Most games are made to be solved. Whatever mystery shrouds them at the outset fades as they teach us their systems and their limitations in service of the player’s eventual conquest. Immortality, though, isn’t so easy on players, asking us to trust a mechanic that we never fully grasp in order to parse video clips in a similar fashion to director/co-writer Sam Barlow’s prior games, Her Story and Telling Lies. A narrative emerges over time, though we never choose how it plays out. We can only piece together what’s already happened to an obscure 20th-century film actress, Marissa Marcel (Manon Gage), and the people in her orbit.
The game is an “interactive restoration” that presents an unedited collection of footage related to Marcel’s three films, none of which ever saw proper release. Despite any sinister or tragic connotations, nothing about Marcel’s demeanor is overtly foreboding. She doesn’t come off as troubled or enigmatic so much as bright and personable, egoless and eagerly committed to whatever the work asks of her. The three films are all extensively realized and convincing: 1968’s Ambrosio, a lurid period drama set in a convent and adapted from the The Monk, a real Gothic novel from the 18th century; 1970’s Minsky, a mystery-thriller set in the New York art world; and 1999’s Two of Everything, which saw Marcel return from a decades-long absence for a dual role in one of those late-’90s explorations of moneyed amorality.
Early on, we have access to a small handful of video clips that we can watch in any order. To unlock more, we must pause a clip and select some detail that catches our eye. The game then creates a match cut to another clip in its library, so that one painting, one cigarette, or one actor’s face leads us to a separate appearance of the same object or person. This mechanic is the main “puzzle” of Immortality: We experiment with it to figure out how it works, grappling with imprecisions that may or may not be part of the game’s fiction.
For example, the cursor indicates an image that’s usable in a match cut, but the game doesn’t tell you what specific object it recognizes. (Selecting a lamp might take you to another clip from another film featuring a lamp, or you land instead on another clip where the light source is from fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling.) The only way to know for sure is to try, learning whether the game differentiates between red wine and blood, or between real blood and stage blood. In some cases, the system seems to prioritize unlocking “new” clips, at which point there’s no way to retrace your steps. The trail you follow soon branches off in every direction and then loops back in on itself for good measure, littered with recurring faces and symbols.
How you proceed is entirely up to you, though the jumps between clips and time periods discourage a rigidly linear approach. Throughout Immortality, there are no obvious blank spaces to be filled and no checklist, with no indication of whether the footage dump represents everything that was shot for the films or whether some clips are forever “missing.” I proceeded through the game assuming that matching a highly distinct object would take me to a more specific, related clip than matching something more common like a plant, which appears across all three films. I also inferred that some clips don’t appear until you either collect a related clip or acquire a certain number in total, and I believed that some match cuts would only trigger for specific images or for a certain period of the footage.
But it’s equally possible that none of these are quite right—that I misunderstood some detail and extrapolated a ruleset based on the wrong information. Elsewhere, there were further details that I never quite settled on, like what images and actions, if any, correlated to the paranormal occurrences that I began to discover. I noticed that dark-skinned actors were relegated to extras or technical roles behind the scenes and that when I selected these extras and crewmembers, there were comparatively few “matches” or no matches at all. I’m still not sure if this is meant as an acknowledgement of an industry’s historic lack of representation or to reflect how AI-recognition technology tends to replicate white biases—or, perhaps, it’s not intentional at all and the story just uncritically centers white characters.
It’s impressive that Immortality can accommodate so much uncertainty without collapsing in on itself in a heap of frustrating dead ends. Here, the granular understanding of game systems comes a distant second to the overall experience, where we watch these characters’ lives and the things they made in order to reflect them. That lack of understanding, in turn, mirrors the supernatural elements of the story: Whatever we may gain by imposing our will on the universe, we can be sure that it won’t be any greater comfort or certainty about our place in it.
Impressive, too, are Immortality’s grandiose ambitions. The game perfectly creates three distinct time periods, all while ensuring that the in-fiction movies remain authentic and plausible; whether these films are even meant to be “good” remains an open question. The clips include not only takes that are meant to be edited into the final film but footage of promo interviews, table reads, rehearsals, and location scouting. For a task of such scope, Barlow has enlisted three co-writers on the project: Allan Scott, Amelia Gray, and Barry Gifford.
The inclusions of Scott and Gifford in particular are telling, given how much Immortality channels the work of their prior collaborators. Among other films, Scott co-write Don’t Look Now, and the trajectory of one character, John Durick (Hans Christopher), from cinematographer to director echoes that of Nicolas Roeg. Gifford wrote the source novel for Wild at Heart and co-wrote Lost Highway, so it seems only natural that Immortality fixates on fractured identity and fluid reality (in addition to borrowing a few creepy techniques) in a manner that recalls David Lynch. Even the game’s core act of navigating clips begins to feel like multiple realities overlaid on top of each other, since the match cuts often take you to the very center of a clip and bypass the clapperboard that clearly marks it as a movie scene.
Immortality is so very satisfying to play because your understanding of these scenes changes alongside the context you gather and the theories you formulate. As those theories are proven and disproven, you see the pieces fall into place and feel yourself learning the big-picture details as well as the smaller ones. You’ll realize someone is wearing a wig, or that one actor has been recast, or that someone is overcommitted to their accent, and it’s these tiny discoveries that give the game such a convincing, lived-in quality.
Ultimately, the length and scope of Immortality is to its benefit, foregrounding all the attention to process and detail rather than seeming like a bundle of cute references or a cover song. Some of the references and evocations—in particular, one character who’s plainly patterned after Alfred Hitchcock—are more obvious (and potentially intrusive) than others, but they’re spread out across so much viewing time that the game successfully incorporates them into the greater thrust of its characters’ lives and their work. Likewise, many of the details that clash at first glance—some dodgy wigs and lighting, or a cast that’s a bit too pretty and modelesque for the eras being replicated—fade into the background by simple virtue of how much footage we watch, how much time we spend internalizing this vision.
The mediocre interface, however, never really improves. It actually gets worse over time since, as you go deeper into the game and accumulate more footage, the video clips become a chore to navigate as you repeat the same actions. With less new footage to find, the match cuts inevitably start taking you to things you’ve already seen without any kind of “new clip found” notification or even a wider range of labeling options to move things along. Worse, there’s no back button or highlight on what you’ve previously played, so finding your way back to a prior clip means squinting at a wall of video in hopes of spotting wherever you left off.
Of course, these late-game inconveniences also speak to something rare and refreshing: Immortality isn’t designed for convenient completion because it’s fully comfortable with the player not seeing everything. It’s confident enough to merely suggest certain details and concepts, giving us glimpses of certain prickly edges and troubling dynamics without falling back on an overt explanation, a tidy conclusion, or even a break from the verisimilitude of the “found footage” format. It’s an impressively layered work, filled with conflicted thoughts on the concept of the auteur, the collaborative process of art, and the prospect of going too deep in the service of expression. Rather than a clean moral or cautionary tale, Immortality opts for something messier, more complex, and far more likely to endure.
This game was reviewed using a code provided by Half Mermaid.
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