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War Remains: Dan Carlin Presents an Immersive Memory

Library of Realities.com review:

Popular podcaster Dan Carlin is best known for his dramatic retelling of historical world events through long and detailed long-form audio commentaries. In War Remains: Dan Carlin Presents an Immersive Memory his narrative leads a visceral description of European trench warfare in the First World War and its effects on those unfortunate enough to find themselves on the battlefields.

Though Carlin is not an academic historian, his background in television news reporting and radio talk shows helps him deliver engaging historical insights. It's his voice that leads this experience, with strong support from immersive audio designed by Skywalker Sound over five animated visual sequences. War Remains addresses suffering with some strong content and doesn't let up throughout its thirteen minute runtime. Scenes include trench warfare and a point of view of what it may have been like to shelter in place during heavy bombardment. The hardships and horrors of war are further driven home by the hard-hitting narration.

Aimed at providing something close to a first-hand experience of some of the horrors and psychological challenges of war, the shorter length of the program may be a relief to viewers, particularly as we assume this was designed with museum-going visitors in mind. Viewing at home however, we would have preferred a longer piece with more historical context, particularly after paying to download the app.

We're also not sure how much virtual reality benefits this experience. The audio presentation of War Remains is of extremely high quality, both in forms of the narrative and the accompanying immersive sound effects, but the visuals didn't quite match up. Aside from the brief scene of sheltering from a bombing raid, the animated images didn't provide much of a sense of immersion and in some cases actually distracted from the narrative. Also, for a story of human suffering this piece hardly depicts a human in its visuals at all. We suspect we would have benefited more just by listening to the audio while seeing actual photos from the period.

Dan Carlin is the host of Hardcore Histories and other podcasts, available through the usual podcast apps and also at Dan Carlin.com.

✅ Excellent audio narration and effects.
✅ Dramatic retelling of historical events.
❌ Visuals struggle to provide immersion.

I almost turned this off because the initial impression was of a really irriating narration voice and because most 'experiences' annoy me with their pretentiousness.

But i'm glad i did not, it was illuminating and affecting. I actually need to go walk this off, now.