GAME CLEAR No. 202 -- Immortality

Immortality (2022, Multiplatform)

Developer: Sam Barlow
Publisher: Half Mermaid Productions
Clear Version: PS5
Clear Platform: PS5
Clear Date: 12/8/24

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Why should I care?
Poring over found footage has never been more fun, and maybe the plot will land better for you than it did me.

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Hearts on fire

Back at it with Sam Barlow’s third game, Immortality. Still iterating on his ideas from Her Story (and the intervening game Telling Lies), Barlow has brought us another game about sifting through a bunch of live-action video to try to solve a mystery. In this case, he wants us answer one burning question: “what happened to Marissa Marcel?” By introducing compelling new mechanics, Barlow succeeds in making the same basic idea exciting a third time over, but I’m not sure the answer I got to this game’s central question satisfied me like I had hoped it might.

When the game starts, it introduces us to fictional actor Marissa Marcel. She is mostly famous for having been cast in and filmed the majority of three motion pictures, none of which were ever actually released. Her relative lack of public appearances combined to make her a rather interesting figure around whom a number of fan/conspiracy theories arose.

Now, at long last, all of the footage from her films has been released and dumped into your hands, dear player, and it’s your job to figure out what the hell happened. But wait! Oh no! A glitch has occurred and now you’ve only got access to one clip, one of Marcel’s appearances on a Johnny Carson-esque talk show promoting her first film, Ambrosio.

All is not lost, though. The game then explains its central mechanic, which is that while watching any clip, you can move your cursor to select any object or person of interest in any frame. Doing so will jump you to a frame in another clip in the body of work that features that same object or person or someone or something similar. Selecting the Carson stand-in, for instance, jumps to an appearance on the show years later by Marcel’s director. Selecting the mug on his desk jumps to a table read from one of Marcel’s films. You get the idea. Each time you do this, the game also saves the exact from you jumped from to a big image board in case that’s useful to you later for connecting dots.

I found this utterly compelling and loved the surprise factor of finding out where something might lead. If there was any downside, it was that I could sometimes get four or five clips deep before remembering I should probably actually watch some of them instead of just continuing to jump around. Doing that is fun too. Barlow’s effort to make the scenes from each film look era-appropriate is evident, and it’s fun to find out what each film is even about in the piecemeal way the game forces you to. The acting and production values are also quite high; this is a rare FMV game in which I never felt the need to set my normal expectations aside. It just looks great and seems like it was made by people that know something, anything, about shooting a film. That’s really cool, and it’s something I hope we will continue to see in the world of FMV games.

As you peruse the frankly massive number of clips from Marcel’s career, you’ll notice some of them on your big board are glowing. This is the game’s not-so-subtle hint that there’s something worth investigating there. Without spoiling much, I’ll just say that examining these clips reveals something unusual and perhaps supernatural is afoot here.

Unfortunately, that’s also where things go a bit off the rails, at least as far as my tastes are concerned. It’s pretty evident from the outset that the game is trying to say something about the film industry (and the creative process in general), why people get involved in it, the misogynistic forces at play therein, et cetera, but I’m not sure Immortality really sticks the landing with the way it chooses to go about that. I think there are more grounded ways it could’ve handled it that would have worked better for me personally. It’s a game that wants us to think about human nature yet ultimately undercuts its very protagonist’s importance.

To Barlow’s credit, Her Story was fairly grounded in reality, so maybe he wanted to do something different here. It just didn’t really work for me. The game reviewed well broadly, so obviously some people found his angle effective. Just too bad for me that I didn’t.

I still think it’s by far the most competently-acted and shot FMV game I’ve ever seen. It’s really not close. And the scene-jumping mechanic is absolutely awesome. But when something so narrative-driven doesn’t really hit home so well narratively, that’s a problem!

It’s weird to come away from both of Barlow’s critical darlings being kind of underwhelmed by the writing. They both provide very clever, original ways to interact with FMV, but boy does my heart not sing for the the execution of their respective mysteries. “What happened to Marissa Marcel” is pretty unsatisfying, but at least the journey was pretty cool.