Immortality

You think games can’t tell film stories. That a game trying to be cinema always ends up a worse version of both — QTEs interrupting the mood, cutscenes padding out the gameplay. And you’re right, mostly. Most of them are.

Immortality is not most of them.

Here’s the entire game: three films made between 1968 and 1999, all starring an actress called Marissa Marcel, none of them ever released. They’ve been lost. You scrub through the footage — frame by frame, forwards and backwards — and when something in a shot catches your eye, a face in the background, a coffee cup that shouldn’t be there, you click it. The scrubber jumps to another clip somewhere in the two hundred-odd minutes of material. Then another. Then another.

There’s no inventory. No dialogue tree. No fail state. The interface is a timeline and your own curiosity, and it’s genuinely one of the best puzzle boxes anyone has built in the medium — because the thing you’re actually doing is editing. You are constructing the film’s real story out of order, from scraps, the way a conspiracy theorist or a film scholar would. And the footage is good. Shot on 35mm, written with the texture of the eras it’s pastiching, performed by actors who can actually act — Manon Gage gives one of the best performances in games and almost nobody played it, because it came out the same week as something with a gun in it.

I won’t spoil where it goes. What I’ll say is that the surface mystery — what happened to Marissa, why these films were buried — is a door, and behind it is something angrier and stranger and far more ambitious than “interactive movie” ever promised. The game is about the camera. About what gets taken from performers and kept. It has things to say about the film industry that it could only say by building a fake film industry and letting you paw through its archive.

The mechanics-level trick is the part you’ll appreciate most: there’s no hand-holding because there’s no designer voice at all. Every discovery is one you made by looking closely at an image. It’s the closest a game has come to the feeling of researching something yourself — falling down a rabbit hole at 1am, ten tabs open, the pieces clicking. That’s a loop your brain already knows. This just does it with actors and celluloid instead of Wikipedia.

It’s four hours. It’s on everything, including your phone. And it’s the cleanest possible answer to the objection you opened with — a game that isn’t borrowing film’s clothes, but building something cinema structurally can’t do: a story you can only experience by scrubbing, rewinding, and looking harder.

You think games can’t tell film stories. This one tells one film never could.