IMMORTALITY

Introduction

Marissa Marcel was a film star who made three movies. None were released, and she vanished. IMMORTALITY is an FMV adventure built from that lost footage: you pause a clip, hover until the cursor becomes an eye, click a face or an object, and match-cut into another clip containing it — assembling, hop by hop, what happened on those sets and in between. A 2022 work from Sam Barlow (Her Story) and his studio Half Mermaid.

I write this from the Steam review pool. The label is 'Very Positive' — 84% of 1,704 Steam-purchaser reviews (1,596 positive / 304 negative across all 1,900), and 81% in the last 30 days (snapshot 2026-06-23). Press agrees: Metacritic 87, PC Gamer 95/100, Edge 10/10, and a Golden Joysticks 2022 Best Performer win for lead Manon Gage.

By the numbers it reads as acclaim, but this is not the near-unanimity of Opus Magnum. The 16% negative is a real thickness, and it argues a consistent case. What I read for is the fork: where the same game becomes a 'masterpiece' to one player and 'not even a game' to another — and what single design choice both sides are actually pointing at.

Key art for IMMORTALITY — Steam store

First Impressions

Line up the helpful positive reviews and the vocabulary rhymes: masterpiece, haunting, a new high bar for the genre, and almost on a loop, 'the match-cut is an invention' and 'Manon Gage's performance.' Japanese reviews call it equal to or beyond Her Story; Famitsu names it Barlow's best work. The shared feeling: this reworks the border between film and puzzle.

The negative side's vocabulary rhymes just as tightly: 'not a game,' 'just watching a movie,' 'endless scrubbing of footage is tedious,' 'obtuse, no idea what to do.' One critic called it 'so boldly tedious, so profoundly self-sabotaging.' Reaching the credits 'with only the vaguest notion of what the story was' is a recurring confession.

What interests me is how often praise and complaint point at the same thing. 'The clues are cleverly hidden' reads as 'the joy of discovery' to one player and 'busywork' to another; 'no stated objective' reads as 'trusted freedom' or as 'unhelpful.' My job isn't to stage that as a fight, but to translate it into design terms.

Key art of Marissa Marcel — Steam store

Putting the Mechanics into Words

What the positive side always names is the match-cut. Pause a clip, hover a face or object until the cursor turns to an eye, click, and you jump to another clip that contains it. In Puzzlebyrinth terms, the verb here is nearly singular: see, and connect. Where Her Story was a text search you typed keywords into, this reworks search into visual association — the same author abstracting the verb 'search' one step, from text to image.

Reviewers lower their voice for a second verb: rewind. When the music turns ominous and you run the footage backward, another scene surfaces like a ghost over the first — the pool says so while carefully withholding specifics. There is no 'correct' clear; instead a layer is folded behind the screen, visible only to those who raise their observation resolution. Two verbs, but combined with 200-plus clips the space explodes.

If Return of the Obra Dinn is a grammar of 'observe and fill the deduction blanks,' this is a grammar of 'observe, connect, and edit the story yourself.' Both share one thing: the game refuses to hand out answers in order. The sequence you pick up is the experience. What's subtracted is the instruction 'what to do next' — and that blank reads as freedom to one player, unhelpfulness to another.

A scene tied to the film 'Minsky' — Steam store

The Feel of the Story

What the pool spends the most words on is how the story assembles. Three unreleased films — the Gothic 'Ambrosio,' the New York-set 'Minsky,' and 'Two of Everything,' about a pop star and her body double — plus the off-camera moments between them, are dumped as fragments. Reviewers write that 'a timeline and a web of relationships rise in your head in the order you happen to pick up.' The story isn't told; it's reconstructed by observation.

The sharpest fork is the 'other story' that surfaces past the midpoint (I withhold the specifics too). The positive side praises it as 'the moment it turns into a question about filmmaking itself'; the negative side finds it 'coy, with a small payoff.' One reviewer wrote, 'I loved it until it started telling me what it was.' The more clues are doled out, the sharper discovery feels — whether the revealed answer matches the buildup is a separate question, the tightrope every mystery walks.

What both sides agree on is the acting, above all Manon Gage as Marissa. A game that makes you observe 'the same face changing' across decades and three films collapses entirely if the performance does. Reviewers keep saying 'a human is at the center of the screen' because the design stakes its whole foundation on the quality of the footage and the performance.

Art tied to the disappearance — Steam store

The Texture of Difficulty

The 'difficulty' here is not manual skill. There is no fail state, no game over; anyone can keep watching footage. Yet the complaints cluster precisely on 'difficulty' — the difficulty of tolerating ambiguity. Sort the pool and the places people stumble fall cleanly into three.

First, the absence of an objective: nothing tells you what counts as progress, and goal-oriented players stall early. Second, the hidden-clip hunt: late on, finding the remaining footage drifts toward rewind guesswork, and the recurring complaint is 'brute force, not investigation.' Third, the content itself — strong sexual, violent, and religious imagery (the studio says so plainly) — where some simply step off.

The positive side reframes all three as virtues: the missing objective is 'trust,' the hidden clips are 'a reward for observation resolution,' the strong imagery is 'inseparable from the subject of cinema.' Neither side is wrong. It's a question of reach: the game is built for players who pose their own questions and doubt the screen, not for those who wait to be told. Gentle to whoever can calmly pull one clip at a time, a wall to whoever wants a map and a destination — that split, the same difficulty lived in opposite ways, is its real texture.

A moment from a film set — Steam store

Sources

This piece was written by reading the user reviews on the Steam store page and the press reviews as of 2026-06-23. No review text is quoted directly; typical claims are reconstructed. Story spoilers are withheld.

- Steam: IMMORTALITY (Very Positive, 84% of 1,704 Steam-purchaser reviews; 1,596 positive / 304 negative across all 1,900)

- Read via search/WebFetch: the top helpful positive reviews, representative negative voices, several recent reviews, and Japanese reviews (Famitsu and others)

- Press: PC Gamer (95/100), the more critical The Washington Post, plus Metacritic 87

Closing

Steam reads 84% positive; my design-critique score is 8.5, and the two don't diverge much. It abstracts the verb 'search' from text into visual association and stops handing out the story in order, delegating the edit to the player's observation. That ambition genuinely updates the genre, and it's no surprise praise dominates — with Manon Gage's performance as a strong foundation.

The point and a half I take off is the side effect of that freedom: subtract the objective and the late hidden-clip hunt drifts into brute force, thinning sharp observation into luck, while some feel the revealed 'other story' doesn't match the weight of what they assembled. Reviews put the median clear around 6 hours, stretching to 16-20 to collect every clip. Hard to recommend to anyone who wants a map and a destination; still singular for anyone who'll doubt the screen themselves. Rarely is it this clear who a game is and isn't for — and that, I read, is the breakdown behind the 84%.

Art from the Gothic film 'Ambrosio' — Steam store