Immortality is an interactive film-game released in 2022 by Half Mermaid Productions. The player is given a single video clip of an actress in a talk-show interview, and by clicking on various objects and people in the video clip, the player can navigate to other video clips from a series of movies and interviews all featuring this actress, named Marissa Marcel. Clips of these film shoots uncover both the narratives of the movies as well as a larger mystery involving Marissa, who appears the same age in movies filmed over a span of thirty years.
This game has a particularly elegant design to me because of its quite simple palette of interactions: the player can rewind, fast-forward, pause, click on an object/person to move to a new clip, and navigate the catalog of explored clips. Because of this, the interaction loop whereby the player clicks on an object/person becomes thoroughly used and repeated over the ~four hours of gameplay. The game prompts this interaction with a vague tutorial at the very start of the game, but does not explain how the video clips are related by the common object/person between both scenes. The loop the first time the player clicks on the screen could be interpreted as:
- A vague understanding that clicking uncovers a new scene
- The player decides where and when to click on the video clip
- The player clicks
- The game chooses a scene that features the same clicked object/person
- The scene changes on-screen
- The player understands that the scenes are connected by objects/people.
This loop gets reinforced over the many hundred scene transitions the player must undergo. I think that this is an effective interaction loop, especially because of how many times the player’s mental model is challenged as a result of an increasing number of click interaction types.
Immortality also has a few very distinct interaction arcs that challenge the player’s mental model of the film narratives as well as the meta-narrative. One such arc occurs at the very end of the game once the player uncovers a certain amount of special clips that take more thoughtful interaction with the game. The catalog (seen above) slowly disappears, clip-by-clip, to reveal a video playing underneath featuring a mysterious unnamed character that appears in said special clips. They say to the player “I am a part of you, now,” and the game rolls credits. This has a few effects depending on the player’s mental model of the meta-narrative, and I thought that this arc was mostly confusing and anti-climatic since I didn’t understand the meta-narrative very well by the time I finished the game. This arc became much more effective only after reading the Wikipedia synopsis of the meta-narrative, so I think the game could have chosen a final arc that could have impact for players at all levels of understanding. The arc is effective, however, at disrupting a very regular, well-used interface to deliver more impact and importance to this final scene.
