it’s not too annoying. I haven’t gotten those two to a second layer, though.
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Did they actually screen the three movies within the game as traditional movies? Each one has a separate IMDB entry and the release dates are months before the release of the game.
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Got credits, i was definitely missing big plot points lol
I’m awake late again because I’m an idiot!! But it was worth it, i haven’t gotten this many chills from a piece of media in a long long time.
Plot question:
it seems like she is somehow controlling both the director and Marissa in Two of Us, which causes Marissa to die of like. Brain issues. But i feel like I’m missing some connective tissue there. Could someone tell me if i missed something obvious?
Also i love that the chronologically last scene i have found links directly to the chronologically first scene (burning Marissa links to the initial interview)
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I haven’t found something that outright says cause of death but the subverted scene after finding all of the 2oE footage says something like wanting things simple but not being made to choose. The metaphysics haven’t been scientifically explained and I doubt they will. I will say there’s more to the apparent brain injury to find.
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I tried to play this with a controller and found it totally baffling, but mouse works great. You can basically swipe left and right at different speeds to set the speed of the film, or drag in small increments to slowly move backwards or forwards. I didn’t use the keyboard at all. It reminds me of editing a video, but without a timeline.
I used the buttons to skip to the beginning and end a lot. Drawing out the Weird Shit feels like manually tracking a cassette tape with your finger and accidentally going the wrong way so the tape starts to unravel inside the cassette. It’s great.
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For other scenes like that, the scene from Minsky with the accident (you’ll know it) has at least 4 layers in it that explain a very specific Thing, and there’s a sex scene that has 4 layers in it as well I think.
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There is also an interrogation that works this way! It’s great stuff.
Hit credits finally! Amazing game. There are still many characters whose fates I have not discovered yet and I still haven’t figured why exactly all that stuff happened to the characters at the end but I think I mostly understand it. Fantastic story, honestly. We can get all brainy about it but the plot is basically “what if a basically-vampire became a theater kid and killed everyone in the theater club” and that’s great, honestly. Enormously fun stuff. I was surprised at how funny it was, too!
Tulpa is right that part of the story’s interest comes from how it inverts power expectations; you expect the protagonist to occupy a certain role but she really occupies the opposite.
spoilery themes thoughts:
The greatest joy I got from this was from seeing someone who has clearly been Through It in creator relationships saying something complicated and messy and adult about what artistic relationships are really like. Making art gives you power, including power over your collaborators, and it’s enough power to break their hearts. Nobody on the silver screen can be innocent and waifish enough to fully escape the responsibility and power they have.
The Kotaku review is right in that this is a “cynical” way of looking at art. There is something corrupting in the desire to be known and to create art, to dominate other people’s attention and use collaborators as puppets for your desires. So I’m not surprised it isn’t landing with folks who aren’t yet ready to think about artistic partnerships as complicated relationships where most of the time, nobody can really get exactly what they want. At one point in the story, the Immortal says that she takes more than she gives from all relationships… working with that kind of toxic creative partner is certainly not the future that art schools and game developer programs and creative writing classes sell to you, but it’s definitely one you end up finding a lot out in the real world.
I’ve been in a few frustrating collaborative partnerships, so I was hit hard by the stuff in the story about the creators misunderstanding one another. You need your collaborators’ help and consent to make your dreams come true, but this requires vulnerability and honesty. Without that clear communicatino, you end up fumbling together, each trying to figure out what the other person thinks you’re making, discovering landmines of misunderstanding late in the process. I went through something like this at work last month and it made me so miserable my skin started peeling from stress, haha.
But even in the best of times, having collaborators is hard. People get hurt. That’s a much more interesting problem to wade through than the me-too problem the Kotaku reviewer thought this story was about–the problem of bad old men being old and bad. There’s increasingly little space to explore and learn inside that theme. I’m so glad this game was about something else!
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Yeah, I am absolutely enamored with the fact that a video game came out in the year 2022 where characters can’t be neatly categorized as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but simply multi-faceted. I think that’s one of the pleasures of the database format of game. For a character driven story like this, being presented with simplistic, tropy images of the characters only to undercut those by adding depth the hard way: by providing an expanding bubble of context that never feels like quite enough to really know the characters involved, but enough to know that they can’t be reduced to your first impressions of them
Like, my first impression of John Durick was completely wrong because of what I assumed the game would be like. He’s not some preening alpha male artist (though he has a jealous streak), he’s a moth flitting towards a flame and he would have likely remained obscure if not for the attentions of the main character.
I’m rambling at this point, but I’m just happy there is a video game story that has room for much more than a single interpretation—a game that doesn’t tell me how I should feel about its events.
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I just want more games to not patronize me, and Immortality doesn’t patronize me.
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Also, has anyone else watched the karaoke scene where the Immortal sang along to Anohni’s cover of Candy Says?
probably the best scene in the game, feels like a key moment for that character
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Yeah i loved that one!!!
I know we’re all talking about Themes but I’m the Plot Person and I’m here to say that
I think she did this all on purpose, and that her end goal was achieved exactly as intended. The movies themselves as finished products wouldn’t contain The Immortal in a meaningful way. But the piecemeal bits we get years later do contain her goals and intentions, both in the non-linear way we experience them and literally as hidden information that’s only revealed through meticulous scrubbing.
I love the idea that she had a single art piece she was making through at least two different lives, three separate movies, multiple murders, and 50+ years. This is how an immortal might think.
Anyway, that’s my read on the plot and character.
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This is understandably offputting to some tastes but I love the extra layer of the Immortal speaking to us and achieving memorial immortality through us. The text on the final achievement is “I LIKE TALKING TO YOU.”
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yo that shit broke my heart!!!
I love that the protagonist of this story is absolutely a horrible force in the world, a person of incredible amorality and retributive violence who goes directly to knives and murder in situations where humans would just cry and go to the bar… but the game spends its whole time helping you sympathize with these desires. Her behavior is just an extreme example of the way that humans naturally feel and behave toward one another. Artistic drive is alien; it makes you act illogically and fixate on shit most people don’t care about, and it makes you selfish and strange. The Candy Says sequence is maybe the best moment about how the Immortal’s grief that she can’t have what humans have is really the most human thing about her. These freaky people spend the whole movie acting like they’re not human, but they’re really just pure artistic id a lot of the time, haha.
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Yeah! This is exactly it!
The immortals are completely unconstrained by human morality and they tend to learn all the wrong lessons in attempting to emulate humanity. The main Immortal learned how to be a film-maker from observing the ersatz Hitchcock. He sculpted her, but the marble wanted to reveal its own shape, to paraphrase that old cliche. He taught her that to be an artist is to use people as tools, as brushes in your palette. And so she did, from that point on, the pure id of the artistic drive as you put it.
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I just realized that there’s a lot in the story to suggest that by viewing the videos, we too have been trapped in her cycle of rebirth. The Other One reincarnates into Amy when she watches the video of Carl dying in the accidental on-set shooting. Perhaps this is meant to suggest that by making an audience watch the Immortal in all of her videos, she has found a new way to come to life?
Dunno if this is really supported by anything but it does lend an additional edge to some of her final statements.
EDIT: There’s also a line where either she or the other one suggests that fire is not always the end.
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Feeling the same way about this. Wondering how y’all got credits to roll? Was it perhaps the final scene of marissa’s movie? The one with amy, y’know what i mean? all on board for the idea but for some reason can’t square it with the Marissa nose/head bleeding stuff
Also want to jump on board and say that really liking the themes as far as i can see them and has easily replaced my don’t wanna do anything binge-watch-television-nights. honestly surprised at my brain capacity to juggle three (or more like four i guess) plots and characters in my head
Edit: also the person playing the one fuckin kills it
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I hit the credits roll entirely by chance, it seems. Backed out of a not especially consequential clip and the pre-credits sequence started.
I think you just hit credits after unlocking a certain number of clips, which clips you’ve unlocked doesn’t matter.
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Oh, there’s totally textual evidence that this is correct, and I think this ties into Cania’s plot analysis too
Check out what Marissa says in Ambrosio 9/16/68
She said: “Making a movie is about capturing the light that bounces off your skin and recording it on film and then releasing it to the audience in the theaters. When you’re sat in the theater, the light that hits your eye, it’s part of this chemical chain that reaches back to and touches my skin. I think in that way, if we’d make movies that show more of the body, it could be a powerful magic.”
I feel like this is as good a veiled explanation of the Weird Shit happening as you’ll get from this game.
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