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At 2 o’clock on a Thursday I sit in the dark at my computer trembling, my face bathed in the aseptic glow of Her story creator Sam Barlow’s new game, Immortality. On the screen, the camera is fixed on the flawless porcelain complexion of forgotten actress Marissa Marcel (played by Manon Gage), who is naked and bathed in a warm, almost infernal light. “Are you ready for a satanic fuck?” she asks, moving off the script and provoking a hoarse laugh from her off-screen crew. While I’m not quite in the market for that, I have ben ready to be fucked by the unpredictable magic of film.

It didn’t take long for Immortality to take me back to my work at the television. I spent the summer pre-university as a teenage intern dubbing tapes in small rooms filled with VCRs, watching editors disappear into cocoon-like Avid suites where they spent hours sifting through raw footage (Avid technology replaced Moviola machines, whose Immortality pulls its scrubbing mechanism). There was something beautiful and mysterious about watching – standing at the edge of this enigmatic black box where something went in and a new, yet familiar thing came out. So it’s as frustrating as it is fascinating to have been immersed in for 22 hours Immortality and still want the feeling; For days, since playing the game, every prop, wig, and gesture lived in my head as if it were my job.

Immortality centers on Marcel, who, according to the game’s fiction, was plucked from an audition of thousands in the 1960s by a prominent director. She made three films: ambrosio (1968), Minsky (1970), and Two of everything (1999). No one was released and she disappeared. The game presents itself as special software designed to showcase Marcel’s recently unearthed work, allowing fans to analyze her behind-the-scenes films and clips. The essence is to use match cuts – transitional cuts between objects with similar themes or structural compositions – to explore Marcel’s films and find out what happened to her. For example, click on a feline sculpture in Minsky jumps to images of the cat in Two of everything; an abstract figure painting can lead to a mask or an actor’s face. “Successful” match cuts and their subsequent reveals will unlock new clips.

A scene selector in Immortality

Image: Half Mermaid Productions via Polygon

ambrosio is a giallo-esque sexual thriller adapted from the (true) gothic novel the monk, with beautiful matte painted backgrounds. In the crime noir MinskyMarcel takes a page of the rough Jane Fonda klute, adopting the same sly, nervous demeanor that ensnares her direct detective love interest. And in Two of everything, she plays both a world-famous pop star and her body double, whose shared life is irrevocably destroyed. With a few clicks on the right hotspots, I flutter from the fresh resourceful Marcel in a novice monk robe to an older, world-weary Marcel (who hasn’t aged a day) in Doc Martens.

Right out of the gate, I pour streams of energy into dissecting every scene and bit of subtext. My first type-A reaction is to make copious color-coded notes on all three films. After observing ambrosioArthur Fischer, the obvious Alfred Hitchcock equivalent, I’m considering getting my old Truffaut and Spoto books from a movie class in college that I barely remember. An interview in which Fischer has placed his hand revealingly around Marcel’s neck screams ‘a celebrated author who takes care of a young girl’. After seeing enough Minsky and Two of everything, I note paranoid speculation about Marcel’s director, John Durick. I spin disjointed theories based on Brecht, Baudrillard, Heidegger, and laboriously explore the theatrical relationship between material reality, performance and process. I dive down a rabbit hole of German Expressionist costumes and forget what I’m looking for. Finally, I look down and see that I’ve managed to almost reverse engineer the scripts for all three movies. In short, I have achieved nothing at all. I’m Charlie Day and I’m putting together a conspiracy theory that spans decades.

When I finally realize what to do – without giving too much away, it’s about being strategically handy with the scrubber mechanic – I surf through the rest of Immortality on a feverish mission to find hidden images. The game’s meta-story is an attempt to distill the most prominent themes in Marcel’s films: identity, sacrifice, duality and the dialectical relationship between art and order. (Sometimes it’s kinda gnostic.) Most things feel important and connected because Immortality is exceptionally good at creating layers of complexity while hiding a very simple (and predictable after a certain point) truth about the way people make myths. Even when it drove me crazy Immortality just wouldn’t get out of my head. I can’t say I enjoyed my time searching for Marissa Marcel, but I love how beautifully it integrated the player into the processes of viewing and filmmaking.

A crew member starts a scene in Immortality

Image: Half Mermaid Productions via Polygon

To the “endgame” (which doesn’t really apply to this experimental structure), Immortality begins to lose its shine. As soon as I can answer the question (usually) What happened to Marissa Marcel? sanding the clips becomes more of a chore than a pleasure. But as the game unfolds through the vehicle of film, there is an innate urge to “complete” any film, as this is the only way we can fully envision or know a film. My enthusiasm starts to wane after flipping through scenes I’ve watched dozens of times.

I manage to get a few more gems out, but after a certain point the endless clicking offers less and less return. From a practical standpoint, my rhythmic search for untried match cuts is starting to slow down simply because I’m out of objects. To credit, like the reproving weight of a cat’s paw on my arm, Immortality gently suggests that maybe I’ve seen enough, meaning I have to draw a line and accept the limits of what I’ve learned. Since this is a game that draws so much attention to the process, it makes sense to be somewhat self-conscious of how monotonous it can be.

What Immortality doing exceptionally well is combining my lifelong love of lavish historical drama, a genuine commitment to classy production values ​​(yes, I love all wigs), and a very specific kind of slow, neurotic mystery. Immortality felt most alive the moments I was looking for crumbs, even trying the most obvious combinations of Film 101 symbolism for match cuts. When I finally came across the scene showing what happened to the ‘real’ Marissa Marcel, it raised a lot more questions than answers, while also reminding me that resolutions are just constructs. My biggest source of frustration, however, was the tonal discrepancy between the meta-story and the three films. Even when Immortality tried to avoid over-exposure, the lengthy digressions in the backstory felt, in some ways, like betrayal, or at the very least, enormous self-ownership. After all, I wanted to find Marissa Marcel. (On a small practical note, I wasn’t a big fan of the minimalist UI filters – the “movie” and “image” go without saying, but I still have no idea what the third funnel icon does.)

A scene from a movie in a cemetery in Immortality

Image: Half Mermaid Productions via Polygon

Because of the non-linear story, Immortality has no real approach to closure – something I’ve come to respect given how conditioned we are to expect some sort of ending, however unsatisfactory or abrupt. After working myself into a useless foam to solve Marissa Marcel’s problem and becoming fluent in the game’s visual language, I had found myself in the impenetrable black box. I take my hat off to you Immortality for how insidiously it deconstructs our collective expectations about the most important thing conclusion. I started out as a total ignorance, and eventually fulfilled my destiny with all my heart as a devoted Marissa Marcel fan, even though she spends Two of everything in a straw-like wig that makes Elizabeth Holmes look like a Pantene commercial.

Finally walking away feels like taking out my own role in this strange theater, even if I haven’t exposed every bit of footage or stripped every scene of subtext and meaning. Sometimes a cat is just a cat. Sometimes a gargoyle is just a small statue. Immortality know how much you want to know more, and it leans into your hunger.

Using this fan-like thirst for knowledge as authority and authenticity – even if it occasionally undermines the stories – the game also creates an easy choice for the curious outsider: to play or not to. Immortality embodies the most alluring features of the “if you know, you know” meme – there is no short summary for a politely interested stranger who can adequately summarize the question What happened to Marissa Marcel? The only way to fully appreciate the scope of this project, flaws and all, is to throw all expectations of story and structure out the window, and realize that the simplistic division between film and games keeps us from doing so much more. to do with either medium.

Immortality will be released on August 30 on Windows PC, Mac, Xbox Series X, iOS and Android. The game has been reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Half Mermaid Productions. Vox Media has affiliated partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commission on products purchased through affiliate links. you can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.