Telling Lies developer's next game is Immortality, about a missing movie star
The curious case of Marissa Marcel
The developer of swell narrative games Her Story and Telling Lies teased his next project last summer with a rather redacted store page. Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow's next game, Immortality, has now been slightly more revealed to be a story about the disappearance of movie star Marissa Marcel. We don't know much more than that, but it sure does sound like another twisty mystery is in store.
The teaser trailer for Immortality is right here and it does, pardon me, set the scene. Marissa Marcel appeared in three movies across thirty years, but none of the movies she filmed ever wound up being released. Marcel herself went missing, which is presumably the mystery you'll be untangling.
Since there's little else to go on so far, here are the blurbs for Marcel's three films from Immortality's page:
- 1968: Alan Fischer directs Ambrosio his adaptation of M. G. Lewis’s notorious Gothic novel The Monk. He casts unknown Marissa Marcel as the infamous Matilda.
- 1970: John Durick writes his thriller Minsky with Marcel in mind. Set in New York City, the movie concerns the death of a famous artist and Marissa stars as the muse suspected of murdering him.
- 1999: For his swansong, Durick teams up with Marcel again as she returns from a lengthy hiatus. The movie Two of Everything is a subversive thriller which explores the duality between a successful pop star and her body double.
For what it's worth, Immortality was known as Project Ambrosio before it was fully revealed. Just a bit of all that former redacted information remains. Under the heading "2022", the words "Barlow", "custodian", and "concordance" appear between a bunch of other covered text. A mystery!
Her Story and Telling Lies both revolve around scouring videos for clues to unravel some hidden stories. Alice Bee's Telling Lies review says they're quite neat. Immortality's description doesn't explicity say so, but given the subject matter it feels safe to assume it involves even more of the same.
Barlow is joined in writing Immortality by Allan Scott of The Queen's Gambit, Amelia Gray of Mr. Robot, and Barry Gifford of Wild At Heart.
"I have always been fascinated by moviemaking," Barlow says. "Delving into the history of cinema and sharing Marissa Marcel’s work with players is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. We hope to use this footage as a lens to explore the medium and peek inside the second half of film’s first century. Perhaps it can bring closure to the questions around Marissa’s disappearance also."
Okay, but Marcel isn't real, right?
Immortality will release sometime in 2022 over on Steam.