Ian here—
Five years ago, I posted a video analysis of Sam Barlow’s game HER STORY that I’m especially proud of. Now, I follow it up with a lengthy discussion of Barlow’s 2022 game IMMORTALITY. This video serves as the twelfth video in my Shape Up! series, and I’m also considering it the long-belated sixth entry in my detective games series.
Full script below the jump, with ample citations. (I leaned heavily on the newly-released book IMMORTALITY: Design Works for background research on this one.)
What is the purpose of art? It’s admittedly a big question. But the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky has an answer I like.
According to Shklovsky, art’s basic function is to shake us out of the automatized perception that we so often slip into in everyday life. So much of our life is just daily routine, but art derails that routine, makes perception laborious, opening us to a renewed aesthetic encounter with the beauty of the world. “The road of art is serpentine,” Shklovsky writes, “it is a road on which the foot feels the stones, a road that turns back on itself. … Dance is a way of walking that can be felt, or more precisely, a way of walking that is made to be felt.”[i]
Introduction
When you first launch the 2022 full-motion video adventure game Immortality, it doesn’t announce itself as Immortality. Instead, it calls itself “Marissa Marcel: An Interactive Restoration of Three Movies.” Apparently Marissa Marcel was a French-born actress working in the UK, Italy, and the US who starred in three films—1968’s Ambrosio, 1970’s Minsky, and 1999’s Two of Everything, none of which ever released due to circumstances surrounding their productions. Then Marcel mysteriously vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. She’s maintained a cult following, however, so much so that archivists have exhaustively digitized every frame of footage ever taken of her—from screen tests and TV interviews through the raw footage of her three films—and preserved it in interactive form in this software package. Initially, our main menu seems to give us free reign to watch a total of 199 videos, which we can organize either in strictly chronological order of when they were filmed, or in an order better suited for following the stories of the films, which as to be expected had their scenes shot out-of-order. As the controls are explained to us, the screen suddenly glitches, and that generous selection of 199 videos is reduced to just one: a 1969 talk show interview Marcel conducted after shooting had wrapped for Ambrosio. From this interview, our task is to build our clip library back, using the only tool available to us: a type of visual associative linking referred to as “match cutting.” Pause the video, click on a face or object in the scene, and the game will link you to another instance of that face or object in one of the other videos. And then you click again, and chain your links forward, match after match after match after match.
This is just magic. I don’t really know how it works. Immortality’s technical director Connor Carson built the match cut system on top of a code base foundation initially created by Lizi Attwood for Telling Lies.[ii] But I have no sense of how exactly Carson took something originally designed to bring up time stamps based on dialogue transcripts and built onto it a whole bunch of code for tracking objects and faces moving around in a video file. I have to assume that there’s some sort of machine vision involved. If this is the case, Immortality is pretty much the best-case scenario for machine learning in game development. Writer/director Sam Barlow and his team have basically invented an entirely new way of interacting with images, one that I suspect would be too resource-intensive to implement using traditional human labor, especially given that Immortality was never going to be a best-seller. It’s a brilliant use of technology to will into being a whole genre of interaction that wouldn’t have existed otherwise, and if this ends up being where AI takes game development, I’ll happily relinquish some of my pessimism on that front.
Immortality has my favorite UI of any game from the 2020s so far. It is a simply a marvel to interact with on a moment-by-moment basis. But being fun to interact with and being successful as a game and interactive narrative are unfortunately not the same thing. When I finished my first playthrough of Immortality in September 2022, a few days after it first released, I felt unsatisfied. And over the course of three years, I’ve dwelt with that dissatisfaction. I replayed Immortality, I read the book and watched the movies that inspired it, I bought Lost in Cult’s massive murder weapon of a book on it. I kept hoping that the next bit of research I did, the next new connection I made, would somehow “solve” IMMORTALITY, make my feelings about it click into place, allow me to finally claim, unambiguously and unreservedly, that it was a success. But that never happened. Instead, the more angles I examined it from, the more I became convinced that it was inchoate—and that its misshapen structure was in fact the most interesting thing about it. I did not fall in love with Immortality, as I had set out to do. But I did become fascinated with its problems.
Spoilers incoming—and they won’t stop coming, so be forewarned.
Ambrosio
Marissa Martel’s 1968’s film Ambrosio is an Italian-produced adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ gothic novel The Monk. Or, rather, it’s an adaptation of about half of that book. Two of the book’s major characters, Agnes and Lorenzo, are reduced to very small roles in the film. A third major character, Raymond the Marquis de las Cisternas, doesn’t appear at all in what we see. This reduces the focus of the adaptation to the titular corrupt monk Ambrosio. Ambrosio is friends with the young novice Rosario, who seems obsessed with him and later reveals that he is in fact a woman, Matilda, who was playing the part of a monk in order to get close to Ambrosio. Matilda lures Ambrosio into breaking his vow of celibacy, plunging him into a spiral of lust. When Ambrosio subsequently grows infatuated with the naive young woman Antonia, Matilda supports him in his conquest, teaching him witchcraft so that he can brew the 18th century equivalent of a roofie. When Matilda and Ambrosio are caught and brought before the inquisition, she encourages him to pledge his soul to Satan in exchange for his escape, which he does. With the monk now firmly within his grasp, Satan fully unveils all of the layers of deception at play: not only had the young man Rosario been Matilda playing a part, but in fact Matilda herself was just another role. She wasn’t a human woman at all, but rather a demon who had volunteered to take on a human form that would be maximally enticing. (Put a pin in that.)
The footage we see from 1968 is not just Ambrosio itself. It’s also casting sessions, table reads with the cast, lighting tests for costumes, and promotional interviews, together weaving larger story of the filmmaking context in which Ambrosio was made. Sam Barlow cut the Agnes and Lorenzo material for practical budgetary reasons,[iii] but he also wrote some behind-the-scenes drama around the actress playing Agnes, who auditioned for what she thought would be a central role and is upset to see most of it cut. The footage we sift through is suffused with little world-building details like these, in an attempt to connect Ambrosio’s production to a recognizable era of Anglo-European filmmaking.
Not always 100% successfully. Barlow claims that Ambrosio was supposed to resemble a late-period Hitchcock movie, and to be frank I’m just not seeing it.[iv] The actor playing Ambrosio’s director Arthur Fischer bears a strong physical resemblance to Hitchcock, so it’s good casting in that regard, but I’m not getting Topaz or Frenzy vibes from the production itself. It reminds me more amazingly-named French filmmaker Just Jaeckin, who successfully passed off scuzzy exploitation as highbrow art cinema with literary aspirations. Barlow has also mentioned Ken Russel’s The Devils as an inspiration, and yeah: that makes more sense.[v]
But let’s not get too bogged down in the minutia of reference points. Big picture, this is an Italian production shot in 1968. In the wake of new wave cinemas around the world, standards of film censorship in Europe were shifting rapidly. Cinema was aspiring to the prestige of literature, and with that aspiration came a trend toward tackling erotic themes more frankly. But unlike literature, where the only thing required to explore human sexuality is for an author to put pen to paper, eroticism in film means people taking off their clothes in front of the camera. In particular, women.
I may not buy Ambrosio as a late-period Hitchcock film, but Hitchcock’s attitude toward actresses thoroughly suffuses the character of Arthur Fischer. Fischer gives one speech that’s basically a bullet-point summary of Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”—except, instead of offering a feminist critique of the male gaze in cinema, he’s bragging about how well he knows how to make a movie: “Keep your face blank so the audience can project onto it. You are their vessel. They will see you looking … then we cut to what you are looking at. And through you they will see. You are looking for them. So use your eyes. Sofia, Marissa, your job is to be looked at.”[vi]
What does it means to be an actress—especially a young, inexperienced actress—in a film industry rushing to find new expressions of eroticism, and new ways of pandering to the male gaze? Barlow says that one of his earliest inspirations for the game was a British Film Institute interview with Olivia Hussey about her starring role in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, in which the interviewer ardently probes the 15-year-old actress about the nude scenes she did for the film.[vii]
In promotional materials for Ambrosio, Marissa Marcel fields similar questions. It’s a little hard to know exactly what’s going on in her head. She not only asserts her willingness to do nude scenes, but also professes a downright philosophical fascination with onscreen eroticism, and the unique charge it brings to performance. And yeah, we could write this off as an impressionable young actress succumbing to pressure from the male power structures that surround her and embracing her own exploitation. But … maybe there’s something deeper going on. Marissa actively authors her own sexual image as an actress, far beyond what the director Fischer asks or expects of her. In fact, she conspires with the director of photography John Durick to clandestinely shoot a much-more-explicit sex scene behind Fischer’s back, with Durick himself serving as a stand-in for Ambrosio. They both bad-mouth Fischer on camera before scampering off to have actual sex. At this point we can venture a guess why Ambrosio never got released: Fischer found out what was going on on his set under his nose. Professional jealousy, sexual jealousy—we get the general idea. Meanwhile, John Durick and Marissa begin dating, and he moves up in the world, directing an American production titled Minsky.
Interlude 1: Evidence Box Games
Early in this video, I described Immortality as a full-motion video adventure game—a term that also describes director Sam Barlow’s earlier games Her Story and Telling Lies. This is an accurate but also reductive way to characterize Barlow’s games. They’re also examples of what I like to call evidence box games.
This is a sub-genre of investigation games where players are given a lot of stuff to sift through, and must follow investigative threads that have been carefully planned ahead by designers, but aren’t clearly indicated upfront. An evidence box game gives you some questions and gives you a lot of information, but doesn’t provide you with a point-by-point to-do list to guide you through a linear investigation. One other example of an evidence box game is A Hand with Many Fingers. It gives players free reign in an archive and asks them to tie together various CIA drug-running operations in the 1970s. Unlike Her Story, the archive you’re perusing isn’t a bunch of video clips. It contains newpapers articles, memos, and other paper documents. But the gameplay—noting places, dates, and names, and planning your next search around those—is strikingly similar to Sam Barlow’s first two games. The Roottrees Are Dead is a game that will probably remind a lot of people of Return of the Obra Dinn, because it plays a little ditty when you’ve correctly matched names and faces. But at root (get it, “root”) its gameplay is again all about sifting through places and dates and publications in a large archive that you need to plot your own route through. So, evidence box game.
There are also analog examples of this form. Hunt A Killer’s subscription-based evidence box services got quite popular at the height of COVID, along with the similar Unsolved Case Files series. In these analog examples, you’re sifting through physically-printed letters and notes and photographs and autopsy reports, but the logic is the same: examine an archive of stuff, find the connections between said stuff, and use those connections to answer a set of central animating questions.
The evidence box puzzle style has really taken off over the past decade. In fact, it’s one of the few genres I can think of that became popular simultaneously across digital and analog gaming. But its ingredients are very old. One of the earliest antecedents I’ve come across is J. Brander Matthews’ and H.C. Bunner’s short story “The Documents in the Case,” first published in 1879. Despite being a short story, “The Documents in the Case” lacks traditional narration, and instead presents itself as a cache of documents—a lot of the same type of stuff you’d expect to find in a Hunt a Killler box. Letters, newspaper clippings, pawn tickets, theater programs, things of that nature. Taken together, they weave a tale of lost inheritance, mistaken identity and incest.
These disparate examples are bound together by a central problem, a central challenge. When you present someone with an archive of stuff, how do you structure and pace the delivery of that stuff?
Minsky
Shot in 1970, Minsky is Barlow’s riff on American New Hollywood cinema—specifically, Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 paranoid thriller Klute.[viii] For a touch of authenticity, Barlow co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Allan Scott, who wrote Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. I had my gripes about Barlow’s conception of Ambrosio as a late Hitchcock film, but on the whole I give him enormous credit for the period-appropriateness of the films we see in this game. They’re written well; the hair, makeup, and costumes are all great; and the emulation of period film stock and technology is fantastic. They even dusted off an old split-focus diopter to use in the Ambrosio filming, for authenticity’s sake.[ix] It’s to the game’s enormous benefit that we can see an aspect ratio or specific quality of color and immediately place the era and production of a random clip we’ve just match cut into, so I do give Barlow’s team immense credit here. I’m frankly in awe of it.
Minksy concerns a murdered painter (the titular Minsky). The actor Carl Greenwood portrays Detective Goodman, a young, by-the-book detective who gets in over his head investigating the murder, immersing himself in a Warhol-esque scene of hedonistic hippies and artists and ultimately falling for Marissa Marcel’s character Franny, Minsky’s muse and lover who’s also the prime murder suspect. Identities and genders dissolve and reconfigure. Goodman, desperate to prove Franny innocent, chases another suspect Frankie Santora, not realizing Frankie is just Franny in drag.
You might be noticing the thematic overlaps Minsky shares with Ambrosio: not only a male figure of authority falling prey to sexual obsession, but also secret identities, gender fluidity, and a fascination with the mimetic power of art. Did Marissa Marcel have some sort of clause in her contract where she would only appear in films with certain thematic resonances?
Interlude 2: Stepped Construction
Beyond his grand statements about the general purpose of art, Viktor Shklovsky’s particular focus was the narrative arts. One key storytelling technique he analyzes is something he calls stepped construction.
A practical-minded co-worker might say to you, “they didn’t have tea, so I brought you a coffee.” That efficiently conveys a sequence of events, a nice little trip from A to B, but it’s not much of a story. Because stories aren’t practical. They employ tricks to decelerate that trip from A to B. They introduce obstacles: “I went to get you some tea, but the Dark Lord of Beverages swooped in and stole it all.” They delay plot developments by way of trials: “I met a wizard who promised to teach me to brew tea, but I first had to gather a phoenix feather, a harpy’s egg, and a minotaur’s hoof.” “The gods sent me a pegasus to help, but the Dark Lord trapped the pegasus, and it had to break free of its bindings—first a rope, then a chain of iron, then finally a chain of diamond.” Why three trials? Why three types of bindings? The repetition serves a purpose: it defers the eventual resolution of the story, gives the story more of a stair-stepped structure. And maybe during all of this you’re impatient, and asking, you know, “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” But if you got rid of the stair-steps, you wouldn’t have a story. Storytelling is, at base, the act of decelerating events and deferring the eventual conclusion. Take that away, you take away art, and you’re left with mere practical-minded communication. You’re left with, “they didn’t have tea, so I brought you a coffee.”
I’ve applied Shklovsky’s idea of stepped construction before to strictly linear games like Half-Life 2 and Dead Space, looking at the way they use obstacles to create setpieces. But it’s also helpful when thinking about that central challenge of evidence box games: when you give your player a big box of stuff (either a literal physical box, or a database of video clips) and tell them to have at it, how do you give the resulting experience narrative shape? How do you inject the necessary deferrals and decelerations to prevent your player from just reaching in and grabbing the solution immediately? What are the trials we need to overcome, as players and as story-explorers?
Hunt a Killer boxes use a simple solution. Players are given a sequence of boxes, each organized around just a couple questions. You’re expected to answer those questions before you move on to the next box. Look at the stuff, answer the questions, confirm your answers, wait for the next chapter of the story in the mail. Unsolved Case Files riff on this basic format, with multiple sealed envelopes that players are expected to unseal in a specific order, like a series of trials granted by a quest-giver.
Her Story and Telling Lies both forgo this strict multi-staged gating. Players never pass any barriers from one phase of the game’s story into the next. Instead, their main delaying tactic is the clumsiness of their search function: you can only ever bring up five videos at once, in chronological order. You might type in a word, and discover that it’s too common to be useful: it’s spoken in 18 videos [Hannah], and you can only watch the first five, and nothing is revealed in those first five beyond what you already know. So you need to get cleverer about your word choice. Except Barlow is also very clever about his word choice. He refrains from using character names when pronouns will do. He refrains from using search-worthy verbs like “kill” when the much more innocuous “cut” would do. The difficulty of these games stems from how the scripts have been written to avoid certain words while alternately using others so frequently they fill up the search results with useless clips. Barlow’s circumlocution results in a circuitous path for the player. As I said in my video on Her Story, it’s like the game’s final boss is Barlow’s thesaurus.
Then there’s Matthews and Bunner’s short story. Although “The Documents in the Case” isn’t structured like typical prose, it was bound and printed in a magazine, so readers read it linearly, turning from one page to the next like they would any other story, rather than sifting through a box of unbound materials. Handed this obvious structural advantage, Matthews and Bunner fell flat on their face, and organized their documents in a way that renders their story dysfunctional.
Minsky (continued)
Behind the scenes of Minsky, the whole cast is hooking up. That includes John Durick, who joins the cast as the titular painter after the initial actor quits over his discomfort with nude scenes. Relationships are tested and professional lines are crossed, when Greenwood surprises Marissa with unsimulated penetration during a sex scene. It all evokes the glorious and sometimes troubling messy productions that littered the 1970s—and in Minsky’s case the production was such a mess that the film never got released. Barlow imagined an elaborate fake history here, where although the film was never released, filmmakers still watched its raw footage and it influenced later films such as Basic Instinct.[x]
Hold on, I’m getting a weird sound sound here as I’m capturing, so I’m just going to …
Oh, snap. Who’s that?
So it turns out this software we’re using, this “Interactive Restoration of Three Movies,” is haunted. Certain clips are affected by a low rumbling drone that erupts at certain defined points in their duration—and is even faintly audible as just you’re navigating the clips in the top-level viewer, although that’s not reliably useful. If you rewind the clip while you’re hearing that low drone, you’ll sometimes see a superimposed figure, and if you scrub it back at just the right speed, the image will snap, and Marissa Marcel will suddenly be replaced by a different woman with blonde, slick-backed hair, who moves at a higher framerate than the the 24fps of everything surrounding her—just enough to be uncanny. The more of these clips you find, the more this woman tells a story that’s quite different from the behind-the-scenes narrative we’ve sketched out so far.
Marissa Marcel doesn’t exist. At least, not in the traditional sense. There was a young French woman named Marissa Marcel, but in the mid-1940s she was killed and consumed by an entity officially referred to as The One. Immortal, genderless, and with no set form, The One assumes the appearance of whoever it last ate, absorbing their memories in the process. It’s attracted to artists, so it’s sort of like a muse, if a muse was also a body-snatcher—or a vampire. It expresses envy of and disappointment with humanity, recalling some depictions of fallen angels. But it also claims to have literally been Jesus Christ. It’s not just artists it takes over; it’s also religious leaders: anyone in a position to captivate the masses with a good story.
Marissa was already inhabited by The One when she was filming Ambrosio, which casts a new understanding on her demeanor. This wasn’t, it turns out, a naïve actress abused by a sleazy Euro-trash director, it was an ancient being that devoured a pretty girl then played dress-up in her skin, and was always in complete control of that skin’s cinematic exploitation. I chose to put off referring to The One until now because, well, Immortality is a nonlinear database of video clips that individual players will encounter in different orders. Everyone will first encounter The One in a different context. For some players, it might be here.
There’s certainly a lot more going on in the supernatural level of the plot during the production of Minsky then their was during Ambrosio. In August 1970, partway through filming Minsky, Marissa’s co-star Carl Greenwood is also consumed by another immortal art vampire, referred to as “The Other One.” (Hmm. For beings attracted to artists and storytellers, they’re not very good at coming up with names, are they?) The One has known The Other One for an eternity. They’ve been romantically involved; they invented Christianity together; they’ve debated the value of art, religion, and humanity for millennia. Long-simmering resentments come to a head on the set of Minsky. The Other One ate Carl Greenwood as a deliberate provocation, knowing that The One genuinely liked him. So The One strikes back, engineering a prop mishap that kills Carl on set. (Hence the film remaining unfinished.) This wouldn’t, in and of itself, actually kill The Other One, but The One has Carl’s body cremated afterward.
2 of Everything
The third and final movie included in this tour of Marissa Marcel’s career is the 1999 erotic thriller 2 of Everything. Inspired by 90s-era films ranging from Sleeping with the Enemy to Showgirls to Eyes Wide Shut, Barlow has said he wanted 2 of Everything to capture that sense in 90s cinema that the window for frank onscreen portrayals of sexual desire that had opened in the late 60s was closing. Although movies still had sex in them, it was woven into increasingly dark narratives about failing relationships, domestic violence, and abuses of power.[xi] 2 of Everything’s screenplay (of course, again) has to do with doppelgängers and assumed identities. This time we have pop star Maria and her body double Heather, who enjoy switching places until Heather is murdered to cover up a billionaire’s sex crimes. Now without an identity, Maria devotes herself to avenging Heather. In addition to the films Barlow and his collaborators explicitly cited as inspirations here, I also get strong currents of a couple of erotic thrillers modeled off of Vertigo’s structure: Brian de Palma’s Body Double and David Lynch’s Lost Highway. This makes sense, because one of the screenwriters Barlow brought in to collaborate on 2 of Everything’s screenplay was Barry Gifford, the screenwriter of Lost Highway.
With the help of 1999-era digital compositing, Marissa Marcel plays both Maria and Heather. But although cinema technology has evolved, Marissa herself hasn’t aged a day since 1968, only updated her wardrobe and hairstyle. Maybe it’s Hollywood cosmetic surgery, maybe it’s vampirism. And hey, look at John Durick: he’s looking pretty good too, right? Yeah, spoiler … he got chomped.
But not by another immortal. The One itself ate John Durick, after the Minsky production imploded. But then it regretted the decision, disappointed by Durick’s mundanity. It couldn’t go back to being Marissa—it can only take on one form at a time, and as soon as it consumes a new host, the old body is lost forever. So for twenty-nine years it lived as John Durick, wistfully pining for its old life as Marissa. Until Arthur Fischer dropped off some negatives he stole from the Ambrosio production. (Hey, some clear closure on what happened with that production!) Watching the old footage of Marissa, The One somehow re-manifested her as a second puppet. And what better way to celebrate your newfound ability to pilot two bodies than a movie in which one actress plays two parts?
The rewind scenes of this production are rather subdued—a lot of them just consist of The One reading out Marissa’s lines, while Durick vanishes. It’s a new variation on the already multifarious modes of address we’ve seen in the subverted clips. Sometimes The One appears in a black void, narrating its past to the camera. Other times The One replaces Marissa on-set and dishes about art, religion, and the immortal lifestyle. Sometimes scenes filmed for the movies transform into violent or sexual fantasies that can’t possibly have literally happened, given what we know about these characters and the overall timeline. Other times we see things that did happen—The One actually did consume Marissa Marcell—but that happened elsewhere, in a farmhouse in France in the 1940s and not on a soundstage in Italy in 1968. These rewound scenes are not only supernatural, they’re also modernist, breaking down narrative expectations of sequence and causality.
Interlude 3: Temporal Transposition
Shklovsky was particularly interested in the construction of mystery stories, using examples such as the early Sherlock Holmes story “The Speckled Band.” Mystery stories have stepped construction, as you would expect, but they’re more specifically built around the technique of temporal transposition—that is, the story omits the description of certain events, so we learn about them only by looking at their consequences. Mystery stories by their very nature must leave a gap in their chronology, inviting their readers to tease out events that happened during it. That gap remains open until the story’s denouement, and the questions it poses are what drive reader interest as they make their way to that denouement.
I said earlier that “The Documents in the Case” (which can be seen as a sort of precursor to the evidence box genre) is poorly organized—and it comes down to this matter of temporal transposition.[xii] Matthews and Bunner begin their story with an obituary from a London paper in 1879, establishing that a Sir William Beauvoir, Sr. has died, with inheritance going to his eldest son, William Beauvoir Junior. William Junior immigrated to the US thirty years ago and hasn’t been heard from since—so, okay, there’s a hook. We then jump back to 1848 and read a series of documents arranged in chronological order that reveal what happened to William Junior. He’s dead. Killed in a Sioux attack on the American frontier. We learn his fate on the fourth page of an 11-page story, in the 14th document out of 41. Where else is there for the story to go?
We catch up to 1879. Some lawyers are now investigating the trail of William Junior. And we get more chronologically-organized documents … but what’s the point? What’s the new hook? The title indicates we’re supposed to treat this as a “case.” But we’ve cracked the case. So why are we still reading?
The story does rally at the end, when the investigating lawyers race against time to try and stop William Junior’s nephew (who also came to the US) from incestuously marrying his cousin, William Junior’s daughter. But “The Documents in the Case” has a soggy middle. The first four pages are organized around a central question: what happened to William Junior? That central question drives interest in the documents: readers are trying to fill that 30-year chronological gap. But that gap gets filled, and while the authors are gradually setting up the incest twist, they don’t give their readers enough to do in the meantime. We were actively pursuing the answer to a question … but now we’re just reading through a lot of stuff, hoping for an eventual payoff.
2 of Everything (continued)
The production of 2 of Everything is a disaster. The One’s remote piloting of two bodies at once has taken a toll. Durick fails to call out directions because The One is too busy controlling Marissa, who’s giving a bad performance. The two of them collapse in unison mid-take. Marissa develops nosebleeds, and eventually her entire scalp erupts in blood. The One is dying. And the Other One reappears—not to gloat or seek vengeance, but because it discovered a new mode of perpetuating itself that it wants to share. Although Carl Greenwood’s body was burned, his death was captured on film—film that was later watched by Amy, an actress who The One took as a muse and lover while it was inhabiting Durick. Through this act of witnessing, The Other One inhabits Amy—without killing her first. It’s a new vector of infection: over media, rather than a bite. So The Other One immolates Marissa and films the act. And watching that footage, we’re now susceptible to possession by The One. The One takes over our screen, and credits roll.
What’s My Motivation?
So we’ve gone through all three movies in chronological order. Now, let’s rewind.
The 1970 and 1999 films have original screenplays. But not Ambrosio—it’s an adaptation of The Monk. Barlow claimed he was drawn to adapt The Monk because he considered it a proto-noir, with Matilda embodying an early femme fatale role.[xiii] But there seems to be more to it than that, thematically. The Monk is about a crafty infernal spirit who takes the form of the woman Matilda, who also briefly plays the part of the novice Rosario. Immortality is about the immortal spirit The One, who takes the form of Marissa Marcel, who then goes on to play a variety of parts during her lifetime.
The Monk is also set in a church and abbey, with Satan himself as a character. That gives Barlow plenty of biblical symbolism to work with, which is an allegorical well he keeps going back to every time he tells stories about women, performance, and power.
In my video on Her Story, I defended that game’s use of biblical symbolism because although it’s overwrought on its own terms, it also serves an important skeletal function, providing narrative and thematic fields that could either help point you in the right direction during a text search, or strategically hinder your search to delay you from reaching the conclusion too quickly.
But the same can’t be said of Immortality. The match cut system doesn’t use vocabulary and chronological clip order to impede your investigation. It has a much more complicated algorithm operating under the hood, keeping certain clips undiscoverable until players have reached a high enough “progress value” score.[xiv] So what are the biblical symbols still doing here? What are any of us doing here? What’s the point of me clicking on apples, to find clips of apples, to find more clips of apples?
It’s the biggest cliché there is, right? An actor turns to their director and asks, “what’s my motivation”?
Well, actors aren’t the only ones who need motivation. Players also need motivation: What do I do next? And why do I care? So, too, with audiences for mystery stories. Mystery stories are just as much puzzles as they are narratives. They ideally pose a question, one that can be guessed at and worked through, motivating readers to turn each page with zeal.
Her Story is a mystery. When you open the game, your search box already has the word “MURDER” pre-filled in. Wonderful. A murder investigation. That’s all the invitation we need.
Telling Lies is a bit trickier. The pre-filled word “LOVE” doesn’t immediately suggest a mystery. But although we might not yet know exactly what question we’re meant to answer, there is an impression of a deadline—we’ve stolen government surveillance technology, and they’re coming after us—which motivates us to dive in and untangle as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
What’s our motivation in Immortality? The game’s promotional framing promises a missing person investigation. “Solve a Hollywood mystery.” “What happened to Marissa Marcel?” But after a couple hours with the game, I can’t imagine there are many players still primarily motivated by solving Marissa Marcel’s fate. We’re more curious about this other woman. We’re working out how to rewind the clips at the right speed, parsing the sound cues involved, trying to call forth the ghost in the machine. The genre-friendly framing of “Solve a Hollywood mystery” doesn’t really match the supernatually-tinged art game Immortality ends up being.
Neither Fish Nor Murder-Most-Foul
If we wanted to be trite, we could just say that there’s a conflict between the solvable puzzle promised by an investigation yarn, and the sense of esoteric enigma more characteristic of modernist, surrealist, or avant-garde art. Immortality tried to combine these two irreconcilable things, and therefore it failed. End of story.
But this would be a lazy analysis—and one that’s just demonstrably wrong, ignoring an entire history of successful hybridization between these tendencies.
This history is one of the topics covered in David Bordwell’s book Perplexing Plots. One of Bordwell’s major theses is that among popular genres, it has historically been crime fiction—detective yarns, mysteries, and thrillers—that have given popular storytellers the most leeway to ambitiously experiment with narrative form. They flaunt the reader’s lack of knowledge, they call attention to that temporal gap at the center of the story, and in doing so they foreground the act of storytelling itself.
In other words, they’re proto-modernist. And when high literary modernism emerged in the mid-20th century, you actually see some of its key figures adopting the detective story, roughening it up in the process. Borges admired Arthur Conan Doyle. But his detectives fall victim to epistemological collapse as they navigate the information age. Gertrude Stein was a fan of Dashiell Hammett. But in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, descriptions of the crime, suspects, motives, and alibis all inevitably dissolve into repetitive variations of simple phrases.[xv]
And as those modernist authors were roughening up the form of the mystery story, you also had mass market authors such as Rex Stout and Richard Stark re-assimilating modernist techniques back into mass art, playing with nonlinear arrangements of blocks of time and sudden shifts in perspective in ways that are obviously inspired by high literary modernism, but made more digestible for popular audiences.
So mystery, thriller, and detective stories have long seen a cyclical churn between the popular and the modernist, as authors experiment with exactly how far they can push things for mass audiences, versus esoteric audiences. In addition to these literary examples, Bordwell also analyzes popular genre films that play with perspective and unconventional chronological schemes in ways that echo art cinema. And we can add other examples, beyond Bordwell’s. Both Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 and Raul Ruiz’s film Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting feature conspiracy theorists at their protagonist, and conclude without resolving the mysteries at their centers, having become, over the course of their length, more concerned with the interior psychology of paranoia than any specific answers to the quite-possibly-delusional questions their characters pose.
Looking to television, Twin Peaks starts out with a straightforward detective story hook—who killed Laura Palmer?—but by its end, it had not only incorporated a supernatural mythology, but also morphed into one of the most striking works of surrealist art cinema ever to grace American screens.
So it cannot simply be the case that investigative puzzles and more avant-garde, metaphysical mysteries don’t play well together. We have plenty of historical examples of artists making productive use of the gray area between these two poles. Sometimes even with supernatural beings that lurk in superimposed images. Who live in a world of footage run in reverse. The problem here is more specific to Immortality itself.
The answer came to me as I reviewed my notes for the game. Or, rather, my lack of them.
Thumbing through my pen-and-paper notes from games is a nice trip down memory lane: Hey, that’s the number system from Riven! A spoiler-y secret from Tunic’s true ending! Some esoterica from Lorelei and the Laser Eyes! A particularly laborious puzzle from Blue Prince!
On my first playthrough of Her Story, I took three pages of notes in a little Moleskine notebook. When I played Telling Lies, I took eight pages. When I played Immortality, I took zero. I just … never felt a need to. I didn’t need to keep a list of names to remember, places to map, lines to return to. That wasn’t a responsibility the game expected of me. I was just clicking on things, and listening for a hum.
It’s instructive here to compare Immortality to the 2023 game The Gap, which has a similar free-associative flow. In The Gap players jump through points of time in one man’s life: an object or document will link you to an different point, within which you can link to an different point, within which you can link to an different point … so on and so forth, until you’re four layers deep, and no longer remember the beginning of the associative chain that brought you here. Except you can always return to a high-level map that reminds you what particular puzzle you left unsolved, or question you left unanswered, or stone you left unturned when you got lost down your most recent rabbit hole. The Gap is a postmodernist dive into a fragmented psychological landscape, but it also poses a series concrete questions and gives players the means to answer them. In Return of the Obra Dinn, similarly, you can get a bit carried away, finding human remains in a chapter that link you to another chapter with another body that links you again, so on and so forth, without “coming up for air,” so to speak. But here, too, you can always return to your book, remind yourself which fates you’ve left unsolved, and approach the task at hand analytically again.
Now, those are both examples of checklists, and I’m not saying that an investigative game has to have a checklist. Telling Lies doesn’t have a checklist. But when I played it, I made my own checklist. Even in the absence of an explicit to-do list, I implicitly understood the questions the game was raising, and the tools at my disposal gave me the agency to pursue answers to those questions.
And that is the ultimate problem with Immortality. It doesn’t pose enough concrete questions. We start out with the question “What happened to Marissa Marcel?,” but once we discover The One we realize that Marissa Marcel didn’t exist in the first place. So much for that question. From there on, there’s a lot of lore to sift through about The One and The Other One and who they assimilated. But this lore-sifting is unfocused, because we don’t yet know what we don’t know.
Tyl Molbak, the actor who plays Carl Greenwood, the actor who plays Detective Goodman in Minsky, recounts being struck by this scene, when his demeanor has suddenly changed.[xvi] He had read his scenes in order, but hadn’t read anything else in the script, and so he had questions about his behavior here. I honestly envy him. It’s wonderful to have questions—to have known unknowns. When I encountered this scene, I was just floating in on the breeze. I knew about The One. Maybe I even already knew Greenwood was inhabited by The Other One—I don’t remember. What I do remember is the sense that these were all just incidents floating by, not asking anything of me, nor giving me a chance to properly ask anything of them. I could have focused my playthrough more if I was achievement-hunting: the Steam version of the game does have achievements for uncovering the fates of certain characters. But for my first playthrough I was playing the GOG version, which doesn’t have achievements, and the difference was striking. In the absence of an extrinsic tracker of implicit goals, I just kept asking myself: what is my off-ramp? I know that Marissa’s an immortal art vampire, but now what? What am I searching for as I surf these visual links, and how will I know when I’ve found it?
Maybe you yourself have a question—why I keep coming back to the example of “The Documents in the Case.” It was published 143 years before Immortality came out. That’s 143 years’ worth of mystery-writing, and of game design. But Immortality and “The Documents in the Case,” despite being different in many of the particulars, ultimately share the same problem. They both pose a question upfront that becomes irrelevant quite early on. And then they both stumble, never quite proffering a sufficiently motivating follow-up question. They throw stuff at us, and they eventually build up the necessary backstory to support a conclusion. But neither ever quite recovers that animating sense that we’re filling in a well-defined gap.
Afterword: How Do I Stop This Thing
Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story is among the most well-known classics of electronic literature, in no small part because of the obscurity of its inner workings. afternoon consists of pages of text that can be clicked through in a set order, using a basic “advance” key included with the software. You can also click on specific words on the page to open up a new branch of the text outside the default path. However, these link words aren’t underlined or in any way differentiated from the other words that surround them on a given page. The whole hypertext is rife with hidden links, which makes seeing every single possible page and path an arduous task that few have ever accomplished.
Some of the most thorough critical work on afternoon was written by Jane Yellowlees Douglas, whose initial article on afternoon was titled “How Do I Stop This Thing?”—a title that I love, because it so perfectly expresses that feeling of searching for an off-ramp in a work of interactive art, vying for some scrap of closure that will leave you feeling good about closing the program.[xvii] I probably muttered something along the lines of “how do I stop this thing?”` deep into the fifth hour of my first playthrough of Immortality. In her article, Douglas narrates four separate playthroughs of afternoon, tracing the different revelations about characters, their relationships, and their possible motivations that emerged in each. She discusses the game’s endings, and interrogates her own preference for one particular ending, dissecting why it imparted in her a feeling of closure that the others lacked, why she felt permission to finally stop after reading it.
Espen Aarseth, a contemporary of Douglas, praises her close reading of afternoon as “impressive” and an “excellent achievement,”[xviii] while simultaneously questioning whether the whole thing was worth it. When approaching a work of hypertext literature like afternoon, Aarseth warns, “the critic might become preoccupied with the question, ‘Have I read all?’ and come to identify the task of interpretation as a task of territorial exploration and technological mastery. But exploration cannot be the critic’s primary task.”[xix]
As I’ve mulled my way through Immortality, I’ve continuously recalled Douglas’ analysis of afternoon, and also Aarseth’s cautionary words about it. For my analysis of Her Story, I transcribed the game’s entire script, because I wanted to do a proper word frequency analysis. It felt necessary, given how the evidence box is constructed in that game. When I started this analysis of Immortality, I had grand plans to catalogue every one of the game’s clips according to their match cut links, ultimately diagramming all possible matches in the game. I had to give myself permission to not do that. I had to take Aarseth’s advice. I had to choose between being an exhaustive explorer of Immortality, and being a critic—because unlike The One I am not immortal. My time is finite.
So instead of inventorying the extant connections, I searched for the missing gaps. I’ve taken a serpentine path in this video. Rather than walking from A to B, I’ve turned back on myself, felt my steps, imitated the flow of Immortality itself, in all of its idiosyncrasies and potential points of frustration. I can’t deny the sense of technical magic I still feel when using the match cut system. But I never felt like I could dive into Immortality’s mystery. I was left skipping stones over a lake of answers in search of a question.
[i] Viktor Shklovsky, On the Theory of Prose, trans. by Shushan Avagyan (Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021), pg 27
[ii] Chris Schilling, IMMORTALITY: Design Works (Lost in Cult, 2025), “Making the Moviola” insert, pg i. See also Alan Wen, “The Femme Creatives Who Built Immortality, And How They Did It.”
[iii] Schilling, IMMORTALITY: Design Works, pg 437
[iv] Ibid., pg 461
[v] Ibid., pg 461 and “La Petite Mort” insert pg i
[vi] Compare this to Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975), pg 11: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”
[vii] Schilling, IMMORTALITY: Design Works, pg 435
[vii] Ibid., pp 493 & 498
[viii] Ibid., pg 437
[ix] Ibid., pg 470
[x] Ibid., “La Petite Mort” insert, pg iii
[xi] Ibid., “La Petite Mort” insert, pp iii-iv
[xii] J. Brander Matthews and H.C. Bunner, “The Document in the Case,” Scribner’s Monthly vol XVIII (1879), pp 755-765. Readable online here.
[xiii] Joel Couture, “How IMMORTALITY Captures an ‘Open World’ Feel with Its Narrative”
[xiv] Schilling, IMMORTALITY: Design Works, “Making the Moviola” insert, pp iii-iv
[xv] David Bordwell, Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), pp 77–78
[xvi] Schilling, IMMORTALITY: Design Works, pg 502
[xvii] J. Yellowlees Douglas, “‘How Do I Stop This Thing?’: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives,” in Hyper/Text/Theory, ed. George P. Landow (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
[xviii] Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pg 88
[xix] Ibid., pg 87
Intermittent Mechanism 