‘Immortality’ Is a Masterpiece

Disclosure: A producer on Immortality, Natalie Watson, previously worked at Waypoint and occasionally still contributes to Waypoint as a podcast and stream host.

Immortality, like all of Sam Barlow’s games, is about the fickle reality of databases. Like Her Story and Telling Lies, Immortality tasks players with scrubbing through huge amounts of visual information in order to resolve a self-directed mystery: who is Marissa Marcel, and what happened to her? The answer can only be found by digging through an impressive amount of visual material, clicking slowly through it and moving back and forth along the tape reels to assemble timelines, relationships, and what Marissa Marcel wanted or needed from her long life as a film star.

If it sounds like labor, it is, but as a fan of Barlow’s previous work I can honestly tell you that this is the best executed, and most cleverly conceived, that it gets. Immortality is a masterpiece, full stop, and I’ve been thinking about it constantly since I “finished” it a few days ago. 

Of course, what it means to be “finished” in one of these games is always up in the air, and if you’re not familiar then you probably need a rundown. Her Story gave you a massive database of interview footage and you had to make a determination of what occurred during a crime; Telling Lies dumped a massive drive of video calls and demanded you create a linear narrative of what actually happened in a tangled political event between police and activists. While those games had credit sequences that rolled eventually, they never really told you when you were “done” – using their database management techniques, which were largely keyword-based, you could pull a truly impressive amount of visual information to help you make your own conclusions about what happened in their pasts.

Immortality contains a true innovation in the design of the Barlow game, which is the “match cut,” which allows you to click on individual images in a scene and discover other scenes in the game’s database that have similar images in them. A screaming face in one shot might take you to a mouth opened in pleasure in another; clicking on a lightbulb might take you to a candelabra. The use of the image itself, rather than keywords, presents a unique affordance of Immortality, if only because it demands that players actually pay attention to what visual motifs and images are on the screen in front of them. In this way, Immortality becomes an investigation into the transformations in film style, and the concerns of 20th century film, as much as it is about trying to directly resolve a mystery.

As an aside, before I go any further: my film brain was absolutely lit on fire by the use of “match cut” here for many, many things that are not match cuts. I can’t help it. It’s a good word for a mechanic, but a bad word to describe what actually happens visually in the game. I have to say it!

The database of films scenes that the player is navigating in Immortality are set across the last half of the 20th century, looking at the work of actress Marcel in 1968’s Ambrosio (a Hammer film mixed with Euro art cinema about a tempted abbott), 1970’s Minsky (a neo noir centered on the New York arts scene), and 1999’s Two of Everything (an uncanny drama somewhere between an Assayas film and Mulholland Drive). Each of these films are in their own little aesthetic universe, neatly closed off from each other, but linked through the acting of Marissa Marcel and the artistic involvement of John Durick, a character who is mysteriously wrapped up in Marcel’s career; she is his muse, but there is obviously more.

Using the match cut mechanic, the game moves seamlessly through these three very-different films. Images repeat across these works, due both to simply recreated objects in the images (paintings, windows, light sources) and the implicit touch of Durick, who moved from cinematographer on Ambrosio to a director of the other two films. I cannot stress enough how much an accomplishment it is that the team at Half Mermaid worked to functionally create three different perfect pastiche films. These movies feel lifted right out of their time and place, and the entire acting crew do an immaculate job at playing up (and down) at the right moments to make three radically different approaches to film aesthetics come to life onscreen.

If this was all this game accomplished, the putting together of three different film types and making sure players could move back and forth to trace performances, it would be enough. It would secure this game as an outstanding accomplishment. However, there’s one additional step.

The scenes in the database are not film scenes. They are entire filmed segments, from the moment when the camera is turned on to the moment when it is switched off. We catch the slate at the top, and we often hear cut at the end. From the perspective of the game’s mystery, that means we learn a little more about these characters than a final film would tell. We see their facial expression before and after action is called; we hear the low voices after the scene is finished and the played-up passion is dead. 

The first moment that I realized that this, the work of finding the margins of film scenes and reading them like tea leaves, was what the game was, I suddenly got chills. It was going behind the curtain and seeing how the machine was made, and realizing that the cogs and circuits of that machine were what I was digging for to begin with. 

This is a game in which the actual process of digging is rewarding in and of itself. Finding the right match cut that takes you to a piece of footage that is not in a film, such as a home movie of a cast party, is thrilling to me in a way that people report defeating Dark Souls bosses is for them. Clicking an on-screen gun at just the right angle to make a match cut to a disturbing scene, caught on camera in a way that it should never have been, opens up an entire world of possible interpretations that drives home both the conceptual connections between the film as well as the practical ones. These actors lived and worked and dreamed and failed together, a set of facts sold so well by the creative team behind this game that at times I forgot that they were all fictional.

One might assume that a game about an actress named Marissa Marcel, and which traces her career, might revolve around her in some way. To be frankly honest, there were whole hours of this game that I was totally uninterested in her or her journey, and it is a compliment to the game that I could be uninterested in her. Durick’s films have shadow characters and recycled themes, and understanding how they connected to each other over more than 20 years drove my curiosity more than anything else. Strangely, one of the reasons I was less invested in Marcel as a character was because I was too busy thinking about the stellar performance of Manon Gage, who plays each period piece film perfectly in a way that I thought for sure would be fumbled. From a pragmatic perspective, watching Gage play Marcel playing these characters is like watching someone juggle while riding a unicycle in the middle of the Indy 500, and she does it perfectly and without breaking a sweat. It’s really something.

The special thing about Sam Barlow games, as anyone who has played them can say, is coming to your own enjoyment. For me, the narrative reveals of the game, even the ones lurking beneath the surface of the outspoken mystery, are not what makes the game such a success. I was intrigued to learn what happened to Marcel, and I won’t say that the culminating revelation wasn’t shocking and delightful. But this was a game where I could absolutely revel in the craftsmanship on every level: the game design, sure, but also the acting, the screenwriting, the directorial choices, and the way that images were linking together in novel ways. Immortality isn’t just firing on all cylinders. It is inventing new kinds of engines that make other attempts at motor transport look childish by comparison.

I’m being very laudatory here, and that’s because I believe in the project. The game is the real god damn deal. It’s a game for adults, not in terms of sex or violence (it has those), but in terms of aims and how it expects you to engage with it as a piece of art. It’s Barlow’s mystery-solving focus finally paired with the scope and scale that makes it sing, and in a way that asks players to rise to a higher interpretive level than the vast majority of video games made in this world. That’s not shocking, I guess, since the “review information” packet came with a long quote from Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition that told us to think of playing the game in terms of “clearing the fog” from any direction rather than to watch it linearly. 

I’d rather like to think of Immortality in terms of Jean Epstein’s analysis of what cinema, and the ordering of images into a film, is. “Underneath the solid world that we know pragmatically,” he wrote, “hide surprises of a scattered reality.” Immortality schematizes a whole host of hidden realities, emotionally, imagistically, and metaphysically, and it’s a rarified joy to experience them so expertly entangled.