Don't leave anything left on the cutting room floor.

Immortality is the acclaimed 2022 FMV mystery game from Half Mermaid Productions. The game features what is supposedly an uncovered archive of clips from three missing films starring Marissa Marcel. Inside each clip are clues to a series of mysteries about art, power, and the nature of life that could explain what happened to Marissa and those movies.

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On one level, Immortality is a simple game about finding clips in a meticulously constructed fictional archive, using image searching tools to do so. It's also about much more than that, including a story that, as it unfolds, layers several overlapping and dramatic narrative mysteries. In the very film stock itself, there are numerous secrets to be found.

To unlock more clips for your archive, you must search for an item in that clip that appears in another clip, unlocking the latter. This is what the game playfully calls a 'Match Cut'. In image mode, when over an item, an eye will appear in the cursor. The match can be very specific, to an actor for instance, or be any from a set of similar things, for instance, doors.

Some selections can be used several times to unlock many clips and can give you a broad base to work, such useful selections include Marissa Marcel herself, as well as clapperboards, which appear at the beginning of most film shots. Some items appear thematically in many spaces like pieces of art, plants, and cups.

A person's face must be mostly in view to select them, and background actors' faces will match cut to other background actors, rather than the same specific person.

There are stranger and more poetic connections too, for instance between reflected eyes and bullet holes. An abstract understanding of connections between items, and being able to pick out things that appear momentarily but distinctly, like something in a reflection, are essential to finding some clips.

When discovering a clip, the image selection might take you to the middle or end of the new clip, as it connects to where it appears in the video. Use the 'start' function to see if this is the case, as it will scrub you right back to the beginning. This is an easy thing to forget to do.

It's tempting to jump from clip to clip via the image searching tool, without fully watching the clip you just unlocked. This means that you might miss a lot of narrative content, hints about the mysteries, and unique items, and so if you think you've missed something it might be in a clip you instantly image selected away from.

You can select images from one clip multiple times, and if it has a tableau of many items, like a living room, this could be a good place to start a clip hunt.

On the collection screen you have tools for arranging your finds, and which of the images and clips you'd like to consider:

On the film grid, every clip you find has the project it was associated with and the date at the bottom. On the image grid, the images you take from clips will have what specifically was matched with at the bottom, which can help to understand how the game creates sets of objects.

One of the major parts of the game's mystery is the presence of clips within the clips. These are moments you might have caught a glimpse of that reveal to you a deeper level of the interactivity of the clips and their story.

If playing with a controller and vibration turned on the device will vibrate during a playing clip where hidden clips might be.

If you then scrub backward through normal clips, you can find the hidden moments. You will have to fiddle with the speed of the scrubbing until the deeper image solidifies and the secret clip plays.

By scrubbing forwards in secret clips you can rewind them too, and then find even deeper levels of layered video, going at least four levels of scrubbing back-and-forth deep. When done, if you want to scrub back further than a secret clip, which may auto-start when scrubbing back from a normal clip's end, press the 'Start' button to bypass it.

These clips will not appear in your film clip collection, so adding where these clips appear to your favorites is a way to keep track of them.

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Oma is a writer, game developer and artist with over six years working in games. They have an interest in everything from the smallest interactive fiction experiment to the biggest new console releases, since it's all grounds for a unique experience. Their favourite games are the ones that disappear down the side of the sofa of history, and they've written everything from poetry to guides on the topic of obscure games.