In Immortality, the first clip you uncover finds long-lost star Marissa Marcel on a fictionalized version of The Tonight Show. After chatting for a while, Jimmy, the Johnny Carson equivalent of the show, rolls out a clip from Marcel’s film, Ambrosio. The footage is grainy and low quality, the way it actually looked when it was shown on a talk show in 1968. Keep playing and you will eventually find that shot in its original form. In both iterations, the tech is produced in 4:3, the boxy aspect ratio in which many films of that era were shot. But, the image is perfectly clear in the original shot, only affecting the grain of the celluloid, not the static fuzz of the TV.
As you find footage from Minsky and Two of Everything, two other unreleased films in which Marcel starred, the image quality changes to reflect the timing. Minsky is shot in anamorphic widescreen that aligns with other gritty detective films of the decade. The film stock of everything looks distinctly new, with less obvious grain and a fullscreen ratio. The quality also varies as you watch behind-the-scenes footage from each production, interviews with Super 8 Minsky’s cast and digital video recordings of Two of Everything rehearsals.
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I’m opening this review with a lot of technical information because those features matter just as much in this game as the genre or graphical style in another. Developer Half Mermaid’s commitment to capturing footage of each era in formats that looked like they could confidently come from their given times, each production being shot in the period it was filmed. Although it is called immortality, the game is concerned with the momentary; The movements that rose to dominance, along with filmmaking techniques and the movements that employed them, became irrelevant in only a few years as technology and culture progressed without them.
In his previous FMV games, Half Mermaid head Sam Barlow has gradually expanded the range. Her story began with an actress, who was sitting in a room, telling her story *important* to a police interrogator. In Telling Lies, the cast comprised the four primary cast members, but, given the game’s conceit—that your character was reviewing footage from the video call cache, where only one side of the conversation was recorded—probably There was only ever more than one character on screen at a time. While several recent productions have shown signs of scaling back due to COVID restrictions, Immortality is Barlow’s most elaborate work to date, with dozens of actors spanning three lost movies, behind-the-scenes footage and talk show appearances. Although a playthrough will only take 8-12 hours for most players, if you put all the clips in the game together, you have rough cuts of three full movies.
Those three films rest on the shoulders of Manon Gage, who rises to meet the mighty acting challenge presented by this script. In Ambrosio, filmed in 1968, she is a young woman who infiltrates a monastery disguised as a teenage boy. In Minsky, since 1970, she is the primary suspect of the murder of an artist’s girlfriend and the detective investigating the crime. And, in To Everything, filmed in 1998 and 1999, she is both an average woman and a pop star, with whom she switches places. Behind the scenes, he’s Marcel, a fascinating talent that director Arthur Fisher has cast out of obscurity for his role in Ambrosio. Later, Marcel sets out to make Minsky with John Durick, the cinematographer of the film for which he is credited with writing. After a death on the Minsky set, Marcel disappeared from public life for nearly three decades, before starring in Duric’s Too Everything, after which she disappeared again. Gage plays all of these characters skillfully – sometimes several within the same scene – and confidently captures Marcel at various stages of rehearsal. From the slightly theater kid-y line text of the opening table to the naturalism of the final take, she revs up her performance completely.
Although the gauge is clearly good, Marisa Marcel is an enigma. Despite 28 years passing between Minsky and To Everything, the actress looks exactly the same in both films. It’s one of those central mysteries you’ll try to solve as you troll through the movie of Immortality. As in Barlow’s previous games, Immortality presents you with a central question – “What happened to Marissa Marcel?” — and simplifies the process of looking through the footage in the database until you find the solution. In Every Story and Telling Lies, the keywords structured your search. For example, when a character says “knife” or “attic” or “bomb”, you would type “knife” or “attic” or “bomb” into the search bar, then watch the clips that are expected to yield clues. Was.
In Immortality, Half Mermaid has replaced that system with a more cinematic ability to find it by match cut. It’s a smart and effortless change; It seems that a layer of separation between the player and the game has been removed. Instead of language mediating your gameplay, you can now simply click on an object or character in a shot and watch as the camera zooms in on that image, transitioning to a similar image in a new shot. , then zooms out to reveal the full picture. While this is a definite improvement over the word search system, it is little less than the “search by match cut” that brings to mind. While that choice of words suggests a transition between shots with similar compositions, you actually move from one appearance of an object or character to another. It works well, but I think Half Mermaid might be able to dig deeper on a future project – not just exploring the relationships between creations as objects within them.
Although there is a certain moment when the credits roll, Immortality, like in Barlow’s previous work, is a game where you get to decide. when you feel satisfied, Immortality took me longer than in previous games. In part, that’s because the game has a secret layer that isn’t immediately apparent at first. In my initial few hours, I mostly tried to piece together the plot and characters of each film, the relationships on and off screen. But doing so will only give you a small picture of what happened to Marissa Marcel. To know the full story, the game invites you to go deeper. There is a strange awkwardness to the proceedings that takes some time to reveal itself.
Barlow cites David Lynch as an influence on his work – Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart and Lynch’s collaborator on Lost Highway co-wrote the game’s classic and expansive script – but it is in this second quest. that the game becomes distinctly Lynchian. Video games and lynch can create awkward bedfellows at times. Video games are usually designed to solve the mysteries that exist. But, Twin Peaks: The Return ends with a question, followed by an opening scream. Lynch’s work doesn’t give an easy answer. It can’t answer at all. In that respect, Half Mermaid games may be as apt to draw inspiration from Lynch as any game today. Barlow’s play is defined by the same uneasy relationship with reality as Lynch’s films.
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Immortality also shares Lynch’s frank and, at times, uncomfortable approach to sexuality and violence. Jimmy, that late night host, prepares you for it early, asks Marisa about the nudity in Ambrosio. She replies, quoting the film’s producers: “We are born naked and, if we’re lucky, we die naked. So, why not shoot a movie naked?” Then she quips, “He was wearing his clothes.” Ambrosio and Minsky were produced in the late ’60s and early ’70s as Old Hollywood (represented by bloated roadshow musicals like Doctor Doolittle and sword-and-sandals epics like Ben Hur died out) And New Hollywood (run by) young directors like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola were being born. Ambrosio depicts the spectacle of an earlier era, with period appropriate costumes and sets, but reflects the post-Hesse code’s desire to depict sex and violence. Minsky also shows bloodshed and breasts, but feels like a statement that would come from New Hollywood, incorporating the widescreen looks and location shooting that gave films of that era a gritty, veritable feel. The game’s embrace of sexuality and violence feels as a piece of the decade of filmmaking, from which its artifacts emerge.
Immortality feels like a logical endpoint for the past seven years of Barlow’s work. Although his cast has expanded to include a full Smash Bros. is, basically, where he started. Like her story, Immortality is actually about a woman. As in her story, she may not be who you think she is.
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