Why are we fascinated by the idea of haunted films? Return, again and again, to the idea of a spirit attaching itself to a movie—whether in film itself, or on the internet, where god knows how many creepypastas have been written about “lost episodes,” cursed movies, TV shows, and films that possess a spirit of their own? Is it an acknowledgement of how much creators put themselves into their work? Or a reckoning with the way movies can leech into our very spirits, affect us, or, for lack of a better word … haunt us?
Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid’s new game, Immortality, is all about the way film eludes our defenses, and sneaks dangerous (and possibly unwanted) emotional payloads into our souls. The first outright horror game from the creator of Her Story and Telling Lies, the game purports to be a collection of lost footage from the filmography of Marissa Marcel (Manon Gage), an actress who appeared in three films across a 40-year career—all of them unreleased. Untangling the reasons for the shuttering of each of these projects, and the reason so many people associated with them appear to have come to an unhappy end, is the bulk of the players’ duties here, ostensibly as a sort of amateur film editor jumping through the archive mostly at will.
Mechanically, Immortality will be immediately familiar to players of Barlow’s last two games, albeit with a visual twist. Where the previous games had players search out new pieces of live-action footage in their vast and hidden archives by typing in keywords in a search box, Immortality instead tasks them with selecting visual elements in the clips watched to find related ones. Interested in a background player in a scene? Take your editing window into “search mode” and click their face to be brought to a different clip in which they feature. Click a crucifix around a character’s neck, and you’ll be whisked to another clip in which a cross appears. You can even do it for certain actions—kissing, for instance, can jump you between each of the three films on offer pretty easily, given the ways sex and sexuality thread their way throughout Marcel’s fictitious filmography.
In review notes for the game, Barlow and his team talk about wanting to recreate the sensation of being a film editor, creating match cuts, playing with juxtapositions, etc. The problem with that approach, ultimately, is that your job as a player of Immortality is not to be an editor, but a detective, and clicking haphazardly between objects like this is a relatively poor way to go searching for clues. (We found ourselves missing that nostalgic text window more than once.) The biggest issue is that the clip you’re taken to when making an “edit” seems to be at least partially random; there’s no way we found to narrow your search if you’re trying to find something specific, which can lead to lots of desperate clicking of the same element, searching for a new clip to sate your curiosity. Lost in the shuffle, then, is some of the sense of hunting down a lead that was so satisfying in the two prior games, where one interesting new term or name could open up whole new angles of the story. All three of Barlow’s games, by the merit of their player-dictated pacing, have moments when the momentum can crash, but Immortality feels like it’s affected the worst by these sudden dead ends.
Aesthetically, at least, the game is a triumph, partly because of its subject matter, and especially because of its devotion to it. Each of Marcel’s three films—religious parable Ambrosio, ’70s hippie crime flick Minsky, and ’90s identity thriller Two Of Everything—match the look of the eras they’re meant to be evoking, whether that means using projected effects shots for Ambrosio, or filling the backgrounds of scenes with authentic New York artist weirdos for Minsky. None of it reads false, whether you’re watching an old talk show clip, a behind-the-scenes interview, or just candid moments of rehearsal footage. The attention to detail is relentless and impressive.
It doesn’t hurt that all three of the movies are actually pretty damn good. As Marcel, Gage is a consistently engaging screen presence—she has to be, for the central conceit of the game to work—and the stories being told all reflect on each other in fascinating ways. Running through each of them are thoughts on the mutability of identity, the falseness of images, the illusion of virtue. Taken together (and in discordant sequence, as the player slowly assembles fuller pictures of each of them in their mind), they create a sort of funhouse mirror of themes and ideas—but maybe the same could be said of any creator’s filmography, real or fictional.
And lurking beneath it all, a sense of dread. Barlow’s games have always had an anxious intimacy to them—both Her Story and Telling Lies contain moments that pull a gasp from the player by suddenly underlining that they’re playing as a character within the story, glimpses of another person lurking just beyond the boundaries of the screen. Immortality doesn’t do that. There’s no avatar here, no separation. It’s you that you’re playing as, watching these clips. You, scrubbing backwards and forwards through footage, trying to understand what happened to these people. You, growing steadily more uneasy as the feeling builds that, even as you peer into the cinematic abyss, something else is peering back into you.
The tricky thing about talking about creators who make games that are unlike anything else on the market is that it becomes very hard to compare them to anything but their own work. By that metric, Immortality is Barlow and Half Mermaid’s most ambitious, if not their best, game to date. (It’s very hard, even now, to top the precise focus of Her Story, riveting with its unmoving camera—although we will say that watching three competently made movies is significantly more engaging than the vlogs and video calls that made up the bulk of Telling Lies.) The horror element is its secret weapon, though. Even when Immortality falters as a mystery—and we’ll be honest and note that, even after hitting credits, we’re still unclean on some of what Barlow and his collaborators are driving at here—that feeling of discomfort persists. Immortality gets under your skin; flickers subliminally in your head. It becomes a part of you, whether you want it to, or not.