When I first played Immortality on PC, shortly ahead of its release, I felt like an investigator uncovering something shocking. Sitting down at my laptop, coffee in hand, lights dimmed, I’d enter each play session hungry to find the truth that was hidden away somewhere in the video footage. This was how I’d played director Sam Barlow’s Her Story and Telling Lies, too, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to approach Immortality in the same way.
I came away from that experience deeply in love with the game, feeling that, surely, this was the definitive way to play it. I was surprised when so many reviews said that, actually, the game was best experienced with a controller in hand; it was more accurate to the experience of scrubbing through footage on a Moviola, the film editing device that Immortality is digitally recreating.
When I started playing the PS5 version of Immortality, I knew that my relationship with the game would be different this time – I’d already cracked the central “mystery” of Immortality years earlier, so it wouldn’t have the same power to shock me. I was interested to see how well Immortality would hold up to a replay, and whether the DualSense’s haptic feedback would enhance the experience. Part of me worried that Immortality wasn’t a game designed to be replayed, and that my feelings towards the game might even be diminished as I replayed it from the comfort of my living room couch, playing on a big TV in a well-lit room.
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried about that. Replaying Immortality on PS5, DualSense in hand, was an enlightening experience – one that gave me a new perspective on a game that I’ve thought about at least a few times a week since release.
As a substitute for a Moviola, the DualSense is wonderful. The built-in speaker whirrs and clicks in time with your rewinding and pausing, and the internal dynamic vibrations simulate the subtle feeling of tape being rewound – a sensation I’ve never actually experienced, I realise, but somehow the feeling is nostalgic to the sound and feeling of rewinding a VHS tape. The Xbox controller replicated this feeling too, to an extent, but the DualSense haptics are able to modulate subtly between different speeds and intensities in a way that feels extremely tactile.
The DualSense rumbles, lightly at some points, ominously at others, as you start to uncover Immortality‘s secrets. This is all roughly in line with what I expected from the port. What I didn’t anticipate was coming out of this second playthrough with a different set of emotions to the ones I’d felt previously.
(Some Immortality spoilers follow – I won’t ruin absolutely everything, but you should stop reading if you have not played the game before. If you want a spoiler-free review, here’s my review of the PC version for SuperJump, written a few years ago. If you’ve never played and want to know if the PS5 version is a good port – I hit a few minor audio bugs, and a rather unfortunate bug with the ending that I’ve since discovered can happen in other versions too; I think this is the best way to play the game. Okay! Spoilers ahead.)
Immortality is a horror game, and the most at the centre of it – The One – is properly frightening. As you play through it, you come to see what The One is: an immortal being that has assumed the human form of Marissa Marcel and caused enough chaos to have all three of Marissa’s acting vehicles shut down. That’s the simple version, at least. The One is a layered monster, one driven by both centuries of planning and immediate impulses, who craves sex and stardom and human connection.
It’s that desire for human connection that I found myself thinking about a lot on this second playthrough, and a lot of that came down to the use of the DualSense’s haptic feedback. It kicks off when you’re watching a piece of footage – sometimes it rattles the controller hard, sometimes it’s more subtle, sustained for longer. When you enter into one of The One’s black and white monologues, sometimes it pulses along the whole time; do a match cut from her face, and the controller will continue a low rumble until you either exit to the scene selection menu or find another scene with hidden footage. When this happens, it feels like The One follows you outside of her own footage, staying in the controller as you continue to watch the film. It’s easy to imagine there’s something actually inside the DualSense, letting you know, the whole time, that she’s with you.
The effect of this is surprising. The One’s presence is felt more often, and the variations in intensity and cadence make the controller feel alive. It feels like there’s a presence that comes and goes, that’s guiding you, that wants to be close. The presence might be a supernatural, bloodthirsty being, but it feels like it’s reaching out to you through the haptic feedback.
Recently, I rewatched David Cronenberg’s 1983 masterpiece Videodrome, a phenomenally prescient film that is a little too complicated to boil down into a pithy sentence covering what it’s about, exactly. Like most of Cronenberg’s best films, it’s rife with body horror; in this case, star James Woods finds himself melding with TV screens, inserting pulsating VHS tapes into a gaping torso cavity, having his DNA altered by images on screens. The feeling of movement within the DualSense – the sensation of inhabitation – made me think a lot about Videodrome‘s pulsating screens and undulating tapes. The technology does not exist to make your devices change shape or form, but the DualSense can, it turns out, be made to feel alive.
Over time, I also felt myself feeling more and more fond of – maybe even sorry for – The One. Part of this is just the sense of returning to the game I loved so much the first time, and once again getting to enjoy the incredible performances of Manon Gage (big call, but: maybe the best performance ever given in a game?) and Charlotte Mohlin. But I think there’s more to it than that. Through one lens, Immortality is a game where the player becomes haunted; through another, it’s a game where something is set free. Something that you can feel bouncing around in your controller as you see its life story play out on the screen. Something that wants human connection, even if that just means rattling around in your hands.
This is all to say that the DualSense adds an extra layer to Immortality on a replay, and that the haptic controls – for me, at least – changed the experience in interesting ways. If I decide to replay the game yet again in another few years’ time, this is probably how I’d do it. And, for what it’s worth – Immortality totally holds up to a replay! I even found scenes that, to the best of my recollection, I never uncovered the first time I played it. Its power to unnerve is only slightly diminished on a second playthrough, too – as with the first time I played, I once more found myself feeling more nervous than is logical when I got up to pee one night and had to walk through my own house in the dark.
Immortality is one of my all-time favourite games, and worth playing in whatever format you can play it in. But thanks to the DualSense and its haptic feedback, I think the PS5 version might be the definitive way to experience it.
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