Sam Barlow wanted to make a new kind of police procedural mystery. So he quit his job, read interrogation manuals and created one of the most interesting games of the last five years

There are no spoilers for Her Story in this article.

When Sam Barlow was working at Climax Studios in Portsmouth, helping to design the survival horror sequel, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, he would get home at night and tinker with a couple of screenplay projects. They were just an exercise, a way to write about things that he couldn’t in his day job. But then one night, he realised something: both scripts were about a man just ambling along, seemingly quite happy in life, until a cataclysmic event changes everything. “I was like, ‘Oh right, this is me sending a message to myself’,” he says. “I realised I needed the impetus to leave the company and go indie. I was writing this stuff to tell that to myself.”



He’d been toying with a game idea, some kind of police procedural thriller. It’s a genre that has flourished on television and in crime fiction, but is under-explored in the games industry. Inspired by gritty shows like Homicide: Life on the Streets, and fascinated by the interactive movie boom of the early 90s, when developers explored the use of video footage in games, he started to think of a way to combine these elements. But he knew he didn’t want to develop the idea at a studio, he didn’t want some big budget 3D action adventure – he wanted to experiment with the form. He needed to leave. And having saved up a bit of cash to support a small-scale project for a year, that’s exactly what he did.

“When I started Her Story, I spent a lot of the early development time just thinking,” he says. “I sat in my garden, staring into the sky with a notebook in my hand. I think that helped me come up with a lot of the interesting angles in the game.”

What he didn’t do was watch endless police procedural movies and interrogation scenes for inspiration. “Research is so important,” he says. “If all your ideas are coming from movies, that can be a problem. An artist has already gone out into the world and compressed a lot of information to create that film. If that’s your sole influence, all you’re doing is adding more and more compression.”

Instead, he started reading interrogation text books, books intended to teach police detectives and security personal how to garner information from suspects. “Academics tend to categorise, break things down, come up with systems of reference,” he says. “They dig down into the systemic layer of stuff. That gives you a fresh insight, a new way of looking a things. Vocational manuals are written by people with deep knowledge and understanding, there are real world examples, step by step guides, it’s a different perspective full of information and ideas.”

What he learned was that detectives don’t just listen to the suspect’s narrative, they’re picking up on the use of certain pronouns and tenses; they use the psychological elements of story-telling to discover an extra layer of truth and detail in the grammar and cadence of the interview. He started to wonder about how that could be explored in a game.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from Her Story by Sam Barlow. Photograph: Sam Barlow

Barlow also noticed something else while watching YouTube videos of real interrogations. Suspects were often weirdly comfortable with opening up – they were intimate in a way we’re often not in our closest relationships. “Before the war, my grandmother was a singer and there are all these photos of her, this beautiful glamorous star of the stage – but I knew her as a dinner lady,” says Barlow. “I was painfully aware that because of the way families are, and the way people of that generation are, I couldn’t really sit down and ask her to talk about that stuff.

“But then I saw how the police interview room often becomes a place where people just tell their life stories – and that’s what the cop wants. He wants open questions and he wants them to talk and talk and reveal themselves. It’s so weird how intimate and personal these stories are, even in this very cold formal setting where the detective is essentially there to arrest them. In the background, there’s the awfulness of the fact that, with people in my family, I wasn’t able to sit there and be the detective and actually get all this interesting detail and hear their stories. There are a lot of details in Her Story that are directly taken from stuff I know or have kind of imagined about people at different generations of my family.”

Her Story is a game about the process of interrogation, but also about how we give ourselves away – those little tics of personality and character revealed through unconscious gestures and repetitive words. It’s a game about identity as a performance. What we see are clips of a police interview with a woman, captured over a series of days. She may or may not be a murderer, and it is the player’s unspoken role – as the anonymous user of a police computer system – to search the video fragments and discover the truth. The interface is effectively a search engine – you input words that may or may not bring up fresh video segments; you watch the clips; you try to pick up on clues and possible search angles, then type in new words. The game recreates a Windows PC desktop, even reflecting a fictitious light source. It is a disorientating trick, a layering of reality on artifice on reality, luring the player into an environment that is both familiar and sinister.

As a structural conceit it feels modern, a perfect interface for the Google generation, but Barlow says the influence is older. “I re-read a lot of JG Ballard’s short stories before writing Her Story,” he says. “Ballard was riffing on 60s avant garde ideas - the stories are full of narrative gimmicks. One is told though the index of a fictional autobiography, there’s a story told via a series of vignettes that you’re supposed to shuffle like a pack of cards.

“Ballard directed readers of The Atrocity Exhibition to flip through the pages until they found an interesting paragraph and then read around it for more information. This blew my mind, it tapped into the idea of what Her Story was becoming – this idea of the audience as an active participant, surfing the story, looking for particular words or phrases that capture their attention, then diving in and leading their own path through the story. That was such a lovely idea. The fusing of writing and reading sparked something in my head.”

He started writing a script, chopping it up, storing snippets in a database, tagging chunks with specific keywords – a process he’d already practised using transcripts from genuine police interrogations. He brought in actor Viva Seifert, who he’d already worked with on the Climax project Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun before it was canned. For the filming process, Barlow hired a cubicle in a council building in Truro to represent the interrogation room. He cued Seifert in by asking the questions himself - we never hear them in the game.

For the look and feel of the process, Barlow does admit to taking inspiration from one movie: Basic Instinct. “I found some of the audition tapes that Sharon Stone did before she was cast,” he says. “These sparked so many ideas - you have this crappy video footage, badly framed, no theatrical immersion, no lighting or music, her hair is unkempt, the camera never cuts.

Sharon Stone’s screen test for the film Basic Instinct

“Her performance is unrehearsed and has a rawness to it. We’re so used to the tricks of the cinema, when you see footage like this it feels so much more intimate and real. Then you have Paul Verhoeven off camera, reading the police detectives lines, and that idea of having the policeman removed from the scene, diminished – that set up the idea that developed in Her Story where the detective is completely removed from the experience.”

What Basic Instinct also reflects is a lurid interest in female murderers, which often becomes – in the hands of b-movies and tabloid media – an almost voyeuristic fascination. In the early stages of development, Barlow watched trial footage of Jodi Arias, who was found guilty of murdering her boyfriend Travis Alexander in 2013. The legal process became a vast televisual and social media spectacle – similar to the long-running Amanda Knox investigation. A woman who kills is the ultimate taboo, splintering societal notions of femininity, motherhood and nurture. Often the coverage becomes sexualised, with suspects painted as wicked seducers.

“I was interested in the expectations of women and the roles they have to play,” says Barlow. “Elements such as having a family and birth control have shaped what women can do in society, and how they should behave. This tied in with the way people reacted to seeing videos of women murderers and the discourse on how they should act”.

The game was released on PC and iOS on 24 June – Barlow deliberately put it out right after E3, the massive mainstream video games conference in Los Angeles. His thinking was, journalists would be heading back home, bored by big explosions, desperate for something more reflective – maybe they’d welcome playing a slow-paced procedural. “I launched on the Wednesday,” says Barlow. “Then at the weekend, Tale of Tales wrote their thing about how their game hadn’t sold, and that was like, ‘Oh … okay’. I thought some people would hate it, but that some would really get it, and that it would sell okay and probably build an audience over time.”

Even before the release however, the game was attracting interest – and derision – for its use of full motion video. The concept reminded many of the abortive ‘interactive movie’ genre of the early nineties, when CD-ROM technology suddenly allowed developers to build games out of movie sequences. The result was an explosion of titles like Night Trap, Sewer Shark and Double Switch – that were move like straight-to-video action flicks than interactive experiences. But this was also an era of experimentation.

“You had an influx of genres and stories that had never been in games before,” Barlow says. “There were legal dramas, detective stories, there were adult themes going on – all this stuff that people had struggled to gamify. And a lot of it was being made by these TV and movie production people in LA. I played a terrible game called Tender Loving Care after I’d done Shattered Memories. It was a sort of erotic thriller, like one of those Shannon Tweed Channel 5 movies, but it had John Hurt as the psychiatrist. John fucking Hurt! It was bizarre. But stuff like that, as bad and hilarious as it was... there were all these ideas about psychiatry and weird takes on narrative. All this kind of crazy stuff was happening. I wanted to take that and reappraise it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Hurt in the video game Tender Loving Care Photograph: Moby Games/Aftermath Media

Washington Post ran the first review for Her Story. It was positive – as was a subsequent verdict from Eurogamer. But it was a roller-coaster; some okay reviews, some bad. “My hope was to break even over six months or something,” says Barlow.

Then PC Gamer gave it 90%.

Immediately, there was a whole new level of attention, not all of it good. “It kicked off in the comments,” he says. “There were people saying, ‘What the fuck? A 90 for this?’. And there were brilliant comments like, ‘The Witcher 3 only got 93. How can it score so close?’. Because of course, The Witcher 3 has NPCs, side quests, combat, trees... How can an indie game get within three percent of all that? This was tweeted around a few journalists and… we got a little bit of attention.”

Things snowballed. Within a week of release, the game hit number two on the PC gaming site Steam – “only Counterstrike was beating it,” says Barlow. Then there was an Editor’s Choice on the App Store.

But of course, the fact that this was an offbeat, experimental title garnering positive coverage meant that it was always going to attract a very familiar kind of antagonism. “There were some, um, hashtag affiliates who were sharing a photoshopped tweet attributed to me , saying, ‘Oh god, Her Story is not selling at all. The refund rate is through the roof. Where did I go wrong?’ And it was like me having a hissy fit about the game doing really badly. It was bizarre, because that wasn’t happening, and even if the game hadn’t sold, I would’ve been like, ‘Do you know what? I tried it, it was interesting, and it didn’t work.’

“Anyway, someone mentioned me into the thread, and there were all these people going, ‘Fucking indie prick,’ ‘Crybaby,’ ‘Oh hey dude maybe make a better game next time,’ ‘Make a proper game you asshole, no wonder it’s not selling,’ and all this kind of stuff. It gave me a teeny insight into what it must be like to be a target.”

Trailer for Her Story

A month after Her Story released, Barlow was able to inform detractors that the game had sold 100,000 copies. Last month, it was awarded three Baftas for Debut Game, Mobile & Handheld and Game Innovation. A year after release people are still discussing the game, arguing over the details. Because of the way different people discover and analyse the clips in different orders, theories can differ wildly. Barlow says he always meant the story to be ambiguous – he even toyed with dispensing with any sort of formal ending.

“I kind of showed it to a bunch of people and said, ‘How would you feel if there was no ending to this game?’,” he says. “99% of them said, ‘It would be fine if it was on a pedestal in a gallery, but if it’s a game and I’ve bought it, I’m gonna expect some closure’. Because it is a murder mystery, people want some kind of validation. They were like, ‘I don’t want the game to, like, have a definitive ending but I do want permission to walk away because I don’t want to be sat thinking, ‘Am I done? Am I not done?’, and have that unresolved’.

“So I added in the point where the game explicitly says to you, ‘Hey, if you feel like you’re finished then we can be done here,’ and then you get a little twist that potentially changes some of your thinking about what’s happening, and then a kind of cathartic end. Someone who plays to that point has to feel satisfied.”

Shortly after the game was released, Barlow begin to get calls and emails from television and media companies. There was a sense that these traditional organisations knew they had to somehow explore interactive digital formats, but didn’t know how. “They’d look at a video game, even something like Gone Home, and see first-person exploration of a 3D house and they’re like, ‘I don’t see how I relate that to what we do,’” says Barlow. “But with Her Story they thought, ‘Ooh, I kind of get this.’ It’s accessible, they understand what’s going on and they can see where the interactivity comes in.”

The result is that Barlow is now working with innovative media firm Interlude as an executive creative director. There, he’ll produce a digital short based on the classic movie War Games, as well as a new series for the company’s interactive video platform, Eko.

But Barlow has not left Her Story behind. In January he tweeted that there was a treatment ready for the next game, a spiritual successor with a different scenario and character. It will be interesting to see how he develops the concept, how far he will move from the original’s fascinatingly minimal interface. Her Story looked back to the derided interactive movie genre and found in it a way of exploring narrative that we’ve been told didn’t work. Maybe it just worked differently.

Sometimes we must ask questions about how we learn from history, and whether the footage we have available is telling the truth or just another story.