PSA: Play Immortality with a controller
In Her Story creator Sam Barlow’s new murder-thriller game, Immortality, players investigate one central question: What happened to Marissa Marcel?
Marcel is a dazzling film starlet who has met a tragic fate — or, at least, an ambiguous one. It’s not clear what happened to her at the game’s outset, but she’s disappeared, and it’s up to players to figure out what happened to her by scrubbing through a newly unearthed collection of all her work.
Before you play, here’s a recommendation on how to best experience the game: Polygon very strongly recommends that you play Immortality with a controller. Without spoiling the details, just be aware that some key moments of discovery feel a lot better and are a lot more obvious with a controller than with a keyboard. It’s not impossible to play with a keyboard, but the game’s logic and general feel work way better with a controller. (Some of our staffers weren’t able to progress very far in the game using a keyboard, whereas those using controllers had a much easier time figuring out how to proceed.)
Because using a controller felt a lot better, Polygon asked Barlow why the developers didn’t end up adding a prompt that recommends players use a controller with the game. He answered via email that the team is “considering adding one,” he said.
“We spent a lot of development playing on mouse, so we hadn’t really overthought the issue. Then when we got closer to ship and we felt it was good to tell players that controller was optimal for feedback and the mechanical ‘feel.’ But at that point, even something as simple as adding an extra screen up front was complicated enough, so we wanted to leave it till after we’d launched on all platforms,” he said.
Barlow and the rest of the Half
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