I’m still working my way through the game, but some things I still don’t get:
If I’m watching a scene and then find a hidden scene beneath, how are the two related? For instance, I know this other entity “inhabits” Marissa, for lack of a better word. Where Marissa usually occupies the frame, the other woman is present. But if I watch a scene with Marissa in bed with Carl in Monday, then I find the scene beneath and it’s this other immortal guy in his place, does that mean he occupied Carl during the film? If I watch a table read for Two of Everything and find a scene beneath, with this other woman in Marissa’s place but now John is totally gone - does that mean earlier when I saw John with his throat slashed actually happened, in a sense? Is the John after Minsky the same as the one before? Will I learn the answers to these questions?
I don’t necessarily need those questions answered, just what I’m thinking about right now.
Good find, and yep, you’re on the right track. But the answer to your new question is going to be a little more esoteric, and it wasn’t something I picked up on for a good while. When you’re ready for a nudge, say the word. The answer is one of a couple in the game that are vague, but I think unambiguous, if that makes sense. And this one in particular is a lot less vague.
Holy shit. It isn’t “vague” at all, much less ambiguous. It couldn’t be clearer.
I have now put close to 25 hours into this game. And just tonight I figured out a new (to me) thing that it does. A very major thing.
I will also say this: playing it through again fully after investing 12 - 15 hours in a completed playthrough, this is actually kind of better the second time through. All of a sudden you see things that maybe seemed like throwaway things and it’s like “OH! I know what that’s about now!!”
So I rolled credits last night. I guess that’s it. I think I have a handle on what happened, more or less, let’s see how far off base I am.
So the two ‘ones’, as the credits name them, are storytellers, which explains how they end up in the movie business. The ‘main’ one, I guess, wants to tell humanity the perfect story. The ‘other’ one wanted this too at one time, but feels burned by how his perfect story (that of Jesus Christ) was accepted, or not accepted more to the point, and doesn’t really care about telling stories much anymore. But he still seems to care about the One, so he helps her I think, in his own way. When he isn’t driving her crazy. Then at some point, the One meets Marissa Marcel in France, consumes her (still not totally sure what that even means - does she just swallow her whole? Steal her soul? Smoke her like a bowl? I dunno) and uses her to star in a movie, Ambrosio. So the whole ball gets rolling.
At some point during the making of Minsky, the One becomes disillusioned with the process, or at least disillusioned with its director. She tries telling him about who and what she is but this goes badly and she consumes, and then ‘becomes’ him. What happens to Marissa? I’m not 100% certain of the timeline here, but I think this is when Marissa disappears, goes into hiding, so it must have happened after Carl (who is actually the Other One) is killed. So at this point the One is John - as evidenced by the interview with the Carson stand-in.
But then nearly twenty years later, Marissa reappears and begins work on Two of Everything with John once more. How is this possible? Well, I think this is explained in a little monologue the One gives. She mentions that she missed Marissa and the movie making experience and somehow ‘spontaneously’ caused her to reappear. So maybe at this point, the One is both Marissa and John? But doing so is quite stressful, and starts to cause her to breakdown. Literally, I think, as there are scenes where you can see Marissa just start gushing blood. The Other One returns as well, as Amy but also kind of not as Amy? The One seems surprised to see him, though I’m not sure why since they have both died and returned many times. But they both seem to think that his being Amy points to new possibilities, and near the end she asks to burn as he did - and Amy torches Marissa. Previously the One has said that burning is the end of things - you don’t usually come back. So is she gone for good?
I think at this point I’m ready to read back through other folks’ spoilers. I know I’ve missed some stuff (at most, I only have 75% footage discovered for any film) and others I may have just misinterpreted completely. I’ll probably keep scouring through the scenes looking for new stuff. But that’s where I’m at for now.
That generally lines up with my impressions of the sequence of events, plus a few details that I had missed or forgotten about.
I got the sense that the Other One was mostly going through the motions, mainly interested in laying low and surviving.
The time gap is nearly 30 years (1970-1999), which definitely made me wonder how nobody noticed that John and Marissa haven’t visibly aged in that time.
It’s pretty clear why Minsky and 2OE never came out, but I don’t remember seeing an explanation about Ambrosio – during the talk-show bit while filming Minsky, it still seems to be upcoming.
I didn’t pick up on that - I assumed that Ambrosio released, and they used its success(?) to allow them to create Minsky, but I may have just made all that up. I know there’s a throwaway comment that John and Marissa were making Two of Everything with their own money, which makes sense because it’s many years later.
Regarding Ambrosia I believe the editor and Marissa conspired to add a lot more sexual content in the film. The director got mad and ran off with or destroyed the print. I think that comes up in a talk show clip, but don’t recall exactly.
Now that you mention it, I do recall a monologue from The One about the director showing up many years later with copies of negatives from the movie that had been thought to be destroyed. I didn’t really know what to make of that, but I guess if the movie never was released then it makes a bit more sense.
I’m now at what feels like 90% understanding of everything going on in Immortality, but the game didn’t help with that. Since it has movie structures, I spent the first hour clicking on clapboards to get clips. Then, about 2/3 through watching the Ambrosio clips in scene order, the credits rolled. The trigger for credits is poor. I had, sitting in the clip library, over half of the game that I hadn’t watched more than a couple seconds to click on the clapboard.
Once I continued past the credits and finished watching all the unlocked clips, I had the same reaction as Nightgaunt back in September. I needed the directions from divedivedive to unlock what I thought had merely been ghost/mystery flair of the overlaid black-and-white footage. I only gave it the courtesy of looking for more, post credits, because this game is at the top of lists. Surely there had to be more. Its UI is doing a real disservice to the rest of the game. Even though its story is now coherent, I have issues with how I’m supposed to interpret my role in the game and the timing of various remarks to the camera. It remains inconsistent.
At this point I feel like I would have enjoyed watching the three movies on their own more than I did playing the game containing them. Complaints aside, I’m glad Barlow’s making this style of games. I hope future ones deliver more on the potential.
I still hope, as rrmorton hopes, there are a final few bits that will tie it all together.
Being the completionist that I am, I have since sought out all missing reels of all three movies plus the “subverted” (as the game calls them) videos. And if you’re hoping there’s some missing info out there that answers all your questions, well … probably not. I still have questions, though one might say they don’t really matter in the big picture (ha).
Mainly, what are the others? Are they some kind of vampire, living forever and feeding off humans? Do they steal their souls and then live on in the victims’ bodies, assuming their identities? What is their relationship with humanity? The main One seems to be very taken with people, interested in their lives and stories, while the other seems more jaded, disillusioned but still playing along. Are they the last of their breed? Is the One gone now, burned with Marissa? I don’t think so, she seems to have followed the Other’s path to a new form of immortality, but what does that mean?
But those questions don’t really relate to Marissa, and the question of what happens to her is fairly conclusively answered so, mission accomplished I guess.
I will say I did very much enjoy taking this trip, and liked the game very much. It’s like playing an art house film, even though the movies themselves are decidedly not terribly art house films. I told a friend I might even go so far as to call the game avant-grade, just because there’s nothing else really like it, not really even Barlow’s previous games. I do like this game better than Telling Lies, which I liked better than Her Story in turn. I hope his next game is even better.
This game needs to be played with a controller with vibration prompt. I played it on K+M first and got to a dead end having figured out all the plots of the three movies and why the movies were shelves, because of the accidental death on the set where Marissa pulled the trigger, so the studio probably pulled all of her movies. Two of Everything was made as an independent movie funded by John Durrick, as he revealed in one of the clips. Music cues didn’t do it for me, but the vibration is strong enough that would have prompted more investigation, IF I played with a controller. Only the final scene of Amy Archer setting a… doll of Marissa on fire is a real loose thread but the game clearly meant it as setting the real Marissa on fire.
If I didn’t search the interweb for further clues I would have been happy just to end the game without going into the meta-story. No one bat an eye when Tom Cruise looks just as youthful as when he was in his 20s, so I don’t see Marissa Marcel not apparently aging a real issue (psst botox).
The meta story itself is a bit too… gamey, like Assassin’s Creed modern day story.
Mamon Gage is fantastic as Marissa/Matilda/Rosario/Franny/Heather/Maria/The One in disguise.
Ambrosio turned out to be based on a real saucy gothic novel in 18th Century, which makes it even more saucy. Minsky is more traditional 70s pulp cinema. Two of Everything is also very 90s with clear reference to Britney.
Worked great in xCloud on Steam Deck, but I can’t say why without spoiling it.
This game was a bit of a dud for me.
ENDING spoiler warning
On Deck the rumbles are very subtle and easy to miss. You have to pay attention for it. Big difference compared to regular controllers.
Those triggers were done the moment you opened a movie, and not actually watched it in any form. So I got the ending this morning without seeing the stuff that led up to it…
I was going through some clips just mashing on Marissa’s face & random objects to unlock more stuff. Thought I reached an old video and backed out of it to check. I had been marking everything I viewed as “favorites”, and hadn’t watched almost anything from Two of Everything yet.
Ah well.
Would’ve been an obvious new clip if it had started from the very start and not later inside. :)
I liked the concept at first when I thought I was clicking on the same object appearing in different scenes and not just keywords. This was a more interesting way to break it instead of what I did in Her Story. The first thing I searched there was alibi.
