Title: Immortality
Author(s): Sam Barlow
Publisher: Half Mermaid
Year: 2022
But no, really, it’s a video game, though maybe not by everyone’s definition. As far as gameplay is concerned, you’re basically just scrubbing through video clips on a Final Cut-esque timeline. You can fast-forward and rewind the clips, you can slow them down and speed them up, and most crucially, you can click on any object within a clip, whereupon you are immediately and seamlessly linked to another appearance of that object (or something very similar to it) in another clip. This is the mechanism by which Immortality tells its story, though there’re some other interesting mechanisms to explore as well - I’ll leave those to you to find on your own, as this game really is all about the thrill of discovery.
The narrative conceit of Immortality is that you have uncovered the raw footage from three lost films starring also-lost actress Marissa Marcel. The films are:
- Ambrosio, a lusty 1960s take on Matthew Lewis’s gothic ur-text The Monk.
- Minsky, a Warhol-cum-Cassavetes detective thriller set in 1970s New York.
- Two of Everything, a late 90s doppelgänger murder mystery - think Mulholland Drive as interpreted by Christina Aguilera.
This isn’t a game that requires any particular skill, or even any familiarity with other games of any genre or era. It’s an essentially entirely unique experience, with the only similar game I’ve ever encountered being creator Sam Barlow’s earlier release, Her Story. While I would consider myself to be “someone who likes video games”, in practice I like very little of what gets released by AAA studios, and many indie titles bore me as well. I have a categorical hatred of first-person perspectives, I don’t like war, and jump-scare horror (better called “startling”) leaves me completely cold. Immortality is exactly the kind of thing I love to discover, where games are concerned, and comes with my highest recommendation.