Games I Played in October & Novemeber 2025

Games, Review

Looks like I forgot to share October’s games, so here are both months at once. Whoops!

October

Page for selecting video clips, showing he clips arranged in rows. One clips is highlighted for selection.
Selecting video clips in Immortality. | screenshot by me

I finished Immortality (Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid Productions), and it’s phenomenal. To learn how to play the game, the player really just has to dive in and discover how to play the game. The mechanics of pulling up videos, scrubbing them (playing, fast-forwarding, and rewinding), and then zooming in on objects or people in scenes allows for an impressive amount of discovery and exploration of this multi-layered and powerful narrative.

Marissa Marcel was an up-and-coming actor, who starred in three films — none of which ever aired. The game presents itself as a retrospective, allowing the the player to delve into clips from these films along with behind the scenes footage to discover her story. In the end, it’s so much deeper than the surface story, revealing a fascinating perspectives on how artists strive for a kind of immortality through their craft.

Games I Played in August 2025

Games
Polly is the infamous mascot of the shipping company the crew works for. | screenshot by me

Mouthwashing (Wrong Organ) is a psychological horror game about a crew left stranded in space after their ship collides with an asteroid. The five person crew operates a long-haul transport ship, and are constantly reminded by the company’s mascot Polly to stay focused on work and to not linger to long in idle distractions. The isolation on the ship and the slim chance of being rescued reveals dark secrets and the crew’s hidden selves.

The game approaches the narrative as a puzzle, presenting scenes from two points of view — Curly, the captain, and Jimmy, his second in command — and arranges these fragmented scenes out of chronological order. This puzzle structure allows for an emotional escalation, building tension through mystery, rather than a straightforward progression of the plot. It also reflects a sense of workers being trapped in the flow of their lives, struggling to take responsibility for the mistakes they’ve made as the story cycles back on itself and grows increasingly surreal. I was particularly haunted by the Curly’s looming eye swirling in its socket, like the Tell-Tale Heart’s ever beating heart beneath the floorboards.

Games I Played in June 2023

Games, Review
Her Story – Left: Computer screen for accessing videos. Right: Still from one of the interview clips. (Screenshots by me.)

Her Story is an analog-style narrative adventure game written and directed by Sam Barlow (who founded Half Mermaid). Players open on a ’90s computer screen and are given access to recordings of a police interviews with a woman over the course of several months. As the player watches these clips (ranging from a few seconds to a minute long), they discover new key words about the case, which allows them to search and find more clips — slowly unraveling the events of the case (at least, we learn as much as the woman tells us).