2025-12-05 02:02:00
I went to see Eternity not expecting to have more of a reaction than “well, that was pleasant enough,” but I was surprised by how much I loved it. It’s genuinely funny, sweet, and charming as all hell. I cried, multiple times.
But possibly more than any other movie I’ve seen this year, I can see this one being divisive. This is very much a movie where you get out of it what you bring to it. I can completely understand someone watching it and finding it just okay, or even downright disliking it.
Its entire premise is absurdly contrived, even beyond the point where it acknowledges how contrived it is. (At one point, Elizabeth Olsen’s Joan tells her husbands to stop arguing because “it’s not a competition,” and everyone in the room says, “Yes, it is. That’s 100% what this is.”) It’s content to be shallow about the implications of this version of the afterlife, preferring to let it remain little more than the premise of a romantic comedy. Not all of the jokes land, and the endlessly recurring gag of seeing ads for potential eternities often feels like they could’ve spent more time brainstorming funnier ideas.1
It’s distracting how so much of the movie relies on the idea that Callum Turner’s Luke is drop-dead gorgeous, so immediately and universally hot that it’s all anyone can comment on, when I just didn’t see it. That’s not an insult to Mr Turner, either; I’ve seen publicity photos where you can imagine a casting agent choosing him as Impossibly Hot Guy on sight. But somehow this movie has five unusually attractive people as its leads and yet still manages to make everyone look like they’re in a PBS documentary.
And of course, for as much as it presents itself as a story centered on Olsen’s character, she is almost entirely reduced to the prize to be won by one of two men. For the bulk of the movie, her only agency — deciding for herself how she wants to spend eternity — is limited to choosing a husband.
Even acknowledging all of that, I loved it. I should admit that I’m a sucker for stories, especially romantic comedies, dealing with the afterlife: A Matter of Life and Death is an all-time favorite, Defending Your Life is one of the only Albert Brooks movies I actually enjoy, and of course I loved The Good Place.2 And Elizabeth Olsen is on the short list of actors it’s impossible for me not to like.
The main reason that Eternity worked so well for me is the rapport between the characters. The movie might not do a good job of making its characters look glamorous, but it more than makes up for it by having them play off of each other perfectly.
Miles Teller’s Larry is the underdog of the story, Joan’s husband for 65 years who’s always resented living in the shadow of her first husband Luke, who died in the war.3 He and Joan have such a casual familiarity with each other that I thought was instantly believable; you just immediately accept that these actors in their 30s have known each other for almost 70 years.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Joan and Luke plays out like more old-fashioned romantic stories: passionate young lovers separated by tragedy, eternally longing to be reunited. They’re more stiff and formal, reading not so much as a married couple as two people still in the awkward stages of being completely smitten with each other. I don’t think that’s a mistake or a lack of chemistry, though. It’s essential to making this work within the confines of a romantic comedy love triangle: the lovers fated to be together, vs the safe and familiar Guy She’s With Right Now.
In fact, there’s a lot more chemistry between Luke and Larry, and some of the most appealing scenes of the movie are ones where they’re fighting or bonding. This was crucial for making all the characters likeable, instead of the usual rom-com cliche of having one of the sides of the love triangle making a last-minute heel turn, paving the way for true love to win with no complications. It drives home that Joan really is faced with an impossible choice. There are no bad guys here, beyond whoever came up with this ridiculously awful scenario for the afterlife.4
Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early play Larry and Joan’s “afterlife counselors,” slotting into the familiar romantic comedy roles of Sassy Best Friends To The Romantic Leads. But the situation is so contrived that it allows them to be completely aware of how contrived the situation is. The movie doesn’t work without them, and it also doesn’t make them the sole comic relief. Everybody in the cast gets the chance to be funny.
I’m not particularly bothered by the fact that Joan’s character isn’t really developed much beyond A Perfect Woman for two men to fight over, because the men’s characters aren’t that developed, either. Unless you consider “eats pretzels” or “dyes his hair” to be character development, they’re not much more than The Perfect Idealized Love vs The Stable Familiar Love.
For that matter, I’m not that bothered about its refusal to wrestle with any of the higher questions of a movie about the afterlife, what it means to be human, what is our purpose on earth, and so on. Eternity is actually pretty unconcerned about the afterlife. It’s little more than a setting and a premise that allows it to play with all of the standard elements of romantic comedies, flip them over, or turn them inside out. It starts with the “and they lived happily ever after” ending, then asks you to reconsider all of the familiar key story beats of a rom-com with that in mind.
(Vague spoilers for Eternity follow. I’m not interested in outright saying what happens, but if you don’t want to have even a hint that might make you guess how the movie ends, then stop reading here).
One of my favorite sequences in Eternity happens when Luke and Larry are bonding over drinks. Luke tells Larry that he looks like a guy who’s always got a lot on his mind, and Larry insists that he really isn’t. Earlier, he’d admitted that he had no idea why Joan fell in love with him. Now, he admits that he’s been dead for over a week, and he never once thought about the meaning of life.
Later in the conversation, as the two men are reminiscing about their happiest moments with Joan, Larry comes to a sudden realization that makes him understand what Joan really wants, instead of just thinking about what he wants. That prompts him to enact Eternity‘s version of one of the oldest and most familiar scenes in a romantic comedy.
I like it because it’s a familiar scene used in a different way. For one, it’s not the climax of the story; it goes off in a few more directions after that. But more significantly, it’s a case of Larry answering both of his own questions.
2025-12-03 02:00:00
Life is so much easier when you finally give up any pretense of being cool, and I wish I would’ve done it decades ago. It would’ve let me openly enjoy the song “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson, instead of relegating it to my secret shame playlists of songs that I know I shouldn’t like because they’re twee or maudlin or too poppy.1 But it’s just plain sweet, and I like it every time I hear it.
The first time I heard it was in an Old Navy commercial that was ubiquitous at the time. It was a genius move on the part of the marketing department, because it has the line “If you are chilly, here, take my sweater,” and it was used in an ad to sell sweaters.
I think that technically makes it a jingle, so it’s perfect for starting off my challenge for December: to come up with a month’s worth of Two-Fers with the most tangentially-related-to-Christmas songs I can think of. I did a test run a while back for Hanukkah, but this one I can do without worrying that I’m appropriating or disrespecting anything.
And it’s perfectly paired with my favorite song about bells, and one of my favorite songs of all time, “I Hear the Bells” by Mike Doughty. This one isn’t really about Christmas so much as it’s about making out with girls from sales and marketing. But when you get down to it, isn’t that the true reason for the season?
2025-12-01 09:22:17
There are a couple of topics in pop culture that I shouldn’t have strong opinions about, and yet I do. And every time they come back up, the impulse of I disagree with someone on the internet overwhelms my ability to fight back. One of them is that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is not a Christmas song about sexual harassment, actually, and that’s a hill I will most likely die on.
The other is how Idiocracy isn’t actually about eugenics. In fact, it says the exact opposite of the thing that people most often complain that it’s about.
I saw this mentioned yesterday, and my first response was to helpfully direct the person to the Source of All Human Knowledge, this blog, where I already addressed the issue directly and decisively.
The problem with that post is that it’s unnecessarily argumentative, and I just come across like a big jerk. But while I was trying to formulate a less asinine and arrogant way to explain it, I realized that this not-particularly-insightful movie somehow just keeps getting more relevant to me. In fact, I think I was defending the movie while still not fully understanding the extent of what the movie was saying.
(Not to mention going off on a tangential tirade against “explainer” videos and the like, while I was attempting to give the definitive explanation of a movie).
Idiocracy comes right out of the gate with a narrator explaining its “problematic” premise: high IQ people stop having children, while low IQ people have too many children, which eventually results in a complete breakdown of society. We see a far-off dystopian future where everyone is obsessed with consumerism, vulgarity, inanity, all the worst aspects of 21st century society, magnified by thousands.
But it also comes right out of the gate mocking its own premise. The “high IQ” couple we’re shown at the beginning, who put off having children for the sake of their careers, eventually discovering its too late for them to have kids, are awful people. Irredeemably self-obsessed, focused on keeping up appearances, surrounded by increasingly ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption.
They are absolutely not presented as models of proper society. And (slightly) more subtly: their offense isn’t that they’re not having “enough” children, since it’s clear they’d be pretty bad parents.
At the same time, we’re shown the “low IQ” family, who’ve had several children and are expecting more, and their lives are absolute chaos. Just like with the couple, their IQs are displayed clearly on screen. The last time I tried to explain Idiocracy, I said something about how you see it’s not actually about IQ, but about “differences in socioeconomic status and therefore….”
Which was also missing the point, since they’re not presented as models, either. They’re bad parents, being irresponsible by having more kids than they can handle, and it’s weird to be making excuses for them.
Ever since I first saw the movie, I always took this to be an example of its absurd, lowbrow comedy and its broad, shotgun approach to satire: just say everything sucks, and eventually you’ll hit the right target. But what I didn’t appreciate is that it was mocking its own premise, as it was presenting its premise. It was showing how absurd it would be to look at these two families and assume that the key differentiator between them was something as arbitrary as their relative IQs.
Which I guess is itself is part of the satire? Say something confidently enough, delivered with an authoritative narrator voice, and people — including me — won’t think too hard about it?
In any case, that’s really what the entirety of the movie is about, rejecting its own stated premise. The protagonists, played by Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph, are the most thoroughly average man the army could find for its experiment, and a woman that they presume no one would expect anything from, because she’s a prostitute.
When they reach the future, everyone either looks to him for leadership, or rejects him for “sounding gay,” because he’s so smart. Several times, characters treat him like a genius because his IQ is so unbelievably high. President Camacho himself looks to him for guidance, because his genius plan for saving America’s crops is to irrigate them with water instead of an energy drink. And that turns out to be smart enough to qualify him to become the next President of the United States.
He and Rita have the solutions everyone is seeking, not because they’re brilliant or even exceptional, but just because they use common sense. It’s certainly nothing that’s attributable to IQ, and certainly not to genetics.
Characters keep saying how smart they must be, on account of their high IQs, but the people who keep saying this are the same people who’ve made “Ow! My Balls!” the most popular show on television.
To interpret Idiocracy as having any kind of “pro-eugenics” message requires believing that it says everything it has to say in the first 10 minutes or so, and then does nothing but riff on that for the rest of its run time. It means believing that a movie can’t introduce an absurd premise specifically for the purpose of mocking that premise.
So if I’m so confident as to what Idiocracy isn’t saying, then what is it actually saying? Honestly, for a long time, I assumed that it wasn’t saying much of anything. It was a broad, cynical-to-nihilistic satirical comedy, making fun of how much society is intent on dumbing itself down, but not offering anything resembling a solution.
As much as I’m annoyed by people using the movie as shorthand for the most vapid social commentary — I bet they didn’t intend Idiocracy to become a documentary, am I right?! — I have to admit that it wasn’t until I became so thoroughly disillusioned by the past two years that I was able to get a handle on everything it’s saying.
To put it bluntly: why did I watch the movie and without question assume that I was one of the childless, high-IQ types the movie was gently mocking, instead of the tasteless and vulgar low-IQ people that the movie was savagely mocking?
In total, I’ve probably got more in common with them. I will often compromise on my conscience for the sake of convenience, I’m pretty easily influenced by ads, and I’ve got a consumerist streak. Plus I obviously like lowbrow media, or else I wouldn’t have found Idiocracy interesting enough to write two blog posts about.
But more significantly: I’m often content to think of things as being problems for other people to solve. People smarter than me, with more expertise than me, who are more capable to understand everything that’s at stake and required for a solution.
Which in itself isn’t a bad thing; a complete lack of respect for expertise is the cause of a shocking number of immediate crises. But it gets to be a problem when a valid respect for expertise calcifies into a baseless respect for the establishment. And when “other people are much better equipped to handle this than I am” calcifies into “and therefore I am absolved from having to do anything.”
Honestly, I still think that Idiocracy is just okay, but I am starting to think that it had more subtlety than I ever gave it credit for. It’s overtly a snobs vs slobs movie, and it so thoroughly eviscerates the slobs that it’s easy to miss the fact that it’s mocking the snobs at the same time. It’s easy to misunderstand satire if you’re one of its targets.
Mostly based on Mike Judge’s other movies, I think it’s thoroughly a populist movie. Since the movie was released, even the word “populist” has been redefined, especially by political commentators, to be derogatory, referring to exactly the types of people that populate Idiocracy‘s future America. The redefinition hasn’t been as clumsy as the attempts to redefine “woke” or “diversity,” but it’s been no less effective.
I mean populist in the true sense: based in an optimism that everyone is capable of doing good things, and we don’t have to rely on an establishment or an elite to do everything for us. We’re capable of thinking of ourselves.
If you’re offended when Idiocracy says that intelligence is inherited, and that people with high IQs not breeding enough will cause the downfall of society: good! You’re supposed to be offended by that! It means you’re at least part of the way towards getting the underlying message: the people in this version of the future aren’t actually stupid. They’re willfully stupid.
Generations of being influenced by the media, corporate marketing, politicians, and cults of personality have resulted in this version of society. And at every step of the way, they chose to be lazy and unquestioning, giving all their trust and attention to whatever was the loudest, most sensational, and easiest to understand.
But if you know that intelligence isn’t an indicator of actual aptitude, and standardized IQ scores even less so, then you should be able to recognize that everybody in this future society had the capability to do good and make things right. But several of them insist that they just can’t, on account of their being so stupid. They look to a genius to fix the problem, even if that “genius” was himself a thoroughly unexceptional and unambitious person.
Strictly in terms of politics: it’s easy for me to look at the movie and say, “Yes obviously, it’s making fun of the people that would later turn out to be MAGA types.” After the last couple of years, it’s also easier for me to recognize, “Oh wait, it’s also making fun of centrist liberals, who expect all of our problems to be solved just as long as we have the right people in charge.”
Whether that was actually the intent of the movie, I don’t know. For all I know, it might’ve just been a broad, cynical satire that didn’t aspire to saying much of anything beyond “boy the 21st century sure sucks, huh?” But it sure seems telling that Idiocracy is the one movie that keeps feeling more and more relevant over the years.
What makes it feel most relevant now is that for seeming so cynical and even mean-spirited, it actually said a lot about the value of collective action, individual ability, and the refusal to keep othering people. Setting yourselves apart from others, even if you believe you’re being complementary by doing it, means you’re perpetuating divisions that might not be relevant or even need to exist.
And it’s a reminder to have a healthy respect for intelligence and expertise, but not at the cost of abdicating all of your own integrity and responsibility. Blaming those people for causing all the problems and waiting for our people to swoop in and fix everything. Eternally saying “somebody should do something about all the problems” and then going to social media to complain that they just keep happening.
2025-11-30 12:37:21
Wake Up Dead Man is my least favorite of the three Knives Out mysteries so far, but that just means it’s a solid, often funny, and engaging murder mystery that I liked a lot but didn’t absolutely love. The thing I love about the Knives Out franchise is its endlessly clever use of a gimmick — a woman who’s incapable of lying without throwing up, or a mid-story plot twist that casts a new light on everything. This one has plenty of surprises, but I guess I need a clever gimmick to knock it out of the park.
There is one gimmick, though, that the movie uses twice, as it’s establishing what I took to be is its overall mission statement. My favorite thing about the movie is the first time it’s used, because it took me by surprise.
We’ve been following the story of our protagonist, a kind-hearted priest named Father Jud, when a man enters the church that everyone but him recognizes as Benoit Blanc. He doesn’t introduce himself by name, but the priest welcomes him in and asks about his faith. Blanc acknowledges that he’s “a heretic,” which turns into a fairly lengthy tirade against organized religion in general, and the numerous failures of the Catholic Church specifically. He concludes that religion is nothing more than storytelling.
Father Jud responds with grace, and he agrees with him. To paraphrase, he says that he’s right. It is all storytelling, but the stories explain things to the faithful that they need to understand, things that they couldn’t understand otherwise. And as he’s speaking, the sunlight through the stained glass window gets gradually more intense, until he’s bathed in golden light.
It’s not particularly subtle. But I don’t mind that one bit, since it’s an idea that deserves to be driven home as plainly and directly as possible. Until that point, all of the characters we’ve meet who were (or more accurately, claimed to be) faithful were duplicitous, corrupt, manipulative, blindly desperate, gullible, in denial, angry, judgmental, and possibly even insane. When Benoit Blanc, the franchise’s genius detective who’s never wrong about anything, gives his take, it’d be easy to assume that the movie was very deliberately making its point.
So while it was blunt and even a little corny to turn up the God Rays on Father Jud, it was nice that the movie had the freedom and confidence to declare, See, this guy gets it. That multiple things can be true: religion is often used as a tool for control and division, but the values at its core need not be dismissed as meaningless hypocrisy. That it is possible for the genuinely faithful and the adamantly atheist to show grace to each other, without calling each other heretics or gullible saps.
Later in the movie, the same effect is used on Benoit Blanc as he’s having his own “Road to Damascus moment,” when he realizes that grace need not be strictly divine, and it’s something we can extend to each other, even, or especially, the ones least deserving of it.
It didn’t hit me as hard as it would have ten or twenty years ago, since my own faith has faded into what I’d call “optimistic agnosticism.” But it’s always struck me as annoyingly arrogant how so many people — many of whom have been actively harmed by organized religion, and have reason to be angry about it — will simply refuse to consider that the faithful can find value in something that they don’t connect with at all. It takes a kind of humility to acknowledge that we simply can’t know everything. So I liked seeing Benoit Blanc being forced to acknowledge that while he is always right, he’s not right about everything.
As for the rest of the movie: it’s got all the great performances you’d expect from a Knives Out movie, actors enjoying themselves hovering in a space that’s not exactly over-the-top, but definitely isn’t sane and grounded, either. It’s often funny, while rarely going for outright comedy. And even though it’s a more straightforward murder mystery, it’s still a well-told one, dispensing all of the clues in a way that makes them stick in your mind without being so obvious you’ve completely solved the case with 45 minutes still left on the clock.
The main targets of its ire this time (after billionaires and rich racist white families) aren’t just organized religion, but more the people who use a platform like organized religion to sow division, anger, mistrust, and self-righteousness among people. It’s a call to get back to the basics, to refuse to play into efforts to divide us, and to recognize what’s really important.
There’s another really effective scene in which Father Jud and Benoit Blanc are urgently pressed for time, and Jud is on the phone with a woman to get a crucial piece of information. After several failed attempts to keep her focused finally result in a promise that she’ll get back to them, she sheepishly asks the priest to pray for her, and she describes the crisis she’s going through. He ends up staying on the line with her for what seems like several hours, and even Benoit Blanc is left to wait patiently in another room as night falls. Acknowledging that some things are even more important than solving a murder mystery.
2025-11-30 00:16:16
Or, “Mister Insurance I Gave You All The Clues”
A couple of years ago, I decided I would finally carve out some time to play Return of the Obra Dinn, which I’d been looking forward to ever since I bought it on its release.
After a title screen which is perfectly evocative of games from the days of the classic Mac, I got dropped into a boat and handed a magic pocket watch and a book labeled “A Catalogue of Adventure and Tragedy.” Inside was a short introduction explaining I was an insurance inspector for the East India Company, with the job of assessing what had happened to the ship the Obra Dinn, which turned up in port after having gone missing for several years. There was a manifest of 60 crew members and passengers, multiple drawings of the crew and passengers from the on-board sketch artist, a diagram of the ship, a glossary full of nautical terms, and blank pages of a story seeming to span multiple chapters. It was evident that this wasn’t going to be a quick and casual game.
I boarded the ship and went through the first instance of its core mechanic. You find the remains of a person, your character pulls out their handy magic pocket watch, and you use it to play back the specific moment that that person died. You get a brief bit of audio leading up to the event, then you’re suddenly dropped into the scene, frozen in time at the exact moment of their death. You can freely move about, examining everything from multiple angles, to figure out the exact cause of death. Then your Catalogue of Adventure and Tragedy pops up, and you can enter the details: “<Unknown soul> was shot by <unknown person>.”
Perfectly imaginative and well-executed, just repeat that 59 more times and you’ve got a game that’ll receive universal acclaim. I decided that this would be an excellent game for Future Me to dig into, but for now I was satisfied that I knew exactly what this was. A meticulously-researched, well-written, and very dry story of intrigue on the high seas, told via a complex series of logic and deduction puzzles. The charm came in its classic Mac aesthetics and its central conceit of a magic stop watch.
As anybody who’s played the game can tell you, all of that is basically true, with one huge exception: the “very dry” part. I have to be amazed at how impatient and incurious I must’ve been back then, because if I’d just given it five more minutes, I would’ve seen how quickly the game gets really, obscenely, infuriatingly good.
I’m not going to bother with a recap or objective review of the game (since there are plenty of them out there, and I can’t add much), but I’ll just describe my favorite aspects of it. Everything I’ve mentioned so far is in the first five to ten minutes or so, and I’ll avoid spoiling anything else in the game, but if you want to go in completely cold, I recommend that. Return of the Obra Dinn quickly became one of my favorite video games of all time. It’s just a thoroughly exceptional achievement in every regard.
My reaction to the game after an hour or so of playing was that it made me really angry. The difference between now and the first time I tried playing it is that now, I’ve finally committed to making a go at independent game development. And Return of the Obra Dinn raises the bar for independent solo project impossibly high. It’s so good in every single detail that it goes past being inspiring and wraps back around to dispiriting.
Even if you’re not familiar with Lucas Pope’s other games, and especially his development journals, you could recognize this as an independent game with a small team or a solo developer. Not in the negative sense, where you’re having to make concessions because “bless their hearts, they did the best they could,” but because it so thoroughly feels like the creative vision of a developer making deliberate and conscious choices at every step. And making the right choice at every step.
The game’s vignettes and its overall presentation are so evocative that you can complete the entire story without realizing that there’s very little animation, for instance. You never actually see a character speaking. There’s a limited number of locations. Some of the significant characters, you only see once in 3D. Some significant characters have only one or two lines of voiced dialogue.
None of these feel like a limitation of resources, but deliberate choices, using exactly the right combination of drawings, audio, and 3D models to establish the characters and story. The natural inclination might have been to say that since the audio portions of each vignette are just subtitles over a black screen, and we’ve got the actors in the studio anyway, we can compensate for the limited animation by giving them a ton of dialogue. Instead, each character says exactly as much as they need to convey their character (as well as any hints or references to drive the gameplay forward), no more and no less.
It doesn’t feel like a solo project, but a project where you can look back and see that it was all made by one person. As long as that one person is preternaturally good at literally everything.
And it’s important to take the gameplay into account, because it’s perfectly integrated with the storytelling. In retrospect, this was a good game to play immediately after Her Story, since both use a similar mechanic: dropping you into an intriguing scene without sufficient context, and making the process of figuring out that context the core part of the game. But while Her Story brought that concept to the forefront and made it the entire game loop, Obra Dinn has more of a sense of being narrative driven. The game loop, along with the roughly reverse-chronological delivery of story vignettes, feels like the most interesting way to convey this story of Adventure and Tragedy.
There’s no disconnect between your actions as a player and the unfolding of the story, because your objective at every moment is to reveal more details of the story. Characters become familiar because you keep seeing them show up during key events, even before you know who they are. And that lack of knowing is intriguing, bringing them to the forefront of your mind far more effectively than a lengthy bit of exposition would have.
One character seemed to be showing up in just about every major event on the ship, and it was maddening that I couldn’t figure out who it was. Eventually, I was re-watching a seemingly unrelated scene for the third or fourth time, trying to piece together the identities of that scene’s major players, when I noticed a brief, blink-and-I’ll-miss-it-not-just-once-but-multiple-times mention of the man’s name.
My initial impression of the game was that it was going to be a very dry series of logic puzzles, but the only thing “dry” about the game is its sense of humor. I can only recall two moments of outright comedy, one with a character not able to handle the slaughter of a cow, and the other with a man meeting an extremely ignoble death. But I did get the “bad” ending, when events on board seemed to change, and I tried something just to see what happened. It concluded with reading a letter that was so drily funny I couldn’t even be mad that I’d gotten the bad ending. Especially since the game is generally forgiving, and it lets you rewind without losing any of your progress.
And the entire conceit has a deadpan humor about it. When you’re moving around within these moments of frozen time, everything is silent except for the suitably echoing sounds of your footsteps. Occasionally, there’s a piece of music that sounds almost jaunty in contrast to whatever horrific scene you’re watching. It makes you step out of your character for a moment and appreciate the absurdity: a proper English gentleman with his pocket watch in hand, silently walking around often-spectacularly gruesome scenes, dutifully writing notes into a log book.
Mentioning the sound: perfect, like everything else. The sound design is excellent, and the music is exceptional. The stinger of strings when you enter a death scene, the echoing heartbeat as you walk around the scene, the majestic tune that plays as you follow a ghostly trail towards a new set of remains. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to know whether the music that plays over the scenes is chosen randomly or is specific to each scene, but it was often just incongruous enough to work, reminding the player that this is an adventure tale, not a cliched horror story.
The title screen is obviously intended to suggest classic Mac games, but I have to wonder if the music that plays over the title was intended to call back specifically to Beyond Dark Castle. Obviously, the music in Obra Dinn is more sophisticated and elaborate than the music designed to play over a tinny mono speaker in the back of a classic Macintosh, made at the time when sampled audio was still a huge novelty, but the memory was so immediately and thoroughly called to mind that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was intentional.
Much like the drawings of the crew — which are used extensively, and become the main way we get to “know” them — are perfectly evocative of 19th century drawings and engravings, the relatively low-poly character models are evocative of classic games on 1-bit displays. This is a game that never could’ve possibly existed on a classic Mac, but it overwhelmingly feels like it could have.
My only very minor criticism of the game is that in a couple of cases, the game’s commitment to the 1-bit aesthetic made it a little difficult to tell exactly what was going on in a scene. Is that an explosion, or something else? In one scene, I was certain that I’d correctly identified the characters involved, but the game was refusing to acknowledge it; eventually, I went back in and saw the tiniest hint of a murder weapon. But in both cases, the game is pretty forgiving of experimentation and guessing, and it’s pretty quick to tell you when you’re on the right track.
Which is the last thing I’ll call out as a perfect detail: so much of the game feels responsive and in dialogue with the player. Cutscenes are charmingly set to the beat of the music, and visuals and sound effects make it clear what you’re doing with little need for over-explanation. When you ask for an explanation of the log book, or tips on how to play the game, a cut-scene plays out highlighting relevant sections of the book along with short lines of text, each line corresponding to an orchestral stinger. Every time you get the “Well done.” cutscene after getting three fates correct, it’s absolutely charming and satisfying.
By the end of my time with Return of the Obra Dinn, I’d gone through two complete cycles of inspiration-to-anger-back-to-inspiration. It’s just marvelous that this game exists at all, and wonderful that it’s largely the creative expression of one obnoxiously-talented person making all the right choices. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that it’s a fantastic example of what video games are capable of: a novel concept in a somewhat niche genre, used to tell a story in a way that only interactive fiction can.
2025-11-23 07:48:52
When Her Story came out and was receiving universal acclaim, I bought a copy and was certain that I’d enjoy it, if I just set aside a bit of time to play it. I never got around to it until this week, which is regrettable, because it’s every bit as good as the praise suggested. And more significantly: I wish I’d played it before Immortality.
Immortality is the third in a series of games led by Sam Barlow, along with Her Story and Telling Lies, which all have a similar structure at their core: they present the player with a ton of video clips, all taken out of context. The player has to make meaningful connections to unlock more clips and piece together the underlying narrative that ties them all together.
Right after I played Immortality, I wrote a regrettable blog post that comes across as overwhelmingly negative, because I immediately wanted to vent my frustrations instead of giving myself time to digest it. I wish I’d waited. Even at the time, I could recognize it as a masterpiece, and in the years since, I’ve only gotten deeper respect for what it does, and all but forgotten my criticisms that I had while I was nearing its end.
Her Story is smaller — only by comparison, and deceptively, since it hides what must have been a massive amount of planning and execution — and has a more straightforward and explicit version of that core mechanic. It solidified my opinion that these games really are milestones in the history of interactive fiction, because they’re brilliant deconstructions not just of game narratives, but of how we process all narratives. And it retroactively made me respect Immortality even more than I already did.
In Her Story, you’re seated at a computer screen in a UK police station, with access to a database of video clips, all from a series of interrogations of a woman who’s somehow related to a murder investigation. After viewing the available clips, you can type in a word, phrase, or direct quote to pull up more clips that have the same words in the transcript.
The simplicity of that mechanic makes it immediately feel like an investigation, as opposed to a traditional narrative in a full-motion video game, because you’re not watching it as you would a traditional narrative. You can only proceed through the game by making connections. So you’re not so much listening to what the woman is saying, as trying to pick up on what she’s not saying. The casual or accidental mentions of a name, or a place, or some idea that’ll branch off to other topics.
It’s not even as straightforward as the familiar detective game mechanic of trying to catch a character in a lie, since there’s no implicit acknowledgement that the woman is lying. There’s also no sense that every clip you see is being shown to you for a specific purpose: this clip contains a lie. Did you spot it?
Several of the clips are extremely brief, only a few seconds long. It sells the idea that what you’re seeing are randomly selected parts of hours of often-mundane video footage, instead of carefully-edited performances intended to tell you a story. Often, they’re purely intriguing: what was the question that prompted this response? Why did this woman’s personality seem to change so significantly? Why is she holding a guitar in an interrogation room? Very, very rarely, you can barely see the (figurative) hand of the artist peek in, where a clip seems clearly intended to emphasize a word or phrase that you should search for next.
You’re also given no context for why you have access to this database, or what specifically you’re trying to find. Instead of exposition, you can find a note on the computer’s desktop that establishes a couple of basics: the game is set in the present day (of the game’s release, at least), all of the clips you’re seeing are from years ago and haven’t been seen since then. Apart from that, your only apparent goal is to satisfy your curiosity. You’re at a computer screen queued up with several video clips on the topic of MURDER. You can’t not want to know what happened.
The overall effect is astounding. At first glance, it might seem like it’s just a stripped-down version of the kind of environmental storytelling that’s fairly common in games, where you’re given a bunch of disconnected bits of narrative and have to figure out how they all fit together as a coherent story. But by putting all of its focus on that process of fitting everything together — your only agency in the story is telling the story — it deconstructs everything down to the most fundamental similarities between interactive storytelling and traditional, “passive” storytelling.
For years I’ve been fascinated by the idea that what we think of as “passive” storytelling is anything but passive. You’re not the main character, you’re not doing anything to change the outcome, and you’re seeing everything in the same order the artist intended you to see it, but still, if the story’s being told well, you’re actively engaged in the storytelling. Making connections, making assumptions, reformulating those assumptions as your expectations are confirmed or subverted. It’s easiest to recognize in horror or thrillers, or mystery stories, but you’re always doing it, even if you don’t notice that you’re doing it.
Her Story makes you notice that you’re doing it. So (almost) every clip has that electric feeling of discovering something new, unlocking a new potential story path, subverting what you thought you knew, suggesting a surprising twist or complication. Over and over again, in short bursts that only last a few seconds or a couple of minutes. It’s like mainlining undiluted story.
Who is that person she just mentioned? What city is she talking about? What night did that happen? Is she talking about her mom? Why is she upset right now? Is that a bruise? Why did her demeanor change? What children is she referring to, the detective’s?
But these aren’t ideas that you have running in a separate thread while the narrative relentlessly continues without your input, before inevitably revealing the answers (or, especially if you’re watching a David Lynch movie, the lack of answers). Your entire agency in Her Story depends on making those connections, finding some key idea that will keep the investigation going.
I was trying to think of other examples in mainstream media that do the same type of thing with non-linear storytelling, if only to figure out if I was being hyperbolic for saying that these games work unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
I can think of Pulp Fiction, which uses it more as a stylistic flourish than anything else; or Lost and similarly-structured stories, where having to make connections between scenes from alternate timelines sparks the intrigue that draws you deeper into the story. Maybe the closest thing I’m aware of in mainstream movies is Memento, where “the presentation is the point,” and you can only make sense of it by re-ordering scenes in your head and re-establishing cause-and-effect chains as you go.
No doubt there are less mainstream, more experimental movies or books that go farther with this, and I’m simply not aware of them. Also, this seems like the kind of experience that was promised back in the 1980s when “hypertext” was still novel, but I’m not familiar with any that made this their primary method of interaction. 50 Years of Text Games has an account of a project called Uncle Roger, which sounds fascinating and in many ways similar to Her Story, in that it presents a database of narrative content that the player can query for different passages.
I suppose that it’s also similar to alternate reality games, which seed bits of intrigue that encourage you to make connections that reveal an ever-expanding story. Her Story and Immortality are kind of like smaller-scale, self-contained ARGs, but with a more straightforward and consistent interface.
What makes Her Story and Immortality different from any of these examples, as I see it, is that they combine a player-controlled timeline with pieces of artfully-withheld information.
Player-controlled timeline is significant, because it means you have more agency than in traditional media. The story can’t continue unless you get it. And withheld information is significant, because it means that your agency is different from what it typically is in interactive fiction. You’re not an active participant in the story, you’re an active participant in the storytelling. Essentially, your only verb is “understand.”
It’s a pretty esoteric distinction, but the decision to make the video clips — the “passive” parts of the storytelling — be fragmented, intriguing in their lack of context, is the key difference. There’s no mode switch between active and passive, performing an action and then watching a piece of content, because you have to be actively engaged with the content. A clip rarely gives you a complete idea, the crucial clue that makes everything make sense. You have to put the pieces together yourself to make sense of them.
My main criticism of Her Story and Immortality — while stressing yet again that they are both masterpieces, key-milestones-in-the-history-of-interactive-fiction caliber — is that putting the player in control of context and unlocking the narrative means putting the player in control over the pacing as well. Which means that both experiences feel front-loaded. All of the potential energy is at the start of the experience, when it’s all about the intrigue and discovery, and every new clip and new revelation feels like it might go off in a dozen different directions.
To take my clumsy analogy a step too far: if the start of Her Story is like molecular gastronomy for interactive fiction, the last third of the game is more like eating fried chicken. No matter how wonderful it is at the beginning, there comes a point where you’re just picking bits of gristle off the bone, simply because it doesn’t feel right to just leave it there.
I spent about three hours with Her Story, and I’ve seen over 75% of the available clips. It’s an excellent length for this game, enough time to feel like you’re following threads down various surprising rabbit holes, but not so long that it feels overwhelming or tedious. There’s a visual representation of the database, showing you exactly how many clips there are, and how many you’ve seen. I did get to the end credits earlier, and after they’re finished, it gives you a couple of commands that you can use to help see everything in the database — it doesn’t just open everything up all at once, and there’s still some digging required, but at least it gives you an opportunity to satisfy that completionist impulse.
I’ve spent so much time thinking about just the core mechanic, but I can’t stress enough how good the production is. No matter how brilliant the central concept is, it wouldn’t work as well if the execution hadn’t been flawless. Obviously, a ton of Her Story hinges on the strength of the central performance by Viva Seifert. Any false note would’ve undermined the whole thing. And it’s not just that there’s not a single false note anywhere (even for people who are, by nature of the game, scrutinizing every single detail), but that her performance gets more nuanced and multilayered as the game progresses.
Less immediately apparent is how painstakingly the game itself must have been structured, giving near complete control of the narrative over to players, while still making sure that a near-infinite number of seemingly random paths will manage to make sense.
As I mentioned, every once in a while, you can detect when a clip has been written or performed specifically to nudge the player towards a specific query. But it’s extremely subtle. And instead of breaking the immersion, it’s just a reminder of how much work went into making this extremely not-real experience feel so real. It gives you greater respect for just how much command Barlow had over the chaos.
I will say that Her Story had a much more satisfying implementation of the core interaction than Immortality did. They’re the same basic idea, but Her Story gets exactly what is so interesting to me about it, since it’s so straightforward, consistent, and predictable. You type in a word or phrase, you’re only going to get clips that have that word or phrase in the transcript. The only game-imposed constraint is that you’re limited at the start to five clips at once, so if your query has dozens of matches, the rest will be sitting there just out of reach — you’ll know you’ve hit on something, and you’ll just have to figure out exactly how to reveal more of it.
Intellectually, I understand all the reasons Immortality handles it differently. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s presented like an editing bay, with a play on the “match cut” idea, where you can scrub backwards and forwards through the clips, and then select a specific image from the clip, which will jump to a corresponding image in a different clip. On a purely pragmatic level: this game was intended to reach a wider console audience, so it needed a more controller-friendly interface than typing words into a text prompt, and it objectively plays better with a controller than with a mouse and keyboard.
More thematically, Immortality came from a love of cinema and filmmaking. The match cut is a classic idea from film editing, and it seems to correspond perfectly to what games like Her Story were already doing: forming meaningful connections between seemingly disparate images. Plus, cinema is a visual medium, and this approach emphasizes how film uniquely functions with visual symbols; it’s reductive to think of it as nothing more than a bunch of actors reciting words from a screenplay.
But it throws off the balance between audience and artist, active and passive, which I think is the most novel and interesting aspect of these games. Because you can’t reliably predict what might result from choosing a specific image, Immortality imposes a level of interpretation on top of your agency. If you click on an apple, you might be taken to another scene with an apple, or you might be taken to a scene with something that is symbolically similar to an apple. Obviously, that adds a sense of surprise and discovery to the mix, but it also means that the electric moment of interpretation and realization comes after the fact: it’s “ah yes, I see now how this image is symbolically related to an apple,” instead of “I’ve figured out other ideas that the apple might represent, so show me more of those.”
A more specific example from Her Story: some of the interactions were as simple as my hearing a word or phrase in a clip, and then typing that exact word or phrase to reveal more related clips that would expand on it. But the more interesting ones were when a clip seemed to be suggesting a certain topic, so I mentally built a “word cloud” of ideas that might be related, and I pursued those. (Of course there are too many mentions of “blood” in a murder investigation, but what if I ask about “periods?”) It was more rewarding when these paid off, since it felt like I was the one to make the connection, instead of the game explicitly telling me that there was a connection.
While I’m describing the interface as simple, straightforward, and predictable, I should stress that it’s more sophisticated than I’m making it sound. Barlow didn’t just film a long video, cut it into pieces, put a text field in front of me, and say “here, you figure it out.” It’s all deliberately selected and edited, with careful choices made throughout the script, to suggest ideas and connections that make the narrative navigable at all, much less play out with the kind of progression, twists, and reveals you’d get from a linear story. I’m aware that I was being manipulated, but the illusion that I was making a story emerge from total randomness was completely effective.
Which goes back to my issues with pacing, and how both of these games felt as if all their potential energy was in the beginning, and actually playing them wasn’t so much building to a climax as having story moments give ever-diminishing returns. The somewhat simpler and shorter presentation of Her Story actually gave me an even greater appreciation for Immortality, because of all the ideas that they inspire about the most fundamental nature of storytelling.
I don’t think it’s just another case of my going off on a wild, overly-eager interpretative tangent, since Her Story so often references story-telling and fairy tales. (And bizarrely incriminating murder ballads). And Immortality even more directly addresses it, not just with its frequent references to shifting identity, stories within stories, behind-the-scenes footage that is itself manipulated, and so on.
Both of these games made me think about how storytelling — or more accurately, I guess, story-listening — is as destructive as it is creative. I tend to think of the act of actively engaging with a story as a kind of creative process in itself, or at least the completion of the creative process: by making connections, predictions, interpretations, and constantly re-evaluating them, you’re almost playing back the process of making the art in the first place. Joining the artist in the writer’s room or the word processor, thinking about the same things that they were in each moment, making the choices that build up to the conclusion.
The format of these games brings to the forefront the fact that you’re also collapsing possibility spaces. Each decision you make, or reveal that you watch, does open the story to a bunch of new possibilities, but it also prunes away many of the ideas that had been percolating and cross-pollinating to lead up to that point. Essentially, and over-dramatically, you’re destroying entire universes of potential stories at each step.
Neither of these games has an unambiguous, “correct” answer; they’re deliberately left open to interpretation. (Immortality much more than Her Story, almost to a fault). But I have a hard time thinking of either of them as ambiguous, because in both cases, I don’t find one of the explanations satisfying.
I know I’m not the only one who felt disappointed by Immortality just because, after you’ve peeled back a certain number of layers, it suggests a version of what’s really going on, that I frankly thought was pretty silly. To me, it didn’t introduce a new idea that made me re-contextualize and re-evaluate everything that I’d seen; it just felt like a rug pull, introducing a supernatural aspect to a game that didn’t need one. I know that at least one other person felt the same way, because they complained about it at the time in a spoiler-filled review. (Which I don’t agree with, for the record. They are much, much more dismissive of the game, while even at my most negative, I was thinking of it as a frustrating masterpiece).
But with Her Story it’s even simpler. Basically, you’re prevented with two versions of the “truth:” the version of events that the main character describes, and then the version where we realize that she’s not capable of fully understanding what actually happened. And the former version doesn’t appeal to me at all. It seems to reduce the entire game to a simple case of “just find enough clips, and you’ll find out what really happened.”
I think the implicit idea underneath all of that is that, of course, none of this really happened. It’s all fiction. It’s even got “her story” in the title. It’s reductive to think of the value of a story as being entirely in reaching the end; that’s dismissive of everything that happens during the telling. You’re explicitly not given a goal at the start of Her Story, the goal is simply “experience this thing.”
And similar to Immortality, after you reach a certain point in Her Story, there’s an event that implicitly signals that you’ve seen the core of what the artist intended to present. You can keep exploring if you like, but you have now seen enough to “get it.” Roll credits.
Her Story even makes this all but explicit by asking you two questions: “do you understand what happened?” and “have you seen enough?” Pragmatically, it’s a signal that you don’t have to 100% everything unless you really want to. But I think it also might possibly suggest part of the real intent of the game, to make it apparent that the “magic” of the story isn’t in the conclusion, but in the process.
It made me consider how Immortality couldn’t have been more apparent that it was about artifice, identity, interpretation, varying versions of events, stories within stories — and yet I still insisted that as soon as the game told me what was “real,” I believed that that was the entire intent. Why did I insist that everything I’d assumed was a metaphor stopped being a metaphor, just because this obviously fictional work presented one set of the things that it was showing me as if they were the “real truth?”
The presentation of Her Story suggests that this is a murder mystery game. You’re on a police computer, you’re watching the interrogation of a person of interest, and you’ve got a “just the facts, ma’am” interface, where you’re entering specific words into a computer and getting just the matches on those words, no more, no less. That all sets you up for an investigation into the facts of the case, at the end of which you’ll be rewarded with complete knowledge of the whole truth.
And then it subverts that idea over and over for the next three hours, repeatedly asking you to formulate your own ideas instead of just passively accepting everything that you’re shown. All while giving increasingly explicit revelation of who you, the player, are, and why this investigation is relevant to you.
The reveal is understated but profound in its implications: it makes you realize that the game isn’t relevant to me simply because I reached the part where the game’s author told me what was “the truth” and what it all meant. It was relevant to me because I’d been actively participating in every step of the storytelling.