When you play Immortality, you want to take a lot of notes.
It is typical for people who review things, be it movies or games, to take notes. When I’m playing a video game for review, I either have my notebook next to me or a blank notepad in which I write down my thoughts, come up with puzzle solutions, or start my draft. Normally I have about four pages of notes. For Immortality, the new game from Half Mermaid Productions and founder Sam Barlow, I had 12, excluding all the in-game tools I used to track the moments I wanted to remember. I wanted to take apart every part of this game, write down every seemingly crucial quote, and create my own timeline of events.
Immortality is a stunningly complex and compact game that encourages intense engagement. There are multiple layers to figuring out what happened to actress Marissa Marcel, who made three films that never got released and then disappeared, and you’ll want to pay attention.
As you look at footage compiled from those three films, along with glimpses of rehearsals and her life outside of acting, you begin to piece together an almost mythical story about the Hollywood machine, how far people will go for their art, and how fleeting it all can be. It’s a story that’s been told before, but never in such an ambitious and delicate way.
Disclaimer: This review was made possible by a review code from Half Mermaid Productions. The company did not see the content of the review before it was published.
How to play Immortality
If you’ve never played a Barlow game, the split story structure might not click right away. You start with one snippet of the story, and through context and other clues, you’ll find more visuals that you can use to summarize what happened. It is a concept he has used in previous games such as Her Story and Telling Lies, and it allows the player to develop their own interpretations of events and explore them in their own way.
| Developer | Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid Productions | |
| Publisher | Half Mermaid Productions | |
| Genre | Psychological Horror/Point and Click Adventure | |
| Game Size | 30GB | |
| Playtime | 5-10 hours | |
| players | A player | |
| Platforms | Xbox Series X|S, PC, Mac, Android, iOS | |
| Xbox Game Pass | Yes | |
| Introductory price | $20 | |
| Publication date | Aug 30, 2022 |
A big part of playing these games isn’t necessarily about: experienced a story but rather building one, which contributes to a unique sense of interactivity. In previous games, you discovered clips by searching databases with keywords. Immortality changes things by creating a system inspired by a Moviola, one of the first machines used for film editing in the early 20th century that allowed the user to see the film as they edited. It creates a more intimate setting than something like the FBI database in Telling Lies.
Instead of using text, you link clips by clicking on objects and people in the clips themselves. It’s an improvement because it’s faster than typing keywords, but it also helps the player build connections much faster. It’s also more impactful to click a gun in one scene, see it reappear in another, and figure out what it literally and figuratively means than typing in “gun” and seeing where you end up. It feels seamless and more natural, even if you jump years ahead in time or to a movie or scene that initially seems out of place.
With Immortality, you start with one clip – a seemingly pointless talk show segment with Marissa talking about her upcoming movie. The tutorial shows you the match-cutting mechanic, and then you go to the races. You’re put in the editor’s chair, just as you were put in the role of an investigator in Barlow’s previous titles, and you’re shown a grid of every piece of footage you’ve discovered. You can favorite or sort clips by different elements (date, symbol, etc.), but you don’t get any other guidance, which makes sense. Over time, the game and the story will naturally come together.
Let’s go to the movies
As you jump from clip to clip, from film footage to video diary to rehearsal, Marissa Marcel’s world expands. You will meet John Durick, a director of photography turned real director who becomes a constant in Marissa’s life; Carl Greenwood, an actor who is a little out of his depth; and Amy Archer, an actress who always seems like her mind is elsewhere. You meet extras, body doubles, talk show hosts and a mysterious blond couple, and not only see how Marissa’s life plays out, but also the three films in her filmography take shape.
It helps that the cast is full of incredible actors, although Manon Gage, who plays Marissa, is just as powerful and mysterious as the character she plays. The game also treats these movies as if they were real, so much so that you can find them all on IMDb.
Ambrosio, Minsky and Two of Everything are so vastly different that it seems impossible that one actress can tackle them all. Ambrosio is an Alfred Hitchcock-inspired erotic drama adapted from the 18th-century novel The Monk (which, if you’re not in the know, is worth a read on Wikipedia if you have the time) about a monk’s deal with Satan. Minsky is a 1970s new-wave detective noir about a cop and an artist. Finally, there’s Two of Everything, a 90s psychological thriller about a pop star and her hued Mulholland Drive body double.
These films not only traverse three different eras in cinema – with ever-changing aspect ratios – but also act as plot devices themselves. The game is drowning in symbolism and deliberate choice, and if you return to previously discovered clips (and you want to), it all comes together in such a complete way. It almost feels unfair when the realization sinks in why exactly these three films were chosen because it feels so obvious. Of course Barlow, who has explored the concept of double identities before in his work, would make a movie about body doubles! Why didn’t I notice earlier how the game draws parallels to Ambrosio?
It almost feels unfair when the realization sinks in why exactly these three films were chosen because it feels so obvious.
Even without the in-depth analysis, the player gets a lot out of watching these movies come together in a way that feels accurate and natural. The actors discuss the blocking, breaking down character interpretations between scenes and picking it up in the middle of the line to move on again. These movies feel fully realized by the time the credits kick in as you get to see so much about the making of them, but the Immortality team has also clearly made sure that the production is portrayed as accurately as possible. It helps that screenwriters like Amelia Gray (Mr. Robot), Allan Scott (The Queen’s Gambit), and Barry Gifford (Lost Highway) contributed to the script and added a lot of authenticity to the proceedings.
This game is both about the love of film and critique of the Hollywood complex. You want Marissa, John and the others to succeed, but as you can guess from the summary, that’s not going to happen.
Is Immortality a horror game?
The press material describes Immortality as a horror game, Barlow’s first since Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and at first you don’t quite understand that label. Sure, the game’s field feels foreboding – what really happened to Marissa Marcel and why isn’t the marketing revealing much at all? – but there isn’t much for the first hour or so of the game running in horror territory.
The game has no jump scares or large amounts of blood, but it is full of creeping fear, a feeling that just off the screen, something will tickle the part of your brain that detects normality and fill you with discomfort. It feels like every clip has an aspect that feels just that little bit less. Marissa might be looking at the camera in a way that feels like she’s looking by means of it, or some other character might give her a strange look if she’s not paying attention. These are things you might not pick up on unconsciously at first, but the game has already primed you to start looking for clues. A clip may seem insignificant if it only shows actors reading through a script, but you may notice one of these minuscule elements and wonder what’s coming next. You may not notice them at all.
However, as you discover more and more footage and events begin to fall into place, Immortality becomes something sinister. The layers peel away and you start to see the real game come to light in a way that is somehow both jarring and gradual. Marissa remains the epicenter, but it’s also about the player and the philosophy. At some point you realize you’ve been kept in limbo, and what you do with that reveal will become an almost entirely different game after the first few hours. Go back to clips you’ve already watched and you’ll realize they’re full of foreshadowing and symbolism. It’s the ultimate story within a story, but you had no idea it was coming.
As you discover more and more footage and events begin to fall into place, Immortality becomes something sinister.
In a way, Immortality is a subversion of Barlow’s previous titles. If you’ve played Her Story of Telling Lies, you might jump right into the familiarity of Immortality knowing that all you need to do is find the right clip to continue in what is a straightforward story. But the game wants to overwhelm you. It wants you to start building the story so it can introduce new and surprising mechanics and help you rethink linearity and reality. The setup becomes more artificial and you start to wonder if what you saw was a trick of the camera or just something you missed in a previous clip. Barlow’s games have always involved the player in some way, such as as an investigator with an actual reflection on the screen, but Immortality takes that to the next level.
How much you are involved is, of course, limited. What can you do in the face of something beyond your control and understanding?
Should you play Immortality?
Immortality is something special, a game that is dripping with atmosphere and dripping ambition. You rarely see video games like this, with not one but three stories that feel fully realized. It feels like watching three separate movies tied together by a truly enigmatic actress and the people she has drawn to her.
In addition to the game’s physical broad reach, it also manages to overcome both the tragic and the terrible, the real and the meta-real. It tackles so much during its run time (I rolled credits in six hours, but your mileage may vary), and it’s shocking to discover where the game is headed. Whatever you think immortality is – literal immortality, immortality in art and fame, the game itself – it’s so much more. It’s more than so many of the best Xbox or PC games available right now and arguably one of the best games of the year.
Immortality is now available on Xbox Series X|S, PC, Mac, Android and iOS. It is now also available on Xbox Game Pass.
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