Immortality

Sam Barlow has been dissecting the crime procedural for years, first with the database-driven mystery of Her Story and later with the fragmented conversations of Telling Lies. With Immortality, released August 30, 2022, he and his studio Half Mermaid have graduated from the interrogation room to the cutting room floor. This is his most ambitious, most complex, and most artistically successful work to date. It presents itself as a restoration project: to solve the disappearance of Marissa Marcel, a vibrant actress who completed three films across three decades—Ambrosio (1968), Minsky (1970), and Two of Everything (1999)—none of which ever saw a release. She vanished, and the work was lost. Until now.

The player is given access to a digital archive of this lost celluloid. Film clips, table reads, behind-the-scenes footage, and late-night talk show appearances are all jumbled together. The goal is to piece together not just the narrative of these three films, but the narrative of Marcel’s life and the dark, unsettling truth of her fate. It’s a work that positions itself less as a video game and more as a Moviola-powered ghost hunt. By eschewing traditional puzzles and objectives for a purely investigative, player-driven discovery process, Immortality challenges the very definition of a “game.” It’s a dense, often disturbing, exploration of the power dynamics of filmmaking and the permanence of the recorded image, demanding a level of intellectual and emotional engagement rarely seen in any medium. This isn’t a passive experience; it’s a forensic one that implicates the player in its central mystery.

• Match Cut Mechanic: The core of the experience. Instead of a search bar, players interact with the footage directly. Click on a face, a prop, or a piece of scenery, and the system instantly “matches” that image to its next appearance somewhere in the entire archive, pulling the investigation non-linearly through time and context.
• The Lost Trilogy: The investigation is anchored by the three distinct films of Marissa Marcel. Each is a pitch-perfect recreation of its era’s cinematic language, from the gothic psychodrama of the ‘60s to the gritty detective thrillers of the ‘70s and the glossy, sterile thrillers of the late ‘90s.
• Hidden Narrative: The surface-level mystery of a missing actress is merely the first layer. As the archive is navigated, a second, more sinister narrative reveals itself through hidden footage, forcing a re-evaluation of everything that seemed understood about Marissa and the nature of the entity she seems to be wrestling with.

Immortality‘s masterstroke is its match cut mechanic. It’s an idea so potent and so perfectly suited to its subject matter that it feels less like a feature and more like the only possible way this story could be told. The act of clicking on an object—a cup, a crucifix, a face—to be whisked away to another scene is a constant, thrilling act of discovery. One moment the footage holds a passionate monologue in Ambrosio; a match cut on a wine glass later, and it’s a boisterous cast party for Minsky two years on. The genius of this system is how it reframes the player’s role. The player is not a detective following clues; they are a curator, an editor, a voyeur. The path is guided by curiosity alone, following thematic and visual threads. The narrative is constructed not by the developer, but by the unique path each player carves through the footage.

The Gameplay Loop as Critique

The loop is simple: watch, click, watch again. There are no points, no skill trees, no explicit goals handed to the player. The game trusts its audience to be curious. This lack of direction can be initially disorienting. Players are dropped into a sea of celluloid without a compass. But as faces become familiar and timelines piece together, a profound sense of agency emerges. The story of Marissa Marcel becomes the player’s own discovery. This process is also a powerful commentary on the act of filmmaking and consumption. Scrubbing back and forth through scenes freezes actors in intimate, vulnerable, or even horrific moments. The player is given total control over their recorded image, an uncomfortable power that mirrors the exploitation inherent in the stories being told on screen. The game forces a confrontation with the player’s own voyeurism; to find the truth, one must be willing to look where one isn’t supposed to.

Narrative Unspooling

The non-linear structure is both Immortality‘s greatest strength and its most significant hurdle. The story is a shattered mirror, and the player is tasked with assembling the shards. For players accustomed to linear A-to-B narratives, the early going can feel chaotic, even frustrating. Connections are oblique, and context is earned, never given. Yet, for those who persevere, the reward is immense. When a random jump reveals the consequence of an action glimpsed long before, the sense of revelation is electric. Furthermore, the game’s true, hidden nature only reveals itself once the player learns how to manipulate the footage itself. This metatextual layer transforms the experience from a cold case into a supernatural thriller, and it does so using the core mechanics of playback. It’s a stunning, audacious turn that cements Immortality as a landmark in interactive storytelling.

To critique the “visuals” of Immortality is to critique the cinematography of three distinct, fictional films. Each convincingly pastiches its era’s filmmaking style. Ambrosio is saturated with the Technicolor melodrama of a 1960s Hammer Horror film. Minsky captures the grainy, cynical realism of a 1970s Alan J. Pakula thriller. And Two of Everything nails the cold, blue-steel aesthetic of a late-90s erotic thriller. The commitment to authenticity is absolute, from film grain and aspect ratios to the subtle shifts in performance style. The UI that houses this footage is a functional, minimalist representation of a Moviola editing machine, wisely taking a backseat to the film itself. The design is built around instant match cuts and uninterrupted playback, preserving the fluid, dreamlike state of investigation.

On Steam, the game is controlled with a mouse and keyboard, and this feels like its native environment. The precision of a mouse cursor is ideal for the match cut mechanic, allowing easy selection of small objects or specific faces in a crowded scene. Scrubbing through footage by dragging the mouse is intuitive, giving a tactile sense of control over the film. While the game is also available on platforms with controllers, the mouse offers a level of forensic accuracy that feels perfectly aligned with the game’s core conceit of being a digital archivist.

Immortality is a monumental achievement, and one of the very best games of its kind. It’s a game that could only exist as a game, using its interactive framework to deliver a story that is both a loving homage to cinema and a searing critique of it. Sam Barlow has created a complex, haunting, and unforgettable experience that will be studied and discussed for years. At $19.99 on Steam, it demands patience and a tolerance for ambiguity, but for those willing to get lost in its celluloid labyrinth, it offers one of the most profound and rewarding narrative experiences in modern gaming. It is, without exaggeration, a masterpiece.