Games Like Immortality for Players Who Enjoy Piecing Together Stories

Games for Immortality fans who like assembling a hidden story from footage, scenes, audio and other fragments.

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished 16 September 2026Updated 16 September 2026

If you enjoyed assembling a hidden story from scraps of footage in Immortality, look for games that hand you pieces out of order and trust you to make sense of them. The best matches are:

Her Story: Sam Barlow's earlier game, built from clips of police interviews.
Telling Lies: search a database of secretly recorded video calls.
Return of the Obra Dinn: work out what happened aboard a ship that returned without its crew.
The Case of the Golden Idol: reconstruct 12 connected deaths from frozen scenes.
The Painscreek Killings: explore an abandoned town with no quest markers to solve an old murder.
Unheard – Voices of Crime: rebuild crimes from audio recordings alone.
Sara Is Missing: reconstruct a missing woman's final days from her phone.

Upcoming Murder Book works on a smaller scale, piecing together what happened from a suspect's own shifting account.

Key takeaways

Immortality's pleasure is building your own version of events from fragments that are not in order.
Her Story and Telling Lies are the closest matches in structure and creator.
Obra Dinn and Golden Idol turn piecing together a story into a logical deduction puzzle.
Painscreek, Unheard and Sara Is Missing do the same through a town, audio and a phone.
Murder Book is an upcoming interrogation game about narrative gaps and unreliable accounts, planned for the end of Q2 2027.

What makes Immortality different from other FMV mysteries?

Immortality (Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid, 2022) is described on Steam as "an interactive trilogy". Actress Marissa Marcel made three films, none was ever released, and she disappeared. You explore newly unearthed footage from those lost films and use match cuts, which Steam describes as a cinematic ability to teleport from scene to scene, to find your way through decades of movie history.

What sets it apart from Barlow's earlier games is that you are not searching a database or watching interviews. You move through film footage instead, and the mystery of what happened to Marissa Marcel sits behind the films themselves.

A good "game like Immortality" for this page should share at least some of these qualities:

Fragmented material you encounter out of order.
A hidden story behind the obvious one.
Player-built understanding, with little or no hand-holding.
No combat: progress comes from attention and interpretation.

Games like Immortality at a glance

Game	Developer	What you piece together	Format	Platforms (examples)
Her Story	Sam Barlow	A woman's account across seven police interviews	Full-motion video	PC, Mac, iOS, Android
Telling Lies	Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid	Secrets from one-sided recorded video calls	Full-motion video	PC, Mac, consoles, iOS
Return of the Obra Dinn	Lucas Pope	What happened to a lost ship's crew	First-person deduction	PC, Mac, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
The Case of the Golden Idol	Color Gray Games	12 connected deaths from frozen scenes	Deduction puzzle	PC, Mac, Linux, consoles, iOS, Android
The Painscreek Killings	EQ Studios	An old murder in an abandoned town	Town exploration	PC
Unheard – Voices of Crime	NEXT Studios	Crimes told only through audio recordings	Audio investigation	PC, Mac
Sara Is Missing	Kaigan Games	A missing woman's final days from her phone	Phone simulation	iOS

Platforms were checked against Steam, official sites or official app store listings. Availability can change, so check the store before buying.

Her Story

Her Story (Sam Barlow, 2015) is where Barlow's fragment-based approach began. You type search terms into a 1990s police database and watch video clips from seven interviews with a British woman about her missing husband. Each search brings up short, disconnected moments, and it is up to you to put them in order.

Why it fits: the same creator, the same live-action performances and the same refusal to explain the answer. See Games Like Her Story for more.

Telling Lies

Telling Lies (Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid and Furious Bee, published by Annapurna Interactive, 2019) gives you a stolen NSA database of secretly recorded video conversations. You search by typing words and watch the clips where those words are spoken. Because most clips show one side of a call, you fill in the missing half yourself.

Why it fits: a larger web of relationships built entirely from pieces. For more in this vein, see Games Like Telling Lies.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, published by 3909, 2018) is, in Steam's words, "a first-person mystery adventure based on exploration and logical deduction". The merchant ship Obra Dinn drifts into Falmouth with no visible crew, and as an insurance investigator for the East India Company you board it to assess what happened.

Why it fits: like Immortality, it is about reconstructing a tragedy from what was left behind, through careful logical deduction. See Games Like Return of the Obra Dinn.

The Case of the Golden Idol

The Case of the Golden Idol (Color Gray Games, published by Playstack, 2022) presents 12 strange deaths connected by a mysterious idol. You observe each frozen crime scene, reconstruct what happened, and identify suspects, motives and methods. Across the cases, a larger conspiracy comes into view.

Why it fits: each scene is a fragment, and the full story only appears once you connect them.

The Painscreek Killings

The Painscreek Killings (EQ Studios, 2017) casts you as a journalist named Janet exploring an abandoned town. You take notes, photograph clues and solve logic puzzles to find out who killed Vivian Roberts. Steam notes there are no quest markers or hints.

Why it fits: the story is scattered across a place rather than a film archive, and you have to assemble it without guidance.

Unheard – Voices of Crime

Unheard (NEXT Studios, 2019) removes images entirely. You listen to audio recordings of a crime scene and work out who each voice belongs to and who is responsible. A developer note on Steam mentions five chapters in the first version.

Why it fits: the same "what really happened in that room?" feeling, rebuilt from overlapping voices.

Sara Is Missing

Sara Is Missing (Kaigan Games) is a free iOS game in which you find a missing woman's phone. According to the App Store description, you search her messages, notes, emails, pictures and videos, and unlock protected files to reconstruct her final days.

Why it fits: a personal story in fragments, found on a device rather than a film reel.

Where should you start?

Want the closest experience? Her Story, then Telling Lies.
Want a more structured deduction puzzle? Return of the Obra Dinn or The Case of the Golden Idol.
Want to explore a place? The Painscreek Killings.
Want to play on your phone? Sara Is Missing.

Is there an upcoming game about piecing together a story?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia. Immortality asks you to read a story in fragments of film. Murder Book asks you to read one in fragments of testimony: the gaps, the avoidance and the details that change as a suspect talks. It is inspired by real police footage and psychological interviews.

The press kit lists behaviours such as Narrative Gaps, Fabrication, Avoidance and Emotional Leakage. Development screenshots show an evidence board where statements are linked to each other, and a branching case map with achievement endings and a completion percentage, so a case can lead to more than one outcome. Cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions.

Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027. Learn more in Designing Unreliable Stories for Murder Book.