Immortal

An important part of assessing Immortal lies in adjusting your expectations. I was most interested by its claim of being a “Visual Novel Horror hybrid where your choices affect the story”, and I probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near as keen to review it if that wasn’t put front and centre. Playing the game, though, quickly shows that this statement is rather misleading at best, and it might take a little perseverance until the game becomes good for what it is, rather than what it promises to be.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

The game uses all the VX Ace default mapping and character graphics, with an edit here and there, which works pretty well on the whole. There’s no killer graphical feature like the complicated shadows of (otherwise-RTP) Cardiophobia, but nothing stands out in a bad way either. Some mapping decisions can be quite interesting, though, like this forest path early on:



Many games have used pure walls of trees, but Immortal is the first to have made them zig-zag like this in order to remedy the situation.

There are also the CGs; not many at first, but they become increasingly prominent in the latter half of the game as the plot ramps up. In fact, if they’re used to recount flashbacks, then the artstyle actually shifts to reflect the personality of whoever is recounting their story, up to and including white chalk-like drawings on the black background. There are also the custom busts, which are not static, either. The changes to them are usually minor – an eyebrow movement here, a gaze shifting to the side there, a mouth twisting into a wicked smile elsewhere – but their subtlety actually adds to immersion, and makes you watch the cutscenes more carefully. Having said that, they, like many things in the game, improve as the time goes by, so that the busts of the main characters Nicholas and Morna are actually the most basic, at times being barely distinguishable from one another.



Morna is the one on the right.

The sound design, however, is practically impeccable. Most of the non-default music is freely provided online byt the composer Kai_Engel, and it works very well. From the subtle themes used during the major revelations, to tense music accompanying life-and-death decisions and all the way to the exploratory piano tracks that are very fitting for the melancholy tone the game is trying to create. The music carries the game so much, I don’t even mind the lack of footstep sounds like I usually do, especially since a fair few characters might not be capable of making them in the first place. The frequent use of piano music also correlates well with how piano notes used instead of the default menu sounds, which was a nice touch, and those wind sounds are as good as they once were in Psychostasis. Interacting with cupboards full of crockery also produces the characteristic sound of it rattling, which was nice. There are lots of other small sound effects added in key moments during cutscenes, which further aid immersion in the game.



Gameplay

While it wants to be called a visual novel, Immortal is hardly such a thing. For one thing, it features way too much bog-standard on-map running for such a claim to hold true. It’s no Subject, which actually was a horror visual novel and handled room-to-room movement through a dialogue box. Thus, the bulk of its gameplay is just like any other rmk horror/exploration game, though it is hardly a bad thing. Since you’ll likely spend most of the game running about as a group, it even has a “Formation” command, though it changes absolutely nothing substantial.



The way the menu portraits are styled like shreds of fabric is a nice touch, though.

Unlike most other rmk horror games, though, Immortal lacks any chase scenes, figuring they’re too generic and distracting, and scripting the outcomes of plot chases itself (a bit like a shorter game I played recently, Jasei No In). There’s a certain timed sequence affecting the outcome of the plot, though, but you are the one chasing after things in it. It’s also hardly scary by itself, especially in its weaker first half. While it does employ some traditional horror tricks here and there, what it truly aims for is to disturb you psychologically, and to its credit, the second half of the game is increasingly successful at doing so.

Storyline



The game smudges its initial impression a little by having a typo in the first line of text the player sees ("Warning! This game contains depictions graphic content that may be disturbing to some.") However, it then surprises by having the controls screen seamlessly advance into the first story dialogue, where the questions about immortality and its value initially seeming like they’re addressed to the player, since it’s on the black screen and the speakers are not seen, which I thought was a nice touch.

Anyway, the our protagonist is Nicholas, who is a typical shy and largely asocial guy who knocks back an invitation to a party form his two work acquaintances to head home early on a bus, which soon practically empties, leaving only him, a young writer Morna, and their driver Darcey, who also looks way too young and informally dressed to be a legitimate bus driver:



Hence, it’s probably not too surprising that the bus breaks down, and so, the three of them choose to stay the night in the abandoned mansion nearby! When they discover bones in it, they don’t go outside of it because they’re afraid of the wolves. Though, why leave the bus in the first place, if that’s the case? Indeed, why couldn’t they phone anyone? I assumed the game is set in the pre-mobile era, but later on you find a shattered phone on the ground, so clearly, they do exist. Even if this was before mobile phones, any bus company would still want to know why their vehicle and driver didn’t head back to depo, and send out a search party pretty soon. Hell, why not take the strangely intact, rust-free weapons hanging around, and so that you can at least try to fight off wolves, or whatever else may come later?



This prompts no comment from the characters, and nor do the spears present later on.

Believe it or not, (most of) these questions actually do get answered later on. Until that happens, though, we are stuck with what appear to be the least effective and genre-savvy horror protagonists I’ve seen in a while, and you’ll have to put up with it, too. Immortal can only really be considered a visual novel if you narrow down the term to kinetic ones, because outside of two key choices, you have absolutely no control over any of them. Thus, you have to accept you can give no real input during minor exchanges, and cannot poke further at the already obvious clues. You also have to bear with the initial trio of characters not talking to each other much, and basically shrugging off Darcey getting separated from them by a sudden chasm with “Eh, whatever.”, and not bothering to consider her again unless they’re absolutely forced to. It’s much harder to swallow not having a choice about what to do when an unknown girl who clearly ticks all the boxes of a ghostly apparition (she appears just as you exit a room where a creepy child’s drawing just lies in the middle of the floor, for fuck’s sake) crops up, and you are forced to make her come along without much questioning. We can’t even ask her about that drawing, although she thankfully does react to the small bones on the ground floor (though asking if those are of the friend she’s been searching for remains impossible.) When another person, Cieran, appears soon, again cryptically talking about how he’s been searching for Phoebe and another girl, Maeve, for a long time, this is the main character’s reaction:



Of course, it’s nothing when he then insists they split up, and you again cannot object to it personally, only watch the characters do so with pathetic ineffectiveness and then predictably suffer for it.

Still, the game does offer exactly 3 instances where its narrative can diverge a little, and leading to a total of 6 endings. However, they are all “defensive” choices, where you are limited to trying to avoid choosing wrongly and suffering a character’s death as a result. It’s conceivably possible to go for the wrong choice in all three instances and get the worst ending, but it’ll likely take some intentional effort to do so. Otherwise, not that much changes; you get the survivors calling back to the fallen when you choose wrong, and there are happier scenes available after the right choices, though they’re jarringly out-of-place when they involve Nicholas and Morna. Most of the time, the lines of dialogue which would normally be spread out among the group are simply all given to the survivor(s). Thankfully, dialogues themselves improve by that point: they’re very bland and limp-wristed before anyone gets the chance to die, as by far the most dominant “word” used is “…”, standing in either for the goddamn “cryptic” silences by characters obviously knowing more then they let on, or just general indecisiveness. There’s thus little apparent personality at the start, especially since the game doesn’t utilize the secondary narrative techniques very well at first. The environmental description is usually self-apparent (“A small pond.”, “Various books.”, “Painting of a flower”,“Painting of a woman.”, “Nothing of interest.”, etc.) and the characters almost never comment on what they find, or discuss it amongst each other. This is most jarring when you read a book about spirits getting trapped in mirrors, which leads to a cutscene where THAT VERY THING happens about a minute later, and yet the characters are still surprised. Indeed, the next event is the appearance of Rachel’s ghost: she is referred to in the very first note you find, yet the main characters still don’t realize who she is.



One example of a cryptic diary, faded with time.

Nevertheless, the narrative gets significantly better once finding a certain journal triggers a large flashback cutscene. Sure, there are again way-too-on-the-nose hints and stupid, if in-character, moves from the flashback characters (diary’s author finds incontrovertible evidence of a murder, yet chooses to keep quiet about it instead of taking it and showing it to the closest authority in the home) and a wholly new character suddenly appearing just to give you key, whom you are STILL not allowed to question after all the past events should’ve taught you to doubt such strangers. Nevertheless, there are definite changes for the better. For one, the game deals with its “secondary narrative” problem, as the objects in the final area are now given properly disturbing descriptions, which almost retroactively justifies the initial sparseness of them, due to the sheer contrast. Moreover, the characters finally acknowledge the disturbing notes and diaries they find, and refer back to them during the plot cutscenes. The main storyline itself finally starts living up to the presentation, as characters gain in complexity (Morna still sucks, though), antagonists are given motivation and can easily hold your attention, and there’s now a clear thematic focus on guilt, regret and (avoidance of) responsibility, approached from different angles in all the latter dialogues. There’s a decent twist near the end as well, which addresses many of the questions I had at the start, and Immortal ultimately manages to satisfactorily tie up just about every single character arc. The two endings I got were done well (I especially appreciated the call-back to the start in ending 4), and I’m happy to know the other 4 endings exist without searching for them.

Lastly, typos for the creator:

Conclusion



While it’s certainly a flawed work, Immortal is nevertheless notable for consistently improving over time, clearly showing the growth in the developer’s own skill. I would be quite interested to see what the next game from them might be like, as it would presumably lack the starting issues that had to be retroactively addressed here. A hypothetical cooperation between them and the creator of Cardiophobia might be especially interesting, seeing as they’re united in their use of VX Ace RTP and psychological horror, yet one uses it to craft a disturbing narrative from multiple perspectives, while another excels at being immediately frightening and tense. Perhaps some day!