Immortality is leaving Game Pass by the end of the month. If it’s been waiting in your Game Pass backlog, now’s the time to break it out.
I just tried it and bounced off hard, but hey, at least I didn’t pay any money for it.
The interface ranges from inadequate to frustrating. I have no idea of what they were thinking of making what’s effectively an investigative game without giving you even rudimentary tools to manage the information. The scrubbing interface is really inefficient, for no apparent reason except to waste the player’s time. The spoilery UI thing is also pretty painful; I understand wanting to make it obscure and hard to trigger for the surprise factor of having it happen the first time, but once you know the gimmick everything about it just sucks.
The total lack of agency in content discovery made it very hard to be engaged in this as a game, since the primary thing I’d like from this kind of narrative is puzzling together enough of the story to make hypothes about what happened, and then driving the narrative toward the parts where you think the confirmation to the answers is. If there’s a way to acheive that, I didn’t see it. There also seems to be no way to figure out whether you’ve exhausted a particular type of interaction target or not, so even really basic forms of trying to guide the investigation.
So an hour into the game it had started to feel like mostly a UI chore. Then I got my first achievement for a specific discovery, and it became obvious that the part of the narrative I was actually engaged with was irrelevant, and what answers the game would give would be bullshit in the meta layer. And I just lost the will to continue, since this wasn’t working as a game or a story.