6. Immortality, dev. Sam Barlow & Half Mermaid
Immortality is a live-action video game about the failed ambitions of a young actress to create art on camera. And that story works rather well a metaphor for all frustrated ambitions of this unique medium. The golden age of live-action video games is now decades old, and it came and went without leaving much of a legacy.
In the Nineties, a revolution in more powerful computers and disc-based media led many game companies to imagine a bright future for interactive movies. FMVs were sure to be the future for more sophisticated and cinematic narratives. In some cases, they took the idea of "interactive movies" very literally, such as the CD-ROM adaptations of movies like Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic, the latter of which was basically a cheaper remake of the Keanu Reeves cult classic. Other studios were bringing in Hollywood talent to their shoots, such as 1996's Ripper starring a host of stars, most prominently Christopher Walken.
However, nobody remembers Ripper. Nobody remembers the Johnny Mnemonic game. That Blade Runner game has a bit of a cult around it, but only a tiny one. Unfortunately, even the good FMV games get lumped in with the bad. Most of the productions were amateur, looking ridiculous at the time, and coming off as impossibly cheesy within just a few years. What were industry stand-outs like Phantasmagoria rapidly aged, so by the new millennium they were already hilarious embarrassing relics. Even Vanilla Ice did become this un-cool this fast. By the 2000s, pretty much only Command & Conquer could still get away with live-action cutscenes and not get laughed out of the room.
Certainly the dream of making cinema with video games never went anywhere. Developers decided to just make the movies entirely in CG. As that digital animation advanced, tastes moved in that direction. Games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII were incredibly ambitious, and their CG rendered FMV cutscenes stood the test of time, unlike poor forgotten Ripper. Within decades game designers learned to depict all kinds of cinema in cutscenes. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us so successfully copied the beats and moods of prestige TV that there's a faithful HBO remake airing right now.
But the dream of live-action gaming is not dead completely, we do still have Sam Barlow, the maker of acclaimed live-action games like Her Story and Telling Lies. Immortality is his latest game, and the game most interested with the act of making films: the stress, the labor, the physical texture of film rolls, and the pain of failure.
One of the problems with live-action footage is that it is very awkward to mix together with gameplay. Christopher Walken can act his head off, but he cannot just transform into a little guy on screen made of pixels without it feeling unnatural. Immortality solves this problem neatly by making the only interactive element the act of watching and editing video. You are given a series of clips about this actress Marissa Marcel (Manon Gage) all on an editing bay for physical rolls of film. Your actions are to push the rolls forward, backwards, or to click on objects in the frames. Basically every item on screen links to some other moment in some other clip, meaning there's an infinitely vast maze of connections you can find to collect every clip in the story. The movement of the film is very tactile, so you can fast-forward or rewind at almost any speed, there's a great "feel" to what would otherwise be just the basic controls on a DVD player.
The mystery you're solving can be summed up simply: what happened to Marissa Marcel? Why did all three of her movies fail? Her career was only three projects: Ambrosio, a dirty nun movie shot in 1968 Italy, Minsky, a sexy crime thriller shot in NYC in 1970, and finally, Two of Everything, a 1999 indie drama, none of which were ever released to the public. The resources you're given included fully-completed scenes of the movies, raw rehearsal footage, some out-takes, behind the scenes clips, and TV interviews. Along the way you will learn direct reasons why these films were never finished - accidents on set, jealous directors, mysterious illnesses. But you'll also discover there's something much more sinister going on. Why are so many of these clips seemingly haunted by a vampire woman (Charlotta Mohlin)? Also, why hasn't Marissa aged over these thirty years?
I do like the little side-game that occurs with the "haunted" clips. Depending on how you replay the footage, you may discover secret layers and alternate events. It is a fun diversion that complicated the experience beyond just watching all the content. However, I will also confess that none of the meta-plot in Immortality did anything for me. None of it made sense until I read some explainers online, and frankly, those revelations are less interesting than the main narrative. The pain of frustrated artistic expression is just more compelling to me than the immortal part of Immortality. Worse, it is very easy to miss one essential clip you need in order to get the ending. I spent hours unable to unlock the one scene that show what happens after Two of Everything wrapped, a key story-essential moment, until I just lucked out and clicked on Marissa in a random moment.
Even without vampires or nonsense, I think Immortality is showing very cool stuff. I actually want to see Ambrosio, that seems like a great bit of erotic sacrilege, like The Devils meets Black Narcissus. Manon Gage is great as Marissa in all her many forms and guises, from virginal newbie to seductress manipulator. Even without a supernatural twist, all three of the movies have thematic resonances with their backstories, explaining their failure. Plus, the developers did a great job recreating the feel of late-Sixties movies. Most of the clips are believable as movies that could have been. They seem like they could have been great movies - well, except, Two of Everything that has the production values of an early-2000s Cinemax porn.
Ultimately, Manon Gage as Marissa Marcel as this wicked being destroying the men in her life? That's great in any aspect ratio. We finally did get real, respectable movies in our games.
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