#this game reminds me a lot of basically everything addie larue failed to do

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

I’ve been playing Immortality (2022) and I’m obsessed with the nuance it manages to hold and how it successfully threads the needle on fairly specific and complex topics while the story itself is so entirely nonlinear. The gameplay style of sorting through randomized clips ensures that the developers have fairly little control over what order the player finds the scenes in.

I’m not finished with it yet. I have no idea how far I am in the game lol. But like six hours in, at least, I’m really intrigued by the way it delves into art as a concept; is it consuming, is it fulfilling, is it worth the sacrifices made to create it, or the social evils that can surround it, etc. I particularly like that the three fictional films it centers on are interesting but simultaneously fairly low brow.

I’m also enjoying the way it gets into women’s role in art, and the gendered constraints of how they are historically portrayed within a narrative (often by men) but also when it comes to being an artist and the questions of exploitative practices, and lack of respect or recognition.

And the game actually employs its immortal, unaging protagonist in a way that intelligently explores these themes.

There’s something really interesting happening with her three main film roles and how her first character (literally Matilda from the Monk by MG Lewis) is basically an entirely stylized fantasy. A destructive and seductive force of nature, with no interiority of her own, who only exists to corrupt the titular monk. Then her second character is a standard femme fatale, a model who kills her artist lover and again… corrupts the strait laced and moral detective protagonist who’s trying to solve the murder. This character is explicitly acknowledged to be a more grounded and real role, she’s closer to a real, flawed person, but she’s still basically a vector for titillation and is vilified for it. By the third (dual) role, decades later, she’s progressed to being a genuine protagonist. But for that, her character is split into a very literalized virgin and whore dichotomy. These sides are symbolically fused by the third act of this fictional movie with the virginal character’s death, with the whore stepping into her place and finally becoming a fully realized person. But even that comes with the deliberate framing of something unachievable without a death and rebirth occurring. Without her being sanded down to a sort of palatability by it.

I’m also very interested in these films being in-universe lost media that was never actually completed or widely released. And how that may tie into its themes of recognition and the importance or lack thereof of having an audience.