Immortality Looks Like A New Kind Of Cinematic Game
Immortality looks like it may challenge the way "cinematic" is used in discussions about video games. Typically, if someone says that a game is cinematic they mean that its story is primarily told through cut scenes - typically cut scenes in which a lot of time, attention, and money has been paid to making the characters and the environments they inhabit look as realistic as possible.
Naughty Dog, developers of The Last of Us and the Uncharted series, is the most influential creator of this kind of game, but the stories of most triple-A games tend to be built around cutscenes. Though Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty: Vanguard, and Final Fantasy VII Remake are fundamentally different experiences, in many ways, all three rely heavily on the same technique to tell their stories. Gameplay stops, a cutscene conveying crucial story information plays, then gameplay begins again.
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There isn't anything inherently wrong with this approach. Naughty Dog is one of my favorite developers, and both Red Dead Redemption 2 and Final Fantasy VII Remake are two of my favorite games. But, when our definition of "cinematic" extends only as far as the shallow understanding that movies are things you passively watch, and that games are most cinematic only when they are removing control from the player, it impoverishes our understanding of both mediums.
Which is why I'm so, so excited to get my hands on Immortality next month. The new game from Her Story and Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid, Immortality — like its excellent predecessors — is an FMV game in which the player trawls through hours of footage in order to solve a mystery. Unlike Her Story and Telling
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