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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - East Region 2nd Round: 12 Immortality vs. 13 Stray
2026 Video Game Madness - East Region 2nd Round
East Region Round of 32 Matchup Preview: 12 Immortality vs. 13 Stray
The Game That Defied the Medium Against the Game That Made the Internet Love a Cat
This matchup should not exist, and that is exactly what makes it extraordinary.
Immortality was seeded 12th in the East bracket. Stray was seeded 13th. For both of them to be standing in the Round of 32 required two of the most significant upsets of the tournament's first round, and both of them delivered. Immortality defeated Persona 5, one of the most beloved JRPGs of the era and a game with one of the most organized fanbases in the tournament, by a score of 3-1. Stray defeated Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, the 4 seed and PC Gamer's Game of the Year for 2025, by the same margin on the same day. Two games that the bracket structure suggested were long shots both won decisively and both won on Day 1.
Now they face each other, and whoever advances from this matchup is going to the Round of 16 as one of the most unexpected stories in VGM 2026.
Immortality is the most unusual game in this tournament. It was made by Sam Barlow, the designer behind Her Story and Telling Lies, under his studio Half Mermaid Productions. Barlow's games occupy a category of their own. They are built around video footage that the player must sift through to reconstruct a narrative, using the mechanics of searching and finding and watching as storytelling tools in ways that no other designer has quite replicated.
Immortality is his most ambitious work. The game gives you a database of footage from three films made across three different decades by a fictional actress named Marissa Marcel, none of which were ever released. You scrub through the footage looking for connections, matching objects and faces and moments across different films and different eras, and slowly the story of what happened to Marissa Marcel and why her films never came out begins to emerge. The game is about cinema, about performance, about the relationship between an actor and the characters they play, and about something darker and stranger that takes time to reveal itself fully.
It scored a 91 on Metacritic. It earned a BAFTA nomination for a game that the medium had no real category for. The people who played Immortality carry it differently than they carry most games. They describe it in hushed tones. They protect potential players from knowing too much before they start. There is a specific instinct among people who have experienced it to guard the discovery for anyone who has not yet had it, and that instinct is itself a form of testimony. You do not feel the need to protect someone from spoilers on a game that did not mean something to you.
The community that formed around Immortality is small by the standards of this tournament. It is also extraordinarily committed, the kind of community that forms around a piece of art that people feel understood by in specific and personal ways. That commitment produced a 3-1 result against Persona 5, which is not a game whose fanbase is known for being small or uncommitted. Immortality's voters wanted it more in that round. They are here now and they want it still.
Stray is a completely different kind of game making a completely different kind of case. BlueTwelve Studio is a small French developer whose 2022 adventure game did something that almost no game manages. It made the global gaming internet collectively lose its mind over the experience of playing as a cat.
You play as a stray cat who falls into a walled city beneath the earth, populated entirely by robots who have been separated from the surface world for generations. The cat must navigate this city, befriend a small drone companion named B-12, and find a way back to the surface. The game is built around the physicality of being a cat in a way that is both joyful and precise. You jump on things. You knock things off shelves. You curl up and sleep in places that make the robots around you visibly delighted. The world of the Walled City is one of the most atmospheric environments in recent gaming, a place that feels genuinely melancholy and lived-in and real despite being populated entirely by mechanical beings.
It scored an 83 on Metacritic and won Best Independent Game at The Game Awards 2022. It sold millions of copies. It generated an extraordinary amount of goodwill simply by being exactly what it promised and nothing more, a short, beautiful, atmospheric game about a cat in a robot city that understood its own appeal completely and delivered it without compromise.
The cultural moment Stray generated in 2022 has not faded. The people who played it talk about it with an affection that is almost parental. They came to vote for it in the Round of 64 against a 4 seed with an 88 Metacritic and won 3-1. That is not a close result. That is a fanbase that showed up with full commitment and delivered a clear statement.
Two games that produce advocates. Two fanbases that proved themselves in the Round of 64 by beating games that had every reason to expect to advance. One of them gets to keep going. The other goes home having already done something that nobody predicted they could do.
The East bracket continues March 21. 12PM.
