Immortality turns film editing into the game: solve an actress's vanishing by match cut

Sam Barlow built his career on games about searching archives: Her Story turned a police interview database into the interface, Telling Lies a hard drive of video calls. With producer Natalie Watson he pushed the idea further for Immortality — instead of keyword search, the player would sit in an editing suite with reels of footage, like a film editor left alone with raw rushes. That footage belongs to three never-released films starring actress Marissa Marcel, shot between 1968 and 1999, and Marcel's disappearance is the mystery the rushes are meant to answer.

Build an FMV mystery around the match cut: click any face or object in a frame and jump to other footage sharing that image, so film grammar drives the investigation.

Half Mermaid shot around eight to ten hours of live action — two to three times the footage of Telling Lies — staged as three era-specific movies: 1968 art-house horror Ambrosio, 1970 neo-noir Minsky and 1999 thriller Two of Everything, each with its own aspect ratios, lighting and film style. The central tool is the match cut: pause any frame, click a face, prop or light, and jump to footage sharing that image, so players assemble their own supercut. Scenes include the moment before and after the director calls action, letting outtakes and backstage glimpses carry the clues.

Released on 30 August 2022 on Steam, Xbox Game Pass and GOG, Immortality was received as a leap for interactive film; Vice called it a masterpiece, and Barlow said the reception went beyond what the studio expected. Instead of prescribed puzzles, it trusted players to follow visual echoes between the films, and reviewers singled out the match cut as a genuinely new way to navigate a story.

Sam Barlow's games treat searching itself as the story: Her Story made players comb a police interview database, Telling Lies a drive of filmed calls. For Immortality he wanted players to feel like a film editor left alone in a cutting room with reels of mystery footage and a Moviola, able to roll film forward and back and watch closely.

The material is three films starring actress Marissa Marcel — 1968's Ambrosio, 1970's Minsky and 1999's Two of Everything. None was ever released and Marcel vanished; the game hands players clips from every film plus supplementary footage, including moments shot before the camera was called to action and after it stopped.

Navigation is the innovation. The game's centerpiece is what Barlow calls exploration by match cut: click on a dagger, face or light in one scene and the player jumps to another piece of footage in which that image appears, following visual motifs rather than typed keywords from one film to the next.

Half Mermaid shot roughly eight to ten hours of footage, two to three times the volume of Telling Lies, and treated every scene as intentional and designed like a game level. Released on 30 August 2022 on Steam, Xbox Game Pass and GOG, Immortality was hailed as a breakthrough, and Barlow called its reception beyond what the team expected.

Making the player the editor put the mystery inside the craft: rewinding film, catching the slate and hearing “cut” at a scene's end turned the filmmaking process itself into evidence.

Match cuts replaced keyword search with visual memory, so an object repeated across decades — a painting, a window, a light source — could link films the way a motif links an auteur's work.

Shooting three authentic-feeling films, each in its own era's style, let the game dramatize how cinema itself changed from studio-era horror to the psychological thriller of the late 1990s.

The studio stayed deliberately small while scaling content to two or three times Telling Lies, betting that more footage would let players get lost in the mystery rather than exhausting it.

When the medium is the mystery, give players the professional's tool: cutting on visual similarity turned every repeated object or gesture into evidence, and curiosity replaced prescribed quests.

Within weeks Immortality became shorthand for how far interactive film could go: critics analysed its three fictional films, players compared the threads they had found, and Half Mermaid was already building a Netflix version. Barlow told interviewers the reception exceeded expectations and left him deciding what could possibly follow it.