Immortall might be the single most important videogame about war. An experience is laid out here so succinctly, without ever missing a step, that when everything comes crashing down, you quickly learn of your weakness. You quickly learn many things. Painful realities about the horror and immediacy of loss, the instinct that takes over, the sense of defeat no matter what you do. The powerlessness of war is poignantly discussed by playing the protector, yet what it means to protect is profoundly different than what a game sees as protecting in the prototypical sense.
In Immortall, the easiest thing to do is run, and yet the action of making decisions about running calls the player’s sense of self into question. To protect is an odd question to ask of a player in a game. They are not bound by consequences, but there is a profound sense of morality in what doing nothing means to the individual. There is a striking message about a core feeling, and how by not protecting the innocent, we are violating something within ourselves. Forcing the decision on the player, Immortall is never heavy handed, because by violating our sense of safety, we choose a path that says something about us.
The disturbing sense of ambivalence about your foes is a stark refrain from the emotionally wrought up civilians. The result is an endless series of parallel lines drawn to conflicts of all types, but perhaps best described as the reality of hegemonic powers and their ability to influence lives through their creations. The creation here is not the war machine, but the war machine’s affect on the individual, the profound inability to remove oneself from feeling foreign, from feeling alien, and the omnipresent knowledge of the intent of the interaction just over the next hill.
But they are not wiping you out. They don’t see it that way. War is always “just war” by those who initiate it. If a commander had to watch the crying of a child over the scorched body of her protector for long, madness would set in. There are things humans are not able to readily cope with. Thus, Immortall is a message about what we have created. A scenario where the winner is already predetermined, yet the pain of death and genocide never ends. An endless, nameless fear that sticks to the mind, a festering disease mindlessly poked and prodded.
There are no happy endings to be found here, but there is a lesson to be learned. There is a question raised about the kind of people we are, about the kind of world we want our children to grow up in. Do we want them to play by the maple tree, springing about without a care in the world? Do we want them to be sobbing over destroyed bodies? Or, worst of all, do we want to be ambivalent? We would be wise to make up our minds soon. The dead don’t get a second chance.
Recommended: Yes