My Disturbing Obsession With ‘Immortality’
In his now outdated magnum opus, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker claims that the primary aim of every human cultural endeavor is to obscure the fact that we will all inevitably die one day. However we choose to navigate our lives, we are in vain pursuit, as he suggests, of immortality projects. Fittingly, as I work through the growing pantheon of Sam Barlow’s mind bending FMV games, I’d argue that Immortality, his most recent work, is the greatest game using film footage that Barlow’s team has published – one that will be discussed for years to come. In fact, Immortality might hold this superlative title for the entire genre.
Barlow’s first breakout game, Her Story, is universally loved by my friends and acquaintances who have played it. Her Story has some rough patches, some inconsistencies, some lingering mysteries, but those potential gaps or flaws actually enshrine the game in my memory as a puzzle still to be solved. I have combed through the entire database of footage using a combination of my deductive abilities and an online walkthrough, but seeing everything is not equivalent to a deepened understanding of plot and character. Mysteries remain: is Hannah Smith a woman plagued by multiple personalities, or does she have an identical twin? Discussing the unknowns of Her Story is always engaging, and I think about it often.
A few years later, Annapurna Interactive published Barlow’s next endeavor, Telling Lies, which felt like the same game mechanically, albeit with a broader cast, more complex story, and higher overall production value. Telling Lies, even with its presumably bigger budget and higher profile actors, left virtually no impression on me. Even though I enjoyed the game, I struggle to recall the overall plot in detail. I cannot say this about Immortality, however.
Becoming Obsessed With Immortality
Immortality is one of the most mind bending narratives I’ve consumed in recent memory. Allured by the charismatic actress for the game’s central character, Marissa Marcel, I eagerly devoted entire evenings to the painstaking process of film scrubbing. Unlike Her Story or Telling Lies, the primary game mechanic in Immortality involves clicking around key objects in the game’s film clips. The overall structure of a non-linear narrative of film clips remains a common trait throughout Barlow’s games, but this shift away from a keyword search bar is ultimately a more fatigue-inducing method of piecing together the story. There is no guarantee that you will find everything through brute force as in Telling Lies and Her Story, and I think that additionally embedded ambiguity contributes more to the overall mystery of Immortality than it detracts.
I enjoy the aesthetic decision to present most of the film in a traditional 4:3 ratio, with lighting, saturation, and contrast echoing the fuzzy footage of traditional cinema in Immortality. The game feels as old fashioned as its implied time periods, namely the sixties up through the turn of the millennium. Despite the high quality writing, acting, and cinematography within each clip, Immortality‘s overall presentation is distinctly vintage, a strength that enhances the detachment necessary for mysteries to compel an audience. A slicker presentation would cheapen the tone of Immortality‘s ephemeral ethos. The feeling of visible age and tone that visibly evolves throughout the game captures as much mystery as the ambiguity of the (absent) plot structure and ensnaring acting as well.
My experience playing Immortality might accurately be described as a psychological disturbance. That is, the game unsettled me far more than Barlow’s other work ever did. I would shut down my computer in the waning evening hours, lay down in my bed, and my brain would immediately return to work, trying to assemble a coherent or vaguely linear understanding of the several hours I had just dedicated to the mystery. This mystery bothered me. I needed to figure it out. My eyes would snap open and I would get out of bed, ignoring sleep, eager to find more film clips.
Fragmented Narratives and A Compelling Protagonist
The premise of Immortality is more multifaceted than Barlow’s earlier works as well, stringing together three separate films with the only uniting thread being Marissa Marcel, whose acting career appears never to have taken off due to her three films never making it to release. Whether through directorial decisions, stolen film negatives, or shockingly unfortunate accidents involving the death of on-screen actors, Marissa appears to be cursed in some manner, which becomes apparent rather early on. Thus, even though all three films – Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything respectively – never make it to release, the player is given unfettered access to the film’s copious footage and expected to assemble three simultaneous film narratives out of order while also piecing together clues about the game’s meta story.
Marissa Marcel is the anchor that binds this game together. Not only is her actress, Manon Gage, stunningly beautiful, showcasing impressive acting skills, but Marissa commands every scene in which she appears as the film’s various characters. In Ambrosio, a retelling of “The Monk,” Marissa covertly passes herself as a man to infiltrate a religious convent, seducing a pious monk and corrupting him with witchcraft and sorcery, stripping him of his soul in the process. In Minsky, Marissa plays the coy murder suspect who suspiciously survives the sudden death of a world renowned avant-garde artist, enrapturing a detective and undermining his duty to solve the murder, convicting his killer. In Two of Everything, Marissa plays a pop idol named Maria who employs an identical body double to take the public spotlight off her successful career, freeing her to live in an approximation of normalcy. Each film and character played by Marissa is distinct, memorable, and compelling.
Assembling an Understanding; or, Immortality: Explained
Unfortunately, I hit the credits before assembling a complete understanding of how these three films intersected within Marissa’s life. The clapperboard depicted in most of Immortality’s film clips gives some sense of temporal perspective, revealing that Ambrosio was filmed first and Two of Everything last. But I can’t say with certainty that I even know how I triggered the ending. I had simply started noticing some unusual cues given to me by the game in particular scenes. These scenes didn’t strike me as uniquely different from the other kinds of clips I had been scrubbing through, yet I’d occasionally notice an ominous tone and controller rumble (on the occasion that I wasn’t playing with a mouse) that made me pause. In order to dig deeper into these ominous moments, you must toggle the rewind function at particular intervals of speed, which transforms the scene you are watching into a different scene entirely – albeit usually in the same venue but with different characters.
These ominous alternate scenes featured a character who was distinctly not Marissa Marcel, and yet I’m not sure that I can confidently even say that much – just the actress had changed, often replacing Marissa’s. I cannot overstate how unsettling these alternate scenes were in my experience. Gone was Marissa’s often smiling, sensual presence. Instead was a stoic woman with slicked-back hair, suddenly staring into the camera, right into my soul, weaving a cryptically prosaic observation about existence and her role within it. I can’t confidently say that I found all of these alternate clips, nor do I think I watched them in any intended order. But once I realized there was a ghost in the machine, Immortality became a psychological horror game as much as a mystery.
I have to admit that I fell in love with Immortality because of Marissa. Including her obvious flaws, the dubious projects she worked on, and the unsettling nature of many of her character moments, it was the rare moment where I felt myself massively crushing on her. The game clearly wants to titilate with her presence, from rouged lips to explicit sex scenes, and I completely fell for it. My adolescent naivety made the bizarre alternate scenes disturb me far more than if I had simply felt like a detached observer.
Digging Through Footage After The Credits Roll
The post-game realizations astonished me. The credits rolled around eight hours into my playthrough, but I couldn’t stop there. My understanding was obviously limited. I could sense the concentric circles of my ignorance and I wanted to expand my sense of the many interweaving stories transpiring within Immortality. One such resulting moment of clarity was when I picked up on the fact that I had completely missed Carl, the detective from Minsky, being controlled or inhabited by another alternative actor, a pseudo-human who the credits call The Other One, the male partner to The One, who emerges in alternate Marissa scenes. Thus, the scene when Marissa shoots and kills Carl on accident becomes seen in a new light; the scene is a literal embodiment of the metaphorical killing of The Other One as much as it is Carl. One death is tragic while another is deliberate.
Other realizations occurred, like the fact that I had completely missed the budding romantic relationship between Marissa and one of the film directors whose voice appears more than his on-screen presence in outtakes. And at the moment of this writing, I know that I have mysteries yet to solve due to the lack of certain key Steam achievements. Somehow, astonishingly, there is more to be plumbed within Immortality’s depths. At the same time, however, I’m charmed by the fact that I haven’t found everything yet.
Why I Wholeheartedly Recommend Immortality as My Favorite 2022 Game
Immortality is my favorite game of 2022. I cannot believe that is a sentence I can write without caveat, because Elden Ring was such an obviously dominant contender for the past seven months. I didn’t dedicate an entire month of my waking life to Immortality as I did Elden Ring, but I also don’t think the amount of time that you play a game bears a causal relationship with your subjective feelings about it. No doubt, Elden Ring will sweep this year’s game awards, and rightly so – it’s an impossibly vast and compelling game. And if you had asked me whether Immortality had a chance of dethroning Elden Ring for my game of the year choice, I would have laughed at the absurd suggestion. But Immortality hooked my fascination more than any game this year, by far.
I know not everyone will latch onto Immortality as I have. Perhaps my background playing Sam Barlow’s earlier work informed my open-mindedness to picking up Immortality on day one before the internet had its analytical discourse. I also know that many people who play games are skeptical of the FMV real footage genre of game, which may unfortunately be an instant turn-off for many. And the film scrubbing mechanic can be frustratingly repetitive and tedious in places, compared to the prior mechanics present in Barlow’s games. But I believe these excuses are bad reasons to avoid this masterpiece of fiction.
If you love storytelling, you must play Immortality. The game’s interlocking, fragmented narratives challenge the very essence of narrative structure and design. What may initially seem familiar to experienced FMV players quickly interrogates that familiarity, carving out a uniquely uncanny valley between certainty and bewilderment. I marvel at the fact that such a broken array of asynchronous puzzle pieces can arrive at a place of narrative coherence, that the character study of Marissa Marcel succeeds instead of instilling confusion. Immortality is thus a game that will live inside me for years to come.
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