Immortality
Immortality is an artistically impressive game, meaning it has detractors and supporters in equal measure. As a team, the GameSpot staff is quite divided on it. Many of us see its elusive narrative as a plus, creating a convoluted web of interweaving plotlines and mysteries that are rewarding to unravel. However, just as many of us point to this same inapproachable and obtuse way of storytelling as a negative, as it can easily backfire and result in an experience that starts strong but quickly devolves into an unfathomable mess of clicking on random objects for a mere crumb of progression.
There’s a lot of artistic value in a game with such a wide degree of interpretations. Immortality pushed the GameSpot team to go back and forth in how we talk about a game in a way very few titles did this year, encouraging us to really puzzle through why we liked it or didn’t. Plus, regardless of where each of us fell on our feelings toward the game, all of us could agree that Immortality’s Manon Gage is one of the standout performances of the year, and on that alone this game deserves a shoutout in this list.
In GameSpot’s Immortality review, Mark Delaney gave the game an 8/10, writing, “There are moments in this game about which I can’t go into detail, but they are the main reason I’ve given this game the high score you see below. The first time I came upon an example of a particular game mechanic, I jumped out of my seat with excitement, alerting my wife that what I thought Immortality was going to be had dramatically changed in an instant. Even once I learned how Immortality works, it continued to surprise me with what it would show me, what it would tell me, and best of all, what it would refuse to tell me, leaving me to dwell on it long after I finally discovered Marissa’s fate.”
