ohConsidered a creative dead end, the interactive movie – a video game made from filmed footage – is undergoing a renaissance. Like 2022’s Bafta winner Immortality, Of Two Spirits asks players to piece together a puzzle from found footage, where the story is encountered out of sequence through faded clues. It is unique because it is composed of an actual movie, shot by filmmaker Michael Bergmann in the 1980s and then abandoned. Bergmann revisited the archive footage and, together with editor Lucas Tahiruzzaman Syed, adapted the material into a video game format.
The game tells the story of a middle-aged New Yorker and the various men in her life: her therapist, her gambling man, her lover and his therapist. Essentially, it’s a game about psychoanalysis and the desires and traumas that shape how a person behaves. As you watch short clips play out, words appear on the screen to describe the things being said or done: “avoidance,” when we see someone taking a painkiller; “traumatic response”, when we watch a character flinch at the sound of breaking glass, or observe the face of an angry parent in a frustrated partner. Click on the words as they move across the screen and you add them to a “theme” bank in your Filofax, to which the game returns after the clip has played. Next, by choosing two theme words—“sex” and “aggression,” say, or “aggression” and “glass”—you trigger a new scene related to the clues.
Each watched clip is filed in one of eight folders, one for each of the story’s main characters, and can be watched again at any time. Piecing the story together makes you feel invested in its telling and compelled to unlock new fragments of information. The period visuals add to the sense of dreamlike mystery, while the combination of depiction and label offsets some sometimes heavy-handed bits of dialogue and symbolism. The act of drawing links between the characters’ dreams and obsessions, infidelity and promises, and associations and realizations becomes deeply satisfying – even, at times, enlightening. The result is a game that feels like it was always meant to be experienced in this quirky yet rewarding way.
