After the already extraordinary Her Story and Telling Liesgame creator Sam Barlow signs with immortality his masterpiece, a form of culmination of the FMV genre (investigation game based on live action video sequences).
In the early 1990s, FMV games, for Full Motion Video, were the favorite weapon of some gaming machines that wanted to demonstrate their technological avant-garde. Partially or totally made up of live-action video sequences, these games were made possible by the emergence of optical disc media and the considerable storage space they offered compared to venerable cartridges and other floppy disks.
At a time when the very idea of “realistic” real-time 3D imaging was still just a sweet dream in the minds of the enlightened few, it was one of the few ways to exploit the capabilities of display hardware. dozens of colors simultaneously, but also to produce sound in “CD quality”. It was also the only way to present minimal human characters embodied in a game.
Of course, the exercise on the other hand left very little freedom to the developers in terms of interactivity and gameplay. This type of game therefore ended up disappearing from the radar as quickly as it had appeared there – or almost. A few video game craftsmen have continued to explore the genre, drawing out narrative experiences unlike any other. Today, the most famous and admired of these craftsmen is the Briton Sam Barlow. Already author of the brilliants Her Story (2015) and Telling Lies (2019), he just launched with immortality a title that seems to be the culmination of his work.
A dizzying narrative structure
immortality confronts the player with the mystery of Marissa Marcel, a film actress who, at the dawn of her career in the late 1960s, was said to have a great future. However, 25 years and three films shot later, she is still unknown to the public. And for good reason: not one of these three films has ever found its way to the screens.
Who is she really, what secret is she hiding? To find the answer to these questions, we are armed with a Moviola (a portable editing machine widely used on film sets in the middle of the last century) and a large contingent of reels taken from these unfinished feature films, but also rehearsal sessions, castings, and even home movies. By means of links to be found between several sequences (a decorative object, a character, etc.), the game lets us navigate through this corpus as we please, try to understand the way in which it fits together, and finally deduce the end of the story — which will never be given to us explicitly.
Under this very ingenious dressing, immortality deploys a narrative structure of dizzying richness and complexity. The game not only testifies to his love for cinema thanks to the dazzling plastic quality of his filmed sequences, it is also a vertiginous mise-en-abîme of the very process of cinematographic creation.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to illustrate this assertion in a perfectly clear way, at the risk of revealing a little too much about the plot of the game. the power wars that can take place on a set, he questions the ability of a work of cinema to carry a message totally mastered by its creators. It is also no coincidence that the game itself, in the way that we explained above, assumes to hold a statement left entirely open to the interpretation of the player.
Dangerous but Fascinating Diehard
In doing so, immortality runs the risk of leaving part of its public on the side of the road. His extreme cerebralness can pass for snobbery, his die-hardness for a frustrating hermeticism. But in the end, it is all the same its power of fascination, its poisonous charm that prevails.