Immortality is not your average mystery game, it requires the use of your heart as well as your head

Megan Bidmead, 1 April 2025

Immortality is what I would describe as the opposite of a 'hand-holding' game. You're given one simple task: find out what happened to Marissa Marcel, a short guide on the basic controls of the game, and then you're off, armed with nothing but intrigue and the sense that something isn't quite right. The result is one of the most interesting and deeply memorable games I've ever played.

Immortality doesn't really come to mind when we're discussing 'thinky games', but it does engage the player in a particular kind of mystery-solving, one where you not only rely on your brain but also your intuition.

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Immortality.

To give you a sense of what Immortality looks like: players are given an old video clip of a David Letterman-style presenter, interviewing a young actor named Marissa Marcel. This is where we're first introduced to Immortality's match-cutting mechanic. As players hover the cursor over the screen, certain areas will cause the cursor to change to an eyeball; this means it can be clicked on. When you click on it, another random clip including that same person or item will appear. So if you click on the microphone during the interview clip, you'll be taken quickly to another video clip also containing a microphone.

The chase begins. You'll be following Marissa's life in short, specific bursts, through her three unreleased movies: Ambrosio, a 1960s movie about a young woman posing as a monk to sneak into a monastery, and her doomed relationship with a Catholic priest; followed by Minsky, a story of a murdered artist, her lover, and the detective assigned to the case; and lastly, Two of Everything, a 1990s movie about a popstar and her body double swapping lives. You won't find these clips in order, however. Clicking on a painting in one movie could lead to an entirely different piece of art in another.

On the surface, this mechanic seems simple enough, but it's deceptively difficult to find every clip. You can methodically click your way through a good chunk of the clips, for example, just by clicking on Marissa's face again and again. But this isn't going to be enough; to get the most out of it, you need to think in an entirely different way.

Alongside this match-cutting, scene-discovering technique, there is something else. A secret layer, nestled in the gallery of clips, hidden in plain sight. Players can also rewind and fast-forward clips, and doing so can reap rich rewards. Marissa's strangely haunting smiles, her prolonged eye contact, and her seemingly incredible ability to look exactly the same after decades have passed all gave me - to give it a technical term - the heebie-jeebies. But it was a bit like looking through Ambrosio's Vaseline-smeared camera lens; just a little bit out of my range of focus.

When you play certain clips, if you're playing with a controller, you'll notice a rumble at specific times. Following them by rewinding or fast-forwarding reveals secret clips, a second layer, hidden underneath the first. This is where you first come across The One, lurking, waiting to be seen and heard. Then, the game shifts from a simple 'find the clips' puzzle to something a bit different. Instead, you're following the breadcrumbs of this mysterious woman, who seems to be able to perceive you, the player, through the screen. (This was a particularly shocking revelation to me, on my first playthrough, because I used a mouse and keyboard and thus totally mixed the vibration clues; instead, I just accidentally rewound a pivotal clip and let out an audible scream when the scene suddenly switched.) 

This combination leads to an intuitive, very human way of solving puzzles. You're not just using your intelligence to solve something strictly logical, but you're following your gut, and that is something that is much more difficult to engineer in a satisfying way, from the developer's perspective. How do you know players are going to find out the truth in a way that feels 'right'?

The answer, I think, is that you don't know for sure, and this knowledge requires an enormous amount of trust.

Looking back at Sam Barlow's work, you can see him taking this same risk again and again. In the critically acclaimed Her Story (2015), your job is to sort through a police database to find a series of interview video clips, unlocking all 271 of them by using the right search terms from the transcriptions. The next game, Telling Lies (2019), uses a similar mechanic of searching through video call recordings to piece together the movements of an activist group. Both games develop the idea of trusting the user to make certain connections, and these may not always be as straightforward as clicking through the most obvious keywords.

In each, there is a turning point, a moment in which the game may not change but your understanding of it completely shifts. Something about that clip reveals a big secret, and then the domino effect starts to kick in: oh, so this is why that happened, I get it now. There's nothing stopping you from finding those clips right out of the gate by accident. For example, I wiped my previous Immortality save file to start fresh for this article, and I came across a series of clips with The Other explaining a good chunk of her lore, almost immediately. Of course, I did know the importance of rewinding clips when the controller rumbles this time around. And maybe there was something buried in my memory that told me this particular clip was important, even though I had convinced myself I couldn't remember it from the last time. Some people may discover this lore dump immediately and have that knowledge in their minds for the remaining hours they spend with the game, which means they never get that satisfactory 'aha!' moment when they feel that they've earned it.

Immortality's overarching narrative does eventually 'take over'' when you've found a certain number of clips, and you'll reach what you could describe as the official ending. You may not have ascertained exactly what happened to Marissa in that time frame, however. Technically, you can collect every single clip and still not have reached a conclusion in your mind about Marissa's fate. 

But this is a problem that cannot be resolved without imposing the larger arching narrative onto the player at specific moments, which takes the true feeling of being a detective out of the equation. It's a confident kind of storytelling, one that understands it's not going to click with everyone, and feels just fine with taking that risk.

Barlow has trusted that human inquisitiveness and our interest in (mostly) human drama will keep us exploring until we feel we understand enough. That's what makes Immortality so different from other puzzle games. You're a detective in a way that feels personal and immediate. You're going with your human instincts. Who's this guy? You haven't found any clips with him yet, is he important? Both clips have flames present in the shot, is there something significant there? What about that painting that keeps catching your eye in the background, staring at you arrestingly from the wall behind the actors? You're following your nose, gathering data all at once, slowly and perhaps imperceptibly making links as you go. 

And the more you get to know Marissa - and The One, underneath - you'll start using your emotional intelligence to piece things together. It's a subtle kind of logic. Why is she looking so intense in this clip? Why does she look uncomfortable here? Is there something I'm missing? You start questioning not only what happened to Marissa, but what she's feeling, what her expressions mean, and how she finds herself in these strange, toxic, and sexually charged situations. What draws this person to violence in this way? Why does she look devastated one minute, and ecstatic the next? You're not just solving logical puzzles, but emotional ones; you're trying to get at the heart of something that isn't quite human, trying to impose your understanding of life onto her. Essentially, you're using your heart, as well as your head. If you want to make the most of Immortality, these small, subtle clues are what you need to look out for.

Ultimately, what makes Immortality's deep mysteries about art, suffering, and the human (or again, not-quite-human) so compelling is the strength of the acting talent behind it. The reason you're able to read a scene using your emotional intelligence is because the actor has been able to embody that in a way that is quite unique. Immortality contains a being who specifically wants to speak to you. The Other wants you to perceive her. The actors carry a huge amount of weight here; it's their job to get those emotional alarm bells ringing in player's heads, and they pull it off with incredible skill.

It's a complex story, and you feel this irresistible pull to solve it, because The Other, through Marissa, is sending you signals. She wants you to notice that eye contact with the camera, she wants you to keep pushing for the truth. And so you do keep pushing, even if at times it feels confusing and overwhelming, because at the heart, there is an emotionally complex story, and you need to know more.

Immortality is a game that surprised me by how convincingly it pulled me into its world, and how its characters have stayed alive in my mind since I first laid eyes on them. It's a certain kind of thinky game, one that operates on its own, particular kind of logic. And for that reason, it's on a whole other level.