Immortal Life has helped me define something when it comes to life simulators. It’s a moment during playing that I’ve taken to calling the ‘Palms-Up Point’. It’s that moment when all your crops are growing, your quests are just ticking over and you’ve given all the gifts you can. So you just throw your palms up and say, “what am I supposed to do now?” Some games get to this point faster than others. Worryingly, Immortal Life got there after just a few hours.
It speaks, I think, to how disjointed everything feels. I’m not a man motivated by profit (when it comes to growing virtual crops at least), I need an overarching goal. I was struggling to see that here. The result is a game that feels like a pile of bits. They aren’t bad bits, mind. There are even some strokes of genius in Immortal Life – things I wouldn’t mind seeing in others in the genre. It just didn’t feel like a cohesive whole to me – but let’s examine these bits and see what we’ve got. We’ll start with the farming.
Farming Forever
The usual way I farm crops in these sorts of games is to have one giant field with a mish-mash of crops all growing together. I’m happy to say Immortal Life made this tendency of mine stay exactly the same. I want to lead with farming, though, because this is where Immortal Life brings in its best idea: spells. As we all know, the worst part of farming is having to go over every crop with a watering can. In Immortal Life, we can spend a bit of mana to summon a raincloud and water a batch of crops. We can also plant crops this way and harvest them rapidly with dual scythes.
Why haven’t other games done this? The less time with the watering can the better. But anyway, let’s take a step back and examine why we’re here. Immortal Life opens with a plea to come to Misty Valley, which is a spiritual hotspot but needs a bit of sprucing up. We turn up and make contact with the Guiyun Sect and its prospective members, who are all talking about taking an entrance exam. Then the skies cloud over and meteors rain down, destroying the main hall and surrounding buildings. Where was that during school? Either way, we’re tasked with repairing things.
Problem is, from that point the plot takes a back seat. Instead, it unleashes an avalanche of quests. It wasn’t long until I was completely lost. There’s one thread about a Sect member who’s injured, but I’ve shoved about fifteen ginger roots down his throat at this point and he’s still in bed. The rest of the quests are simple fetch quests that just feel like roadblocks. Every time we start getting somewhere, it’s held up by a need to get ten bell peppers for a poorly justified reason. The question ‘What’s the bloody point’ kept popping up in my head. The slightly wonky translation didn’t help either.
Opening The Toybox
I guess the obvious answer to the question of what to do is to explore the other mechanics on offer. To Immortal Life‘s credit, I really like the cooking. You can learn recipes just by growing vegetables and handing them to Mu Xia at the Inn. Then you rent the kitchen, choose your ingredients and a timer begins. You’ve got to chop, mix and cook the right ingredients in the right order, then serve them at the end. It’s quite fun and reminiscient of games like Overcooked – though it makes me far less angry. For the cooking, Immortal Life gets a gold star.
Talking to the other townsfolk is more of a mixed experience, however. The slightly wonky translation does make it feel a little awkward, but the various characters are generally nice to talk to – continuous, annoying side-quests aside. It has the usual issue where making friends with characters boils down to just giving them gifts every day, but I warmed to some of the characters. I certainly warmed to that aspect more than the dungeon-delving, which is just slightly… weird. It essentially turns things into a twin-stick shooter (even though we’re armed with a sword), but with enemies that run straight at you but give up as soon as you walk two paces.
This strange twin-stick, dungeon-delving experience is a symptom of a larger issue. Immortal Life just feels rough around all of its edges. There’s no one big issue – just a cluster of quality of life issues. Controller support is rubbish, for one – any game that has B as an accept button is doing it wrong. Quests also track on the side, but not your progress. Then there’s the inventory – dear God, the inventory. Crops come in different rarities, which all take up a seperate stack. So harvesting your crops will rapidly swamp your inventory, resulting in either constant trips to the shop or playing the fox, chicken and grain puzzle with all your storage containers.
Immortal Life – Mortal Potential
I’m giving Immortal Life a solid kicking but I’m doing it with a sad face, because there’s oodles of potential here. I’ve already spoken about the genius farming ideas, but it’s more than that. The world – and general theme – has a lot of promise. There’s a lot of talk about cultivating spirituality and overcoming your difficulties by focusing on yourself while working together with your fellow people. That’s an interesting premise to centre a game like this around – it’s what kept me playing for the twenty-five hours I managed to sink into it.
Unfortunately, a lot of hours were tinged with frustration over the many quality of life issues. The biggest is the inventory – certainly not unique to Immortal Life, but exacerbated by the crop quality system. Ultimately, what killed it for me was the general lack of knowing what I was working towards. The goal of rebuilding the sect seemed to be lost under a tidal wave of basic fetch quests. So it ends up with a mediocre showing, but I wasn’t joking about those farming spells. Listen up developers, if you’re making a farming game, then I beg of you – let me conjure a darned rainstorm!
