Adventure Gamers - Forums

I went back and forth with a controller and keyboard. I ended up leaving a controller plugged in but mostly playing with a keyboard. i just found sometimes getting the “special” mechanics to work was easier on one or the other, i dont think i ever 100% understood how to get it to reliably trigger but i knew enough.Leaving the controller plugged in let me hear the vibrations while i often had an easier time uncovering secret scenes with the mouse

Just in case - it’s 25% off on Steam now.

Charophycean - 26 April 2023 06:31 AM

It’s evolution, baby.

I wonder if adventure gamers in the 80s would have thought the genre would evolve from the 9 verb interface to 🕹️

It actually went in the reverse direction.

There were a good number of adventure games that you played with joysticks before LucasArts verb interface was even invented.

One of the most advanced ones was The Detective Game in 1986.
It had graphical icons for actions that you pointed and clicked on using joystick. Moving the protagonist character was directly controlled by moving the joystick.

Sadly The Detective Game didn’t start much of anything in adventure game history, and is mostly forgotten by everyone. Few people like me keep talking about it, but that’s all.

In any case, it’s a good example of a direction where adventure games were heading at one point, but then different approaches became more popular.

Got the game. Let me know if anyone’s interested in going for it with me. If not - no pressure. I’ll probably start it simultaneously or right after the start of community playthrough.

I’ll be starting this tomorrow. I’ll post here. Again, just for posterity sake, I’m very unfamiliar with FMV genre because it never really appealed to me (up until now at least), so I haven’t played the old classics or the new highly-discussed games… This might be one of, maybe, three FMV games I’ve ever attempted, but it looks too peculiar to pass up. Plus your recommendations were in sync with my adventure tastes so far (credit you with moving up the queue and immensely enjoying The Last Express), so I’m pumped to give this a go!

I feel both of you - If I recommend something, I feel a bit responsible for the enjoyment, and if I get recommended something - I feel a bit responsible to enjoy it as well, so as to validate another person’s choice as good one. I think it’s called being a “polite and considerate person”

Being self-aware about it and not let it affect impressions of the game too much is the way to go, imho.

Now on to Immortality… Oh, boy! I thought I was going to give it a go for an hour or so, and three hours later I’m (maybe) a little less confused. First off - no worries, Karlok, I’m enjoying this (whatever this is) tremendously, so there - another good recommendation from you. AG should craft you a badge - “Great Games Recommender” or something along those lines.

Immortality at this point is very intriguing and hella overwhelming.  I feel like all I’m doing is uncovering MORE stuff to watch and analyze. I’ve got tons and tons of videos to sift through, and the new ones keep popping up. This is a very complex and layered story, and it took me a good while just to get the hang of navigating this ocean of videos…

Now, I was familiar with the fact that the game is based on watching and re-watching the videos to find items/faces that can correlate with other videos (and so forth) to uncover the story, and I was also aware that I can re-wind and speed them up, but what I was not ready for is to see completely different people upon rewinding scenes ... maaan, what the hell is going on there…

Anyways, now that I’m a bit used to the strangeness, I feel like I can make a more focused effort to get to the bottom of things. I’m really looking forward to it.

P.S. I don’t know about any particular references ( I generally suck at those, and I work on a film set, haha), but all I could think is Tinto Brass so far…  and obviously Bruce Lee situation, although we do have a more recent predicament with a shitty person that shall not be named here.

I have finally finished this very interesting game. It took me several approaches across past weeks as I was getting simultaneously fascinated and frustrated by it. I ended up enjoying the experience, and I think this is unique, well-made, complex game (thanks, Karlok, yet again your recommendation comes through!), but I’m not sure I’d dive in not another one just like this again.

There’s some phenomenal acting here. Brilliant acting, really. Funny tidbit – I work in film (crew), so I recognized at least two people in this game who had guest roles on the show I worked on – this was odd and cool at the same time, as I’m used to seeing different actors from tons of film and TV, but it was the first time I’ve seen someone from my game . Whoever was responsible for casting did an outstanding job. I also found very few (almost none) likable personalities here, and I tend to be a character-driven reader/watcher/player, so it’s another testament to acting (and story) that I ended up going through the entire thing despite not feeling any connection to the characters.

There’s definitely gratuitous nudity in here (you touched on in, Karlok,  somewhere else, I believe ), and I could have easily cut what is present in half, because when it’s this overabundant it starts to look like nothing more than a vehicle for shock value and loses impact by the tenfold.

The story is so complex that I’m not quite sure I fully understood it. I gleaned some answers from tons upon tons of hidden scenes, but I’m sure the finer details eluded me in the end. I’m fine with it, though, because the process of extracting them was so tedious that I wouldn’t go through it again even if someone paid me.

Speaking of that process, this was the biggest downside to the game and what made me want to take breaks between playing. The core activity of watching the scenes and clicking on the objects in them to uncover more scenes (across different films) is already very overwhelming, especially as you just trying to find your way through the game. When the necessity to rewind those scenes (at a certain speed that varies from scene to scene, too!) comes along – this intensifies the feeling like you’re drowning in the ocean of cinema even more. So, I have no idea how is that there was no total scene count for each film I needed to uncover. This was crazy to me – there are hours upon hours of footage, and I don’t even know if I’m looking for 100 scenes or 80 or 55, nor do I know how close I am to uncovering the entire film – 50%? 15%? 1%? I have been wading in all that footage for hours (and by the way, clicking on a certain object in a certain scene can bring you a different result every click – you can click on the same apple in scene 52B 7 times and get 7 different scenes out of it OR you can get 5 of the same scenes and two different in the end – there’s no telling), until I gave up and looked up the total amount of scenes for each film. That made life tremendously easier yet the process even more tedious at the same time, as now I was facing with tracking down only few scenes I was missing – took hours on its own just to find them.

Doing tons (upon tons upon tons) of rewinding at the same time, as some scenes could be played backwards upward of 3 different times (yes – you get 3 more scenes out of just 1 by rewinding it over and over again), I’m fairly sure I’m missed some hidden ones, but at that point I didn’t really care. I worked with what I had but stopped short of meticulously combing through everything – it was just way too much. Which brings me to the second major QoL missing feature – an inability to mark what scenes you already watched to separate them from the brand-new ones you just uncovered. Unless, of course, you abuse the “favorite” feature that wasn’t meant for that and simply start to mark everything you watched as “favorite” (which I totally did).  Beginning of lots of scenes look exactly the same until you watch them, so sifting through loads of them without knowing if it’s old or new is another insane design misstep (or maybe choice) that prevented me from loving this game. In short – it’s the process that killed a lot of joy from the game that could have been absolutely spectacular.

Again, I enjoyed this despite its flaws. The story is complicated, and the films are unique (there’s a bunch of philosophizing on everything art, sometimes incredibly thought-provoking, sometimes self-indulgent and pseudo-intellectual, but on the whole – good quality), there’s fantastic acting, there’s really good cinematography, very decent score and quite a unique gameplay… But, man, did that gameplay get monotonous and overwhelming at certain points! I feel satisfied and exhausted at the same time – interesting combo. I’m glad I tried it, in the end. I’m also happy to move on from this and close this chapter with a feeling of relief.

@Karlok. As far as Tinto Brass - he’s very famous for his erotica films (that can be on the arthouse side), a pioneer of sorts. His most famous is “Caligula” where he managed to combine actors like Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell together with pretty much outright porn, including absolutely wild orgy scene, somehow. But he even has the looks of Arthur Fisher and, from my understanding, similar personality (that you can see especially strongly in the first scenes of “Ambrosio”).

I’d love to hear what references did you find here, like I said, I’m not very good with those.

Also, what’s yours (or anyone who reads this) favorite film out of 3 in the game? My happened to be that very “Ambrosio” - it reminded me of the classic cinema the most, and I liked the combination or almost theatrical roles that seemed larger-than-life on film and fantastic acting. Good cast can pull of the cheesiest things!