Immortality is a great game. The latest FMV title from Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story and Telling Lies, is innovative, disturbing and captivating. It’s a huge step forward from Barlow, vastly expanding the scope of his previous games, with a sprawling cast starring in three radically different films. It’s great, and you can read so much in my review. But the one thing I was most excited about following Immortality’s pre-launch is a bit of a let down.
The trailer shown at this year’s PC Gaming Show featured a screen that read “Match cut your way into mystery”, before showing a few samples of the mechanic in action. The player clicks on a cross chain, held right side up, and the camera zooms in on it and then zooms out to reveal another cross, in the same direction, composed of Polaroids. The trailer does something similar with its characters, zooming in on Marissa Marcel, rotated to the right and transitioning to another shot of her where she’s also rotated to the right.
In short, I find the use of the term “match cut” and the samples selected for the trailer a bit misleading. A match cut, in film, is a transition from one shot to another shot with a similar composition. For a famous example, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a monkey throws a bone in the air, it spins through the air, and as it begins to come down, director Stanley Kubrick slices at a satellite in space. The satellite, like the bone, is located in the center frame. It has a long, straight shape, just like the bone. And Kubrick broaches it the moment the trajectory of the bone’s rotation would reach the same angle that the satellite is. So while the two shots use different colors and different props, the objects in the shot are positioned so that the two shots feel intrinsically linked.
This connection can be used to communicate many ideas. It could tell us that no matter how far technological progress is, from the primitive tools of our evolutionary ancestors to the pinnacle of human invention, it will always have the potential to be used for violence. It could tell us that people will always be prone to barbarism, no matter how civilized we consider ourselves. It could tell us, through the use of sky in both shots, that despite the vast amount of time separating the two epochs shown, our existence is insignificant in the face of the natural world. This is the power of a matchcut. The repetition of the composition allows it to convey ideas much larger than the two shots it could reveal on its own.
That’s why the way Immortality uses its “match cut” mechanism is so disappointing. Instead of the transitions between shots conveying ideas, they often don’t communicate anything except that the object or character is in both shots. In one scene, a boom mic penetrated the top of the recording, so I clicked on it. This brought me to another scene, where a microphone was sitting on a table, at the bottom of the recording. That’s not a matchcut, that’s just the same general type of item in two shots. Since, without giving too much away, some characters are not what they appear to be at first, clicking on an actor can be more enlightening. But transitions loaded with that kind of meaning are vastly outnumbered by transitions that don’t seem to mean much.
Is it even possible to make a game that alternates between actual match cuts? I think so, but who knows? Putting together such a game would require a lot of planning (and Immortality is already an unimaginably complex game). In addition, it can simply result in many scenes with similar compositions. It might just be boring and repetitive and Immortality might not be a better game if it actually uses match cuts. As it is, the system in the game is a big improvement over the ones in Her Story and Telling Lies as it pushes players to be concerned with the images that make up a movie, not the words we need to reduce to talk about it. But I’m still hopeful that Barlow and the team at Half Mermaid eventually make a game that does what they said Immortality would do.
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