Available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, mobile

At first glance, Immortality doesn’t look like a video game at all. Even after you begin playing it, you’d be hard-pressed to find many games that look like it, and even fewer that play like it. The only real comparisons one could draw would be the two games that developer Half Mermaid made before this one, and even then, Immortality builds on those games’ genre-bending features in fascinating ways in order to deliver one of the year’s absolute best video games. Using the now-signature stylings of live-action archival footage and the heart of a detective game, Immortality breaks new ground in the video game space to tell a unique story about artistry, its costs, and, well, a few other wrinkles you simply have to experience for yourself.

To speak to Immortality’s strengths is harder than it is for most games, because the nature of Sam Barlow and his team’s latest effort is deliberately evasive, asking players to search through hours and hours of movie recordings, invented wholecloth for the game’s story, that span 30 years of a disappeared actor’s career. What happened to Marissa Marcel? It’s the million-dollar question implied as soon as you’re placed in front of the game’s faux-Moviola machine, which allows you to pause, rewind, fast-forward, and even click on pieces of a frame–a face, a knife, a pool of blood–and search the records for similar imagery. This constant thread-pulling is both deliberately imprecise and relentlessly engrossing. Even clicking on the same image twice, from slightly different angles or frames, can lead you down new proverbial rabbit holes, allowing this eight-hour game to reimagine the medium’s common one-more-try design. Over time, you’ll piece together the story like red string on a corkboard.

Answering the human questions of Immortality–Where is Marissa now? Why did her promising career fail to launch? What did Hollywood do to her?–are eventually revealed to be the corporeal stand-ins for more…philosophical questions. These answers matter, and you’ll get answers to at least some of the game’s many mysteries, but its grander plans are not for sharing, they’re for seeing for yourself.

There is a moment in Immortality that had me jump out of my seat in a way I always thought was an exaggeration when I’ve seen people do it in movies and TV. It comes at a time when the game reveals its secret hidden meaning I won’t spoil here. This moment is even more compelling when you consider that it comes at a different time and in a different scene for different people because of the way each player moves through its time-twisting movie clips, table reads, and personal camcorder footage without a guiding hand. I’ll think about this moment for a long time, and I’ll remember Immortality as one of the best games of 2022 because, though this singular moment had me out of my seat, the entire experience kept me on the edge of it. — Mark Delaney