Immortality Review: An Experimental Bridge Between Film and Video Games

At 2am on a Thursday morning, I’m swinging at my computer in the dark, my face bathed in the aseptic light Your history the new game from creator Sam Barlow, immortality. On screen, the camera is fixed on the flawless porcelain complexion of forgotten actress Marissa Marcel (played by Manon Gage), naked and bathed in a warm, almost hellish light. “Are you ready for some satanic fuck?” she asks, walking off the script and eliciting raucous laughter from her off-screen crew. I’m not quite in the market for this, but I am am ready to be fucked by the film’s unpredictable magic.

It did not last long immortality to bring me back to my job in television. I spent the pre-college summer as a teenage intern dubbing tapes in tiny rooms full of VCRs, watching editors disappear into cocooning Avid suites, where they spent hours sifting through raw footage (Avid technology replaced Moviola machines, one of which immortality draws his scrub Mechanic). There was something beautiful and mysterious to watch – to be on the edge of that enigmatic black box, where something went in and something new but familiar came out. So being immersed in it for 22 hours is equal parts frustrating and intriguing immortality and still feel like it; For days since playing the game, every prop, wig, and gesture lived in my mind like it was my job.

immortality revolves around Marcel, who, according to the game’s fiction, was picked out of an audition of thousands by a prominent director in the 1960s. She made three films: Ambrosio (1968), Minsky (1970) and Two of everything (1999). No one was released and she disappeared. The game is presented as special software designed to showcase Marcel’s recently unearthed work and allow fans to analyze her films and behind-the-scenes clips. The essence is to use match cuts – transitional cuts between objects with similar themes or structural compositions – to explore Marcel’s films and find out what happened to her. For example, click on a cat sculpture Minsky jumps in to footage of the cat Two of everything; an abstract figure image can lead to a mask or an actor’s face. “Successful” match cuts and their subsequent reveals will unlock new clips.

Ambrosio is a giallo-style sexual thriller based on the (true) gothic novel The monk, with beautiful matte painted backgrounds. In crime noir MinskyMarcel takes a page from the shaggy Jane Fonda clute, adopting the same sly, nervous demeanor that ensnares her straight-laced detective love interest. And in Two of everythingShe plays both a world-famous pop star and her body double, whose life together is irrevocably destroyed. With a few clicks on the right hotspots, I can whiz from freshly minted Marcel in novice monk’s garb to older, world-weary Marcel (who hasn’t aged a day) at Doc Martens.

Right from the start, I put energy into analyzing every scene and scrap of subtext. My initial Type A reaction is to take copious color-coded notes on all three films. After watching Ambrosio‘s apparent Alfred Hitchcock equivalent, Arthur Fischer, I’m contemplating digging up my old Truffaut and Spoto books from a college film class I barely remember. One interview, in which Fischer has his hand meaningfully around Marcel’s neck, screams “a celebrated author nurturing a young girl.” After I’ve seen enough Minsky and Two of everything, I note paranoid speculation about Marcel’s director, John Durick. I spin incoherent theories based on brecht, Baudrillard, Heidegger, and painstakingly question the theatrical relationship between material reality, performance and process. I walk down a rabbit hole of German Expressionist costume and forget what I’m looking for. Finally I look down and see that I’ve almost managed to reverse engineer the scripts for all three films. In short, I have achieved absolutely nothing. I’m Charlie Day create a conspiracy theory that extends over decades.

When I finally get my head around what I need to do—without giving too much away, it’s all about strategizing with the scrubbing mechanics—I surf through the rest of immortality on a feverish mission to find hidden footage. The game’s meta-story is an attempted distillation of the key themes in Marcel’s films: identity, sacrifice, duality, and the dialectical relationship between art and order. (Sometimes it’s more like gnostic.) Most things feel important and connected because immortality is exceptionally good at creating complex layers while hiding a very simple (and at some point predictable) truth about the way humans make myths. Even if it drove me insane immortality I just couldn’t get it out of my head. I can’t say I loved my time looking for Marissa Marcel, but I love it with all my heart how nicely it integrated the player into the process of watching and filmmaking.

As for the “endgame” (which doesn’t really apply to this experimental structure), immortality begins to lose its luster. Once I can (mostly) answer the question What happened to Marissa Marcel? Browsing through the clips becomes more of a chore than a pleasure. But as the game unfolds through the film, there is an innate urge to ‘finish’ each film, as this is the only way we can imagine fully experiencing or knowing a film. My enthusiasm wanes after flipping through scenes I’ve watched dozens of times.

I manage to snag a few more gems, but at a certain point the endless clicking offers diminishing returns. From a practical point of view, simply because I’ve run out of objects, my rhythmic search for untried cuts is beginning to slow down. To his honor, like the reproving weight of a cat’s paw on my arm, immortality gently suggests that maybe I’ve seen enough, which means drawing a line and accepting the limits of what I’ve learned. Since this is a game that draws so much attention to the process, it makes sense that it’s self-aware of how monotonous it can be.

What immortality It’s exceptionally good at balancing my lifelong love of opulent period drama, an unwavering commitment to stylish production values ​​(yes, I love all wigs), and a very specific brand of slow-moving, neurotic mysteries. immortality I felt most alive in the moments when I was looking for crumbs, even when trying out the most obvious Film 101 match cut symbol combinations. When I finally came across the scene that showed what happened to the “real” Marissa Marcel, it raised far more questions than answers, while also reminding me that resolutions are just constructions. My biggest frustration, however, was the sonic discrepancy between the meta-story and the three films. Even if immortality Trying to avoid overexposure, its lengthy digressions into backstory felt in some ways like a betrayal, or at least a big one of its own. Ultimately, I wanted to find Marissa Marcel. (A little practical note: I wasn’t a big fan of the minimalist UI filters – the “Movie” and “Image” filters go without saying, but I still have no idea what the third funnel icon does.)

Because of its non-linear narrative immortality has no real approach to ending – something I’ve come to respect, given how conditioned we are to expect an ending, no matter how unsatisfactory or abrupt. After working my way into a useless foam to solve Marissa Marcel’s problem and becoming fluent in the game’s visual language, I had made it into the impenetrable black box. I take off my hat immortality for how insidiously it deconstructs our collective expectations of what matters most Conclusion. I started out as a total ignoramus and ended up fully fulfilling my destiny as a devoted fan of Marissa Marcel, despite spending a lot of money Two of everything in a straw-like wig that makes Elizabeth Holmes looks like a Pantene ad.

Finally walking away feels like ending my own role in this strange theater, though I failed to uncover every scrap of footage or dry-milk every scene devoid of subtext and meaning. Sometimes a cat is just a cat. Sometimes a gargoyle is just a small statue. immortality knows how badly you want to know more, and it leans on your hunger.

By exploiting this fanatic thirst for knowledge as authority and authenticity — while it occasionally undermines the storytelling — the game also creates an easy choice for the curious outsider: either play or not. immortality embodies the most alluring traits of the “if you know, you know” meme – there’s no quick summary for a politely interested stranger to adequately summarize the question What happened to Marissa Marcel? The only way to fully appreciate the scope of this project, with all its shortcomings, is to jettison all expectations of story and structure and realize that the simplistic separation between film and games keeps us from doing so much more with either to do means.

immortality will be released on August 30th on Windows PC, Mac, Xbox Series X, iOS and Android. The game was verified on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Half Mermaid Productions. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.