Immortality

Immortality is a 2022 interactive fiction game developed by Half Mermaid and directed by Sam Barlow. It was released for Windows, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox Game Pass on August 30, 2022. It later arrived on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and mobile devices through Netflix Games. Rather than asking players to solve a conventional crime, the game presents a fragmented archive of film footage connected by a mysterious woman named Marissa Marcel. Marcel has only appeared in three unreleased films, each made decades apart: Ambrosio, a 1960s costume drama; Minsky, a 1970s detective film; and Two of Everything, a late-1990s pop music project. She vanishes after the production of Two of Everything, and no official explanation exists for her disappearance. The player explores these productions through an in-game media archive, selecting moments and following visual match cuts to discover other clips. A cut from one shot may lead to a different year, character, or film, so the investigation is built from associations rather than a linear sequence. This structure makes editing itself the principal interface: images, repeated gestures, and spoken phrases become clues that connect performers and fictional histories. Barlow had previously used similar video-based investigation in Her Story and Telling Lies, but Immortality expands the idea across multiple films and performance styles. The cast includes Manon Gage as Marcel, with Ty Molbak and Charlotta Mohlin among the performers appearing across the fictional productions. Its performances were filmed as deliberately different works: Ambrosio draws on period melodrama, Minsky uses a darker crime-film vocabulary, and Two of Everything resembles a glossy music-industry thriller. Those contrasts are not merely cosmetic; they help establish Marcel's changing public image and encourage the player to compare versions of her across time. The game's supernatural dimension emerges gradually through images that appear to contain an intruding figure, known in fan discussions as the One, and through recurring motifs involving identity, replacement, and creation. Rather than explaining every event in a conventional finale, Immortality asks players to assemble meaning from contradictions, hidden shots, and the relationship between cinema and the people who make it. The game received strong critical attention for its writing, acting, and inventive interface, and it won several year-end awards, including Best Narrative at The Game Awards 2022. Its central subject is therefore not simply disappearance: it is the preservation, distortion, and reinterpretation of a performer through recorded images that outlive the person captured forever.