Sam Barlow’s new game is Immortality, but what does that mean? Ghost Rider and Serious Sam: Next Encounter aren’t what we think of him for. I liked the boxy nineties interface of Her Story. You could almost buy the odd conceit of searching for keywords based on what was said, the better to find fresh videos, the way the camera held its heroine under hard lighting. It didn’t ring true by the time of Telling Lies. With a USB cable, I could solve the game’s mystery much more easily; why not put all the videos on the MacBook on a hard drive? In these games, so much time is spent watching that I get a craving for mechanical help. On the laptop in question, I played solitaire a lot during Telling Lies.
Then there’s Immortality, which ditches computers for film. That’s a better fit. Screeching through old movies, we look for clues. Then we cut to another clip with a similar image. These are unreleased pics of Marissa Marcel, a starlet who made three doomed movies. Then again, Marissa’s deeds unreel in the soft grain of celluloid, which can warp and burn as quickly as a career. You know, like a life.
There’s Ambrosio, a fictional adaptation of a real novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis about a priest tempted by sin. It looks like something Ken Russell would have directed for TV. Another 1970 cop thriller is Minsky, about a dead artist and his dark-eyed muse. Two of Everything, from 1999, revolves around a pop star and her body double. They all have a deeper meaning. Movies are soaked in murk. Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s gloom-infested tribute to Sunset Boulevard, is a great example of how dreams can rot and spread into reality. That’s why Barlow brought in Barry Gifford to co-write Immortality. Lynch adapted Gifford’s Wild at Heart into a movie, and he also wrote Lost Highway with Lynch. Basically, Gifford writes about people who are trapped and damned by stories.
As well as Gifford, Amelia Gray and Allan Scott wrote Telling Lies and Don’t Look Now for Nicholas Roeg. So Immortality is buried in movies. It wants you to feel like David Hemmings in Blow Up, pacing his studio, surrounded by dripping pictures; or David Warner in The Omen, in his blood-red studio, watching something awful blot out. Is immortality a horror?
Well, you can make people talk backwards, and you have to use both analogue sticks like dials on a Moviola. Besides Marissa and her co-actors, there’s another presence here – something older, lurking in the loops of lost time. There are no white-hot ghouls emerging from a sea of green in this game, like in Amnesia or Outlast. I’m pleased to report that Immortality’s mood is fruitfully unsettling after a few nights. Suddenly you’re wondering if Marissa is still alive – and how.
Then you realize what Barlow’s done. Rather than computers, those ghost-free machines, his fixation with scrambled narratives has found its natural home here, on coils of vulnerable tape. Most of his games have been about editing: letting us make sense of the mess. Marissa is counting on you to tell her story, and to see through the lies.
