When playing Immortality, you’ll want to take a lot of notes.
It’s typical for people who review things, whether it’s movies or games, to take notes. When I’m playing a video game for review, I have my notebook by my side or a blank notepad document where I write down my thoughts, figure out puzzle solutions, or start planning my outline. Normally, I will have about four pages of notes. For Immortality, the new game from Half Mermaid Productions and founder Sam Barlow, he had 12, not including all the in-game tools he used to track down the moments he wanted to remember. I wanted to take apart every piece of this game, write down every seemingly crucial quote, and create my own timeline of events.
Immortality is an amazingly complex and dense game that encourages intense engagement. There are multiple layers to peel back to find out what happened to actress Marissa Marcel, who made three movies that were never released and then disappeared, and you’ll want to pay attention.
As you view collected footage from those three films, along with glimpses of rehearsals and his life outside of acting, you’ll begin to piece together an almost mythical story about the Hollywood machine, the lengths people will go to for their art, and how fleeting everything can be. It is a story that has been told before, but never in such an ambitious and delicate way.
Disclaimer: This review was made possible by a review code provided by Half Mermaid Productions. The company did not see the content of the review before publishing it.
How to play Immortality
If you’ve never played a Barlow game before, the fragmented narrative structure may not work right away. You start with a clip from the story, and through context and other clues, you find more footage that you can use to piece together what happened. It’s a concept she used in previous games like Her Story and Telling Lies, and it allows the player to develop their own interpretations of the events and explore them in her own way.
| developer | Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid Productions | |
| Editor | Half Mermaid Productions | |
| Gender | Psychological horror/adventure point-and-click | |
| game size | 30GB | |
| Game time | 5-10 hours | |
| players | single player | |
| platforms | Xbox Series X|S, PC, Mac, Android, iOS | |
| xbox game pass | Yes | |
| launch price | $20 | |
| Release date | August 30, 2022 |
A big part of playing these games isn’t necessarily about experiencing a story but rather building one, which contributes to a unique sense of interactivity. Previous games had you discover clips by searching databases using keywords. Immortality changes things up by creating a system inspired by the Moviola, which was one of the first machines used for film editing in the early 20th century that allowed the user to view the film while editing it. It creates a more intimate setting than something like the FBI database in Telling Lies.
Instead of using text, connect clips by clicking objects and people on the clips themselves. It’s an improvement because it’s faster than typing keywords, but it also helps the player make connections much faster. It’s also more impactful to click on a gun in one scene, see it reappear somewhere else, and figure out what it means both literally and figuratively than it is to type “gun” and see where you end up. It feels more fluid and natural, even if you jump years in time or to a movie or scene that initially feels out of place.
With Immortality, it will start with a clip: a seemingly goofy talk show segment with Marissa where she talks about her upcoming movie. The tutorial shows you the match cutting mechanics, and then you’re off to the races. You are placed in the editor’s chair, just as you were placed in the role of investigator in previous Barlow titles, and presented with a grid of every piece of footage that he has discovered. He can bookmark clips or sort them by different elements (date, symbol, etc.), but he doesn’t get any other guidance, which makes sense. Over time, the game and the story will come together on their own.
Let’s go to the cinema
As she jumps from clip to clip, from movie footage to video diary to rehearsal, Marissa Marcel’s world expands. You meet John Durick, a cinematographer turned real director who becomes a constant in Marissa’s life; Carl Greenwood, an actor who is a bit out of her league; and Amy Archer, an actress who always seems to have her mind elsewhere. You meet extras, stuntmen, talk show hosts, and a mysterious blonde couple, and watch not only Marissa’s lifeline, but also how the three films in her filmography take shape.
It helps that the cast is packed with incredible actors, though Manon Gage, who plays Marissa, is every bit 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.
Ambrose, Minsky and Two of Everything are so wildly different that it feels impossible for one actress to tackle them all. Ambrose is an Alfred Hitchcock-inspired erotic drama adapted from the 18th-century novel The Monk (which, if you don’t know, is worth reading on Wikipedia if you have the time) about a monk’s deal with Satan. Minsky is a 1970s novelty detective noir about a cop and an artist. Finally, there’s Two of Everything, a 1990s psychological thriller about a pop star and her shadowy body double from Mulholland Drive.
Not only do these films traverse three distinct eras in cinema, with ever-changing aspect ratios, they also function as plot devices. The game is drowning in symbolism and purposeful decisions, and when you go back to previously discovered clips (and you’ll want to), it all comes together in such a complete way. It almost feels unfair when you realize why exactly these three movies were chosen because it feels so obvious. Of course, Barlow, who has explored the concept of double identities in his work before him, would make a movie about body doubles! Why didn’t I realize earlier how the game draws parallels with Ambrose?
It almost feels unfair when you realize why exactly these three movies were chosen because it feels so obvious.
Even without the deep analysis, the player gets a lot out of just seeing how these movies are put together in ways that feel accurate and natural. The actors discuss the block, break down the character’s performances between scenes, and pick up the readings in the middle of the line to continue. These films feel fully realized by the time the credits roll because you see so much going into their making, but the team at Immortality also clearly took it upon themselves to represent the production as accurately as possible. It helps that writers 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 as much about the love of cinema as it is about a critique of the Hollywood complex. You want Marissa, John and the others to succeed, but as you can guess from the synopsis, that’s not going to happen.
Is Immortality a horror game?
Press materials describe Immortality as a horror game, Barlow’s first since Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and at first, you don’t quite get that label. Sure, the tone of the game feels ominous: what really happened to Marissa Marcel, and why isn’t the marketing revealing much? – but there’s not much for the first hour or so that makes the game turn into horror territory.
The game has no jump scares or copious amounts of gore, but it’s full of creeping dread, a feeling that just out of frame, something will tickle the part of your brain that detects normalcy and fill you with discomfort. It seems like every clip has some aspect that feels a little out of place. Marissa might look toward the camera in a way that she feels like she is looking through he, or another character might give you a weird look when you’re not paying attention. These are things that you may not notice unconsciously at first, but the game has already prepared you to be on the lookout for clues. A clip might seem inconsequential if it just shows actors reading from a script, but you might notice one of these tiny elements and wonder what’s to come. You may not notice them at all.
However, as he uncovers more and more footage and events begin to fall into place, Immortality turns into something more sinister. The layers peel back and you start to see the real game come out in a way that is somewhat jarring and gradual. Marissa is still the epicenter, but it’s also about the player and the philosophy. At one point, you realize you’ve been kept in the dark, and what you do with that revelation will inform what becomes an almost entirely different game after the first few hours. Go back to the clips you’ve already seen and you’ll find that they are full of foreshadowing and symbolism. It’s the latest story within a story, but you had no idea what was to come.
As he uncovers more and more footage and events begin to fall into place, Immortality turns into something more sinister.
In a way, Immortality is a subversion of Barlow’s previous titles. If you’ve played Her Story or Telling Lies, you may immediately jump into the familiarity of Immortality, knowing that all you need to do is find the right clip to keep moving forward with what is a simple story. But the game wants to catch you off guard. He wants you to start putting the story together so that 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 camera trick or just something you missed from a previous clip. Barlow’s games have always engaged the player in some way, presenting them as an investigator with a real reflection on the screen, for example, but Immortality takes that to the next level.
Of course, how much you are involved is limited. What can you do about something you can’t control and don’t understand?
Should you play immortality?
Immortality is something special, a game full of atmosphere and oozing with ambition. Rarely do you see video games like this, featuring not one but three stories that feel fully realized. It feels like I’m watching three separate movies brought together by one really enigmatic actress and the people he brought in with her.
Beyond the physically wide scope of the game, it also manages to conquer both the tragic and the terrible, the real and the metareal. It tackles a lot during its runtime (I got credits in six hours, but your mileage may vary), and it’s shocking to find out where the game is going. Regardless of what you think immortality can be: literal immortality, immortality in art and fame, the game itself, there is so much more. It’s more than many of the best Xbox or PC games now available and could be one of the best games of the year.
Immortality is available now on Xbox Series X|S, PC, Mac, Android, and iOS. Now also available in xbox game pass.
