Go! Go! GOTY! 2022: Immortality
By Mento 4 Comments
- Game: Half Mermaid's Immortality.
- Release Month: August.
- Quick Look: N/A.
- Started: 22/12.
- Completed: 22/12.
Well, I'm a little mentally disoriented and woozy from this winter malady I managed to pick up along with the last groceries of the year, so that seemed like the perfect opportunity to go deep into the archives of Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid's latest abstruse FMV mystery. Immortality follows previous projects Her Story and Telling Lies with its use of real actors caught talking and performing on camera and the player attempting to discover a broader mystery by hunting down additional elucidating clips through the connections they have with others. Immortality essentially operates the same way Her Story does in this regard: you're thrown into a narrative at a random point in media res and using a series of "portals"—in Her Story it was key words in the heroine's dialogue, while in Immortality it's images of people and items shown on-screen—you can view individual isolated FMV clips in a mostly achronological order, made more confusing by how you're bouncing between three separate movies and a bunch of behind-the-scenes and promotional footage on top of that. For a while not a whole lot will make sense, but as you continue to dive through these portals from one scene to the next a better understanding of what it is you're watching will begin to coalesce, along with who the characters are (the crew, the actors, and the roles the actors play) and, eventually, the overarching mystery about who, precisely, this "Marissa Marcel" might be. It's a game that shows rather than tells, with very little in the UI to describe what you're seeing besides a caption to say where the clip is from (if it's from one of the movies, it'll also include a scene number) so you have to pay attention to get the most out of the narrative. In short, you have to kind of rough it out for a while before anything starts to make sense and congeals into a recognizable shape, so the advice is to let scenes play out in full for any necessary context they have to impart and consider anything (or anyone) distinctive shown as a potential launching point to a new batch of clips.
The story of the game follows the actress Marissa Marcel throughout the production of her first film as an actor, her second (which she co-directed), and her third (which she also co-directed). The big question mark right off the bat is why she doesn't age a day between the first movie, filmed in 1968, and her last, in 1999. We're also told that all three movies never made it to theaters (each falling afoul of bizarre mishaps) and Marissa apparently vanished off the planet during that 27-year gap between her second movie (filmed in 1972) and the third, creating a series of secondary riddles to ascertain. As the player is only ever able to see footage caught on camera, most of them are either clips from the movies themselves or the table reads and rehearsals, though there's the occasional candid camera confession, pre-release interview, or talk show appearance that helps fill in some blanks. These movies include Ambrosio, an adaptation of the real-life 18th century Gothic horror novel The Monk that sees a pious but proud man brought down by a Satanic temptress (played by Marcel) and his own hubris and lust. Shot in Italy, I feel like Ambrosio's riffing a little on the 1978 Caligula movie: a film originally intended to be a mature cinematic triumph that instead came off as sleazy given the copious amounts of sex and nudity that was added during production. The second movie, Minsky, has Marcel play another femme-fatale in a vaguely noir thriller about a dead artist set in New York's Warholian avant-garde "deviant" art scene, and his obviously guilty "muse" played by Marcel; however, the muse quickly works her charms on the guileless homicide detective working the case to muddy the investigation. The last movie Two of Everything is another thriller in which Marcel plays two roles: a famous singer-actress named Maria on the rise and a body double named Heather, hired by Maria to attend functions and award shows on her behalf so she can recuperate, though after the body double dies while on the job—thus taking Maria's career and identity down with her—Maria goes incognito to find the culprit(s).
Half the fun of these games (or at least in Immortality and Her Story's cases; I can't speak for Telling Lies) in a low-key way is hunting around for a portal to scenes you've yet to see, especially those of major plot importance, though it's also one of the more elusive and frustrating aspects of the gameplay conceit too: unless you know what that missing scene entails it's hard to guess what's going to show up in there as a possible means of entry. That is, besides, something major like a principal cast member or a recurring prop, in which case you're not so much rolling a regular die in the hopes of landing on the desired missing scene but one of those crazy D&D ones. Marissa Marcel shows up almost everywhere, for example, so while she's likely to be in a scene you're missing it's also incredibly unlikely you'll hit upon it by chance given the many other places she appears that the game might toss out instead (and you better believe there are scenes you can only access by clicking on her face). Losing out on all those brief establishing shot or close-up types of scenes isn't really a huge concern if you're just trying to find the moments that matter in the interest of sussing out the plot—either for the specific movie or for the game's overarching narrative about its apparently ageless ingénue—but fastidious completionists might be at it for a while, especially as there are hefty achievements attached to collating every scrap of footage for all three movies.
Immortality sadly does precious little to organize these scenes in an intuitive way, and it becomes ever more of a problem the more scenes you sift through as they're all grouped into a massive growing collage that soon becomes a nightmare to navigate (though having the movies and their behind-the-scenes rehearsal videos all be different aspect ratios helps a little). The game chooses not to let you categorize clips by actors or props either, as listing these might perhaps give away a surprising new portal such as, say, a bloodstain or a close-up on an eye. Best you can do is either order the clips by when they were shot or by when they appear in the scene order of the movie(s), and use the scenes surrounding those missing to figure out what happens (and thus what items/people you might need to use to access them). Also: ever since Jess brought it up, yeah, it's hard to miss the voyeuristic streak in a lot of these Barlow games. Just a whole bunch of watching a woman (or several) be emotionally vulnerable in front of a camera for hours on end. It's like how David Cage has all his heroines do shower scenes, or that time FromSoft let Quentin Tarantino direct a game where its character-creator didn't allow women to wear shoes (not to say that Dark Soles wasn't a masterpiece, but those boss fights weren't made any easier by having the camera so close to the ground). Immortality is particularly thirsty when it comes to its starlet Manon Gage—I think the idea is that the player becomes as enraptured by Marissa's screen presence as her various director and actor beaus—so it's best to keep in mind that the game has a certain uncomfortably personal vibe to it much like its predecessors. (I'll admit to being amused that you can use female nudity itself as another portal to navigate clips, though; I mean, what were they going to do? Be classy and not call attention to it?).
Can't say I'm too enamored by this one, and not because I let this very site's toxic word of mouth sway me one way or the other. I steered clear from Telling Lies because I heard about the fundamental flaw in its notion to expand on Her Story by focusing on two sides of a conversation instead, without taking into consideration the player's tolerance for all the dead air that would ensue when it was the unseen partner's time to talk, and Immortality's choice to go with images over easily sorted and organized text is another angle that doesn't quite work as well either. The level of production value involved—they practically shot three whole movies (albeit very short ones) with era-appropriate equipment, film stock, and fashions—does speak to a more confident voice and approach to the material and I dare say it's probably the most professional-looking FMV game I've ever seen (even if that is damning with faint praise) with excellent performances, but the navigation tools leave much to be desired. For instance, Her Story gave you a list of clips featuring every instance of a key term (or the first ten chronologically, IIRC) that you could then browse through at your leisure, and yet Immortality makes every image jump an arbitrary crapshoot that frequently has you going around in circles? I can't for the life of me find a compelling reason why this change was made. There's also the occasionally illogical way it links props and items by broader themes instead of exact duplicates ("this ceramic vase could be holding water, so it's basically the same as this glass pitcher") also suggests much of the navigation had to be pounded into a shape that would fit in such a manner that's nowhere near as elegant as Her Story's relative simplicity. (Also, despite being a point-and-click type of adventure game, you're going to want to play with a controller with rumble support regardless; I can't tell you why, but trust me.) So, baffling decisions abound. It does make me curious what Barlow will try next with this "scouring FMV archival footage via tenuous threads" idea, since he seems very fixated on getting it right. Bonne chance.