Marissa Marcel made three films and none of them came out. Ambrosio in 1968, a Gothic thing about a monk, adapted from the Matthew Lewis novel that scandalised 1796. Minsky in 1970, a lurid detective picture. Two of Everything in 1999, a pop-star doppelgänger story after a thirty-year silence. She was the lead in all three. She vanished. The films were shelved.

None of this happened. Immortality, from Sam Barlow’s Half Mermaid, released on 30 August 2022 for PC and Xbox, hands you the surviving footage — clips, rehearsals, screen tests, behind-the-scenes offcuts, several hundred fragments in total — and gives you no index, no chapter list, no search box. It gives you one verb, and the verb is the whole game.

The match cut is a search query

Here is the mechanic. You are watching a clip. You click on something in the frame — a face, a lamp, a crucifix, a hand, a cigarette — and the game cuts you to a different clip, from a different film, a different decade, containing that thing. Then you do it again. That is the entire interface.

Consider what this actually is. It is a search engine whose query language isobjects in shot, and whose index you cannot see. You cannot ask for “1970, scene 14”. You can only ask for “somewhere else with a mirror in it”, and the game answers by throwing you thirty-one years across an archive that does not believe in chronology.

The system does three things at once, and this is why it is the best idea Barlow has had.

It makes browsing impossible, which forces attention. In search-box design — Barlow’s own Her Story, from 2015 — you are typing words you already suspect. Here you have tolook at the picture to find your next move, which means you are watching cinema the way a film editor watches cinema: scanning the frame for the object that will carry the cut. The game has trained a viewing habit into you within twenty minutes, and it did it by taking your index away.

It puts the connections in your head rather than the database. Two clips linked by a wine glass have no relationship the game has asserted. The relationship is one you built, because you clicked the glass. Every player’s Immortality is a different graph, and the game never has to author a single one of them.

And it makes the archive feelfound. An index implies a librarian. The absence of one implies the reels turned up in a lockup and nobody has catalogued them, which is exactly the fiction the game needs you to accept.

The films have to be good, and they are

This is the part that gets undersold. Immortality only works if three fake films, from three distinct decades, are individually convincing enough that you would watch them straight.

They are. Ambrosio is shot as a late-60s European art-horror piece, all shadow and religious hysteria, with the specific stiffness of a 1968 production that thinks it is being daring. Minsky has the greasy 1970 grain of a picture with a lower budget and a higher opinion of itself. Two of Everything is a 1999 slick thing, and the period detail extends to how the actors are beingdirected, which is a nuance almost nobody bothers with. The fictional directors — John Durick on the first and last, Arthur Fischer on Minsky — have distinguishable authorial tics, and you can tell whose set you are on before anybody speaks.

Manon Gage, as Marcel, is carrying a genuinely absurd load: she has to play a 21-year-old ingenue in 1968, the same woman hardening in 1970, and the same woman returning in 1999, across footage that you will encounter in random order and compare directly. She is superb. So is Charlotta Mohlin, whose work I will not describe above this line.

The production discipline behind this is what impresses me most as a piece of craft. Every clip has to be watchable cold, meaningful in context, and contain enough clickable objects to route you onward. That is three constraints on every frame of a feature-length shoot, times three films, and they were shot as real productions with period-appropriate technique.

The ancestor is Shattered Memories

Barlow’s obvious lineage is his own: Her Story (2015), Telling Lies (2019), a career built on giving players a pile of video and a way to interrogate it. Both of those games are search-box games, and Immortality is usually filed as the third one.

I think the real ancestor is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which Barlow wrote for Climax in 2009. That game’s actual idea was that it watched you back — the world reconfigured itself according to what you looked at and how you answered, and the horror was the implication of being profiled. Immortality is that idea with the profiling removed and the responsibility handed over. You are still being characterised by what you choose to look at. There is just nobody keeping the file.

The other ancestor is the CD-ROM crash of the mid-90s, and I say this as someone who watched it happen in real time. FMV died because the industry decided the videowas the game — press the right button, receive the next cutscene, and the interactivity was a toll booth on a film you were being shown. Barlow’s whole career is the correction: the video is thematerial, and the game is the apparatus you use on it. The scrub bar is the toy. Once you understand that, the entire genre reopens.

Where it fights itself

The randomness is a genuine cost. Clicking a recurring object gives you a clip from the pool of clips containing it, and the pool does not care about your progress. You will hit the same three fragments repeatedly while the one you need sits somewhere you have not thought to click. The game’s defenders call this serendipity. Some of it is; a fair chunk of it is churn, and the last stretch of a completionist run turns into pixel-hunting a frame for the object you missed.

The rewind mechanic — and I will keep this vague — is a second layer that a sizeable number of players never discovered unaided in 2022. The discovery rate on your central twist should probably not depend on whether the player idly held a button. It is a magnificent thing to find. It is also a design that has decided some of its audience will simply never see the game.

The verdict

Immortality is the most interesting thing anybody has done with video in a game, and it earns that by refusing the two easy versions: the interactive film where you press buttons, and the puzzle box where the video is a skin over a lock. The footage is the mechanism. You are the search algorithm. Every connection in your head was assembled by you out of raw material that was never sequenced.

It is on PC and Xbox, and it went to phones later, where it works better than you would expect because scrubbing is a touch verb. Give it a long evening with headphones and no walkthrough open. The moment when the archive starts answering back is worth protecting.

If the appeal is being handed a database and no instructions, readReturn of the Obra Dinn next, andLorelei and the Laser Eyes for the version where the archive is a building.

Spoilers below

The rewind is the game.

Holding the scrub backwards through certain frames peels the clip open and reveals another one underneath — footage that was never part of any production, in which two figures address the camera directly. The One and the Other One. An entity that has been inside Marissa Marcel, and the woman it displaced, both speaking from somewhere behind the film stock.

What makes this land is that the mechanic and the fiction are the same act. You have spent hours performing an intrusion — pulling apart other people’s work, watching rehearsals nobody meant you to see, freezing frames on faces between takes. The game’s answer is that something else has been doing exactly that, for much longer, and considerably better. The predatory viewer is the game’s actual subject, and it waited until you had become one before it told you.

The Ambrosio material is where the whole design justifies itself. A 1968 film about a monk destroyed by his own appetite, containing a hidden layer about a thing that consumes people to keep living, discovered by a player whose only verb islook closer. Three levels of the same idea stacked on one reel. The archive was built to carry that, and every other pleasure in the game is downstream of it.

The uncomfortable part, and the reason I keep going back to it, is Marcel herself. Every route through this game treats her as an object to be examined. That is what the interface permits. Barlow builds two hundred pieces of evidence that the film industry looked at this woman rather than at her work, hands you the tools to do the same thing, and then reveals that the looking was the horror. It is the neatest trap I have walked into in a decade.