Immortality review – cinematic masterpiece

metro.co.uk:

A spellbinding collage of video game and film, from the creator of Her Story and Telling Lies, is the best interactive movie ever made.

Those who class themselves as hardcore gamers tend to sneer at interactive movies, pointing out – often correctly – that there’s precious little about them that is actually interactive. Immortality, however, is so good that it could single-handedly rehabilitate an entire genre’s reputation. Technically, it is an interactive movie, but it doesn’t play like one, thanks to a completely original, free-form approach. In truth, it probably deserves to be placed in an entirely new genre of video games, all of its own.

A short tutorial introduces you to its protagonist, Marissa Marcel: every inch the Hollywood movie star, she made three films (in 1968, 1970, and 1999) which somehow never got released, after which she disappeared from any form of public life. Immortality presents you with her entire celluloid archive, and it’s up to you to navigate your way through it however you see fit. As you do so, you uncover all manner of revelations about Marissa and the actors, directors, and movie folk with whom she worked.

You could argue forever about whether Immortality is actually a video game, but it certainly feels like one. It uses the video game medium to create a new type of narrative which unfolds in a completely open-ended manner, offering an entirely different experience to everyone who plays it.

The game aspect comes from the emulation of a Moviola editing machine, which lets you navigate each clip (all its footage purports to be unedited and is presented as a single take), zooming to its start or finish, or advancing frame by frame, should you so desire. On top of that, there’s a slightly