IMMORTALITY

I have spent a lot of time with games that hand you a rulebook and dare you to master it. IMMORTALITY hands you a single video clip and says nothing. That opening gesture is either the most exciting thing you will encounter this year in interactive fiction, or the moment you close the app and never return. Knowing which camp you fall into before spending money here is genuinely useful information. The structure is this: you are browsing a found-footage archive tied to fictional actress Marissa Marcel, who starred in three films across 1968, 1970, and 1999 - Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything - none of which were ever released, and who subsequently vanished. The core mechanic is the match-cut system. You pause any clip, hover over a face, an object, a prop, and the game cuts to another clip elsewhere in the archive that shares a visual rhyme with whatever you clicked. Click a cellphone in a 1990s scene and you might land on a telephone from a 1970s table read. The system is not handcrafted link-by-link: the team built an algorithm capable of generating over a million possible cuts, which means the archive feels genuinely bottomless rather than a designed funnel. Scrubbing frame-by-frame through footage, rewinding at specific moments to trigger hidden scenes - these are the tools. There is no inventory, no dialogue tree, no skill check. Progress is entirely knowledge-based: you understand more as you see more, and the sequence in which major reveals land will differ meaningfully between players. What works is almost everything the surface promises. The three in-universe films are constructed with enough period authenticity - grain, costume, acting register - that they function as real artifacts. The performance from Manon Gage as Marissa is the load-bearing pillar of the whole project, and it holds. Thematically, the game layers commentary on authorship, the male gaze, misogyny in the film industry, and the cost of artistic obsession, without ever reducing any of it to a tidy moral. The story underneath the surface mystery - involving two ancient immortal beings and their relationship to human creativity and cinema - escalates the stakes well past what the opening clip implies, and the moment the genre shifts is legitimately surprising. That shift is the thing reviewers warn you not to spoil, and they are right. What does not work as cleanly is the loop in its middle stretch. Clip repetition compounds when you are chasing a specific thread: matching to Marissa's face for the fifth time in a row and landing on footage you have already catalogued is friction that the interface does not fully resolve. The game provides a clip library to retrace your steps, but tracking which hotspots within a clip you have already activated requires mental bookkeeping the UI does not help with. Getting the true ending requires locating ten hidden scenes tied to the clip-reversal mechanic - a mechanic the game never explicitly teaches. For completion-minded players, the randomised placement of some hidden clips across playthroughs makes 100 percent a genuinely tedious proposition rather than a satisfying final challenge. For the strategy-and-systems audience I usually write for: no, this is not that. There are no build decisions, no AI to outmanoeuvre, no late-game complexity to manage. What IMMORTALITY shares with the best games in my wheelhouse is a respect for player intelligence and a willingness to withhold explanation until you have earned the context to understand it. The Metacritic sits at 87, Steam users land at 84 percent positive across a sizeable sample, and the critical consensus - including a perfect score from Edge - reflects genuine quality, not hype. If you have any tolerance for FMV mystery boxes and you care about what the medium can do with narrative structure, this is a strong, well-constructed argument for taking that form seriously.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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