Immortality Score Details DT Editors' Choice “Immortality is an astonishing work of interactive fiction that's every bit as unsettling and unforgettable as the films that inspired it.” Pros Cons There’s a moment in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona that has haunted me since I first saw it. Late in the film, Elisabet, an actress recovering from a mental break at an isolated summer cottage, and her nurse, Alma, begin to lose their sense of self.
A cinephile’s touch Even if you’ve played previous Barlow works like Her Story, you’re bound to be shocked by the sheer scope of Immortality. Presented as a fictional film restoration project, players are tasked with uncovering the mystery of Marissa Marcel, an actress who has all but vanished from the public eye. To piece together the mystery, players sift through hours of footage pulled from her only three films, a trio of unreleased projects made between 1968 and 1999.
It’s clear that Immortality is a game created by cinephiles. The dedication to craft here is unlike anything we’ve seen in interactive media. It doesn’t just raise the bar for FMV games, which often struggle to achieve film quality; it picks that bar up and sets it down 30 years into the future. The only real frustration comes from the clip playback controls. To further sell the archival premise, the game mimics the motions you’d need to use on an old film reel editing machine. That means pushing back and forth to rewind or fast-forward rather than scrubbing a digital timeline bar. It’s a cumbersome process, especially with a mouse, as it’s hard to get a reel moving at a steady, consistent speed.
That’s where the game’s psychological horror comes into play. I got a thorough image of Marcel by the end, but was I ever really seeing her true self? When we see her, she’s always engaged in some kind of performance: acting on set, auditioning for a role, turning on the charm for a talk-show host. The lines between Marcel the human and Marcel the actress are hazy, and there’s a sense that not even she’s able to separate them at a certain point.
It’s been well over a decade since the first time I saw Persona and I still can’t escape it. It’s just part of me now. So too is Immortality, a game that has a way of burrowing its way into your chest if you’re patient. Long after rolling credits, I still feel it wriggling and squirming somewhere inside of me, daring me to dig it out. Perhaps that’s Marissa Marcel pounding on the walls of her new prison.
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Source: DigitalTrends - 🏆 95. / 65 Read more »
Source: DigitalTrends - 🏆 95. / 65 Read more »
Source: DigitalTrends - 🏆 95. / 65 Read more »
Source: DigitalTrends - 🏆 95. / 65 Read more »
Source: DigitalTrends - 🏆 95. / 65 Read more »