Sam Barlow has made a name for himself as one of the most important game designers working today. For almost a quarter of a century he’s been playing around with narrative in games, including work as lead designer on two Silent Hill titles in the late 2000s, Origins and Shattered Memories. After breaking away to become an independent producer, in 2015 he released the ground-breaking Her Story which encouraged players to solve a murder mystery by weaving together numerous video clips from a series of police interview tapes.

^{Picture: Sela Shiloni}
 

‘The fact that you could self-publish on digital distribution was a new thing,’ explains Barlow of the game’s development. ‘So it really felt like an opportunity where you could make something quite specific or different or weird or niche and still find a biggish audience. People playing games on the App Store weren't playing with a controller, they weren't like a traditional gamer audience. There was this sense that you could slightly reinvent what a game looks like and not have those people be freaked out about it.’

Barlow followed up Her Story with Telling Lies in 2019, a game that cemented his position as the figurehead of this nascent genre. Then last year he released Immortality, a stunningly ambitious mystery about a missing actress. Players piece together the story using clips from three full fictionalised genre films and copious ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage. Although players won’t see the whole thing, it clocks in at almost 10 hours. ‘It came about because my games kept being discussed in the context of being interactive movies or related to movies. And as a lover of movies I would always think, actually they’re anti-movies. And so with this one I thought, wouldn't it be cool to actually tackle something that aesthetically is like a movie?’

Even though he’d laid the groundwork with his two previous releases and their critical success, Barlow knew he was being audacious. ‘I think I knew instantly that this was going to be ambitious, and maybe too ambitious,’ he admits. ‘So let’s lean into that. Let's ask big questions about why we even tell stories and let's look back and analyse the 20th-century's greatest medium.’ Immortality is indeed uncompromising in its exploration of the dark side of cinema. But it’s also a horror game underpinned by an extraordinary technical process that Barlow likens to a ‘hidden heartbeat’: to expand further would lessen its impact. ‘I tend to make things that are very complicated,’ he confesses. ‘The goal is to have a very simple interface, or the surface level is quite simple. And then there's a lot of complexity in the content and in the way that the user has a lot of freedom.’

Asked if he has any desire to return to a more traditional style of gaming, perhaps a 3D adventure (with an interesting narrative element, obviously), Barlow is surprisingly forthright. ‘That might be what we do next,’ he teases. ‘I do have the annoying habit of every year playing The Last Of Us or whatever the big, new character-driven games are, and having different ideas about how I’d do things and wanting to get in there and mix it up. So there is a project that we're getting on its feet that, not by design, really does feel like a perfect synthesis of something like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.’ With Immortality nominated for six BAFTA Game Awards, and winning one for narrative design, all eyes are on Barlow’s next move.

Sam Barlow presents a lecture at Abertay University, Dundee, Friday 31 March, 5pm, as part of its Platform series.