First and Third

Oh, immersion, you coy bitch. So hard are you to make, so easy are you to break. I’ve seen it argued that Half-Life 2 represents the pinnacle of immersion, by never taking control from the player, never moving from their perspective, and never giving voice to the player character, giving the story over entirely to NPC conversations and environmental cues, and doing away with the many narrative crutches games rely upon, most of them taken from film. But it feels to me that the crutches grant greater agility. Hopefully, ripping a few examples apart should show what I mean.