At 2 a.m. on a Thursday, I’m vibing at my pc in the dead of night, my face bathed within the aseptic glow of Her Story creator Sam Barlow’s new sport, Immortality. On display, the digicam is tightly educated on the flawless porcelain complexion of forgotten actress Marissa Marcel (performed by Manon Gage), who’s bare and bathed in a heat, nearly infernal gentle. “Are you ready for a Satanic fuck?” she asks, going off script and cueing raucous laughter from her off-screen crew. While I’m not fairly available in the market for that, I am able to get fucked by the unpredictable magic of movie.

It didn’t take lengthy for Immortality to carry me again to my stint working in tv. I spent the summer season earlier than faculty as a teen intern dubbing tapes in tiny rooms crammed with VCRs, watching editors disappear into cocoon-like Avid suites the place they spent hours going over uncooked footage (Avid expertise changed Moviola machines, from which Immortality attracts its scrubbing mechanic). There was one thing beautiful and mysterious about watching — being on the fringes of this enigmatic black field the place one thing went in, and a brand new, but acquainted factor got here out. It is equal elements irritating and interesting, then, to have spent 22 hours immersed in Immortality and nonetheless really feel wanting; for days, within the time since enjoying the sport, each prop, wig, and gesture lived in my head prefer it was my job.

Immortality revolves round Marcel, who, in accordance with the sport’s fiction, was plucked out of an audition of hundreds by a outstanding director within the Nineteen Sixties. She made three movies: Ambrosio (1968), Minsky (1970), and Two of Everything (1999). None have been launched, and he or she vanished. The sport presents itself as particular software program designed to showcase Marcel’s just lately unearthed work, permitting followers to research her movies and behind-the-scenes clips. The gist is to make use of match cuts — transitional cuts between objects with comparable themes or structural compositions — to discover Marcel’s films and work out what occurred to her. For occasion, clicking on a feline sculpture in Minsky jumps to footage of the cat in Two of Everything; an summary determine portray may result in a masks or an actor’s face. “Successful” match cuts and their subsequent revelations will unlock new clips.

Image: Half Mermaid Productions through Polygon

Ambrosio is a giallo-esque sexual thriller tailored from the (actual) Gothic novel The Monk, with attractive matte-painted backgrounds. In the crime noir Minsky, Marcel takes a web page from shaggy-haired Jane Fonda in Klute, adopting the identical sly, nervy demeanor that ensnares her straight-laced detective love curiosity. And in Two of Everything, she performs each a world-famous pop star and her physique double, whose shared life turns into irrevocably destroyed. With just a few clicks on the suitable hotspots, I can flit from the contemporary ingenue Marcel in a novice monk’s gown to an older, world-weary Marcel (who hasn’t aged a day) in Doc Martens.

Right out of the gate, I pour floods of vitality into dissecting each scene and scrap of subtext. My preliminary type-A response is to take copious color-coded notes on all three movies. After observing Ambrosio’s apparent Alfred Hitchcock equal, Arthur Fischer, I ponder digging out my outdated Truffaut and Spoto books from a university movie class that I barely keep in mind. An interview the place Fischer has his hand positioned tellingly across the again of Marcel’s neck screams “celebrated auteur grooming young girl.” After watching sufficient of Minsky and Two of Everything, I jot down paranoid speculations about Marcel’s director, John Durick. I spin incoherent theories primarily based on Brecht, Baudrillard, Heidegger, and tediously scrutinize the theatrical relationship between materials actuality, efficiency, and course of. I’m going down a rabbit gap of German Expressionist costumes and overlook what I’m searching for. Finally, I look down and see that I’ve managed to nearly reverse-engineer the scripts for all three movies. In quick, I’ve achieved completely nothing. I’m Charlie Day, placing collectively a conspiracy concept that spans a long time.

When I lastly understand what I have to do — with out giving an excessive amount of away, it includes getting strategically handsy with the scrubbing mechanic — I surf by means of the remainder of Immortality on a feverish mission to seek out hidden footage. The sport’s meta-story is an tried distillation of probably the most outstanding themes in Marcel’s movies: identification, sacrifice, duality, and the dialectical relationship between Art and Order. (At occasions, it’s slightly Gnostic.) Most issues really feel vital and related, as a result of Immortality is exceptionally good at creating layers of complexity whereas concealing a quite simple (and after a sure level, predictable) fact about the way in which people make myths. Even when it drove me nuts, Immortality merely wouldn’t get out of my head. I can’t say that I cherished my time trying to find Marissa Marcel, however I wholeheartedly love how superbly it built-in the participant into the processes of watching and filmmaking.

Image: Half Mermaid Productions through Polygon

Toward the “endgame” (which doesn’t actually apply to this experimental construction), Immortality begins to lose its shine. Once I can (principally) reply the query What occurred to Marissa Marcel? scouring the clips turns into extra of a chore than a delight. But for the reason that sport unfolds by means of the car of movie, there’s an innate urge to “complete” each movie, as a result of it’s the one means we will conceive of totally experiencing or figuring out a film. My enthusiasm begins to wane after flipping by means of scenes that I’ve already examined dozens of occasions.

I handle to eke out just a few extra gems, however after a sure level the countless clicking affords diminishing returns. From a sensible standpoint, my rhythmic seek for untried match cuts begins to decelerate just because I’ve run out of objects. To its credit score, just like the chiding weight of a cat’s paw on my arm, Immortality gently means that maybe I’ve seen sufficient, which implies drawing a line and accepting the bounds of what I’ve realized. Since this can be a sport that attracts a lot consideration to course of, it is smart that it’s considerably self-aware of how monotonous it may be.

What Immortality does exceptionally nicely is reconcile my lifelong love of luxurious interval drama, a wholehearted dedication to fashionable manufacturing values (sure, I really like all of the wigs), and a really particular breed of sluggish, neurotic thriller. Immortality felt most alive within the moments once I was trying to find crumbs, even once I was attempting the obvious Film 101 symbolism mixtures for match cuts. When I lastly got here throughout the scene that confirmed what occurred to the “real” Marissa Marcel, it raised much more questions than solutions, whereas additionally reminding me that resolutions are merely constructs. My largest supply of frustration, nonetheless, was the tonal disconnect between the meta-story and the three movies. Even when Immortality tried to keep away from over-exposition, its extended digressions into backstory felt, in some methods, like a betrayal, or at the very least an enormous self-own. I did, in any case, need to discover Marissa Marcel. (On a minor sensible notice, I wasn’t an enormous fan of the minimalistic UI filters — the “film” and “image” ones are self-evident however I nonetheless don’t know what the third funnel-type icon does.)

Image: Half Mermaid Productions through Polygon

Because of its nonlinear narrative, Immortality has no actual strategy to closure — one thing I grew to respect, contemplating how conditioned we’re to count on some type of finish, irrespective of how unsatisfying or abrupt. After working myself right into a ineffective froth to resolve the issue of Marissa Marcel and turning into fluent within the sport’s visible language, I had made it into the impenetrable black field. I take my hat off to Immortality for the way insidiously it deconstructs our collective expectations concerning the all-important conclusion. I started as a complete ignoramus, and ended up wholeheartedly fulfilling my future as a loyal Marissa Marcel fan, despite the fact that she spends Two of Everything in a strawlike wig that makes Elizabeth Holmes appear like a Pantene business.

Finally strolling away appears like concluding my very own position on this unusual theater, despite the fact that I did not uncover each shred of footage or milk each scene dry of subtext and which means. Sometimes a cat is only a cat. Sometimes a gargoyle is just a bit statue. Immortality is aware of how a lot you need to know extra, and it leans into your starvation.

In exploiting this fan-like thirst for information as authority and authenticity — even when it often undercuts the storytelling — the sport additionally creates a straightforward alternative for the curious outsider: Either play, or don’t. Immortality embodies probably the most attractive hallmarks of the “if you know, you know” meme — there’s no fast recap for a politely stranger that may adequately sum up the query What occurred to Marissa Marcel? The solely method to totally recognize the scope of this mission, flaws and all, is to throw all expectations of story and construction out the window, and understand that the simplistic divide between movie and video games is holding us again from doing a lot extra with both medium.

Immortality shall be launched on Aug. 30 on Windows PC, Mac, Xbox Series X, iOS, and Android. The sport was reviewed on PC utilizing a pre-release obtain code supplied by Half Mermaid Productions. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media could earn commissions for merchandise bought through affiliate hyperlinks. You can discover extra details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.