// PC GAMER — GAMING
'I am a big roguelike guy, but also a fan of minimalism and elegance': Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story, guides us through the games in his Steam Library
The founder of Half Mermaid on classic adventure games, modern hacking sims, and his favourite screenwriting software.
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Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"
Sam Barlow is the director of Half Mermaid and one of interactive fiction's modern luminaries. Breaking into game development with his one-move choose your own adventure Arrival, Barlow worked on games like Ghost Rider and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories before striking out on his own with 2015's Her Story.
Blending FMV-style video with an investigative branching narrative, Her Story was a pioneer in the detective game genre. Since Her Story, Barlow has further experimented with combining live-action footage and interactive fiction in 2019's Telling Lies and 2021's Immortality.
Barlow is currently working on two different projects, one with director Brandon Cronenberg, the other with Blumhouse Productions. But he took a break from those to show me around the mystery-riddled file-stack of his Steam library.
I am trying to find the time to do justice to 868-BACK. I am a huge fan of Michael Brough's work—at this point [they're] the only games I still have and play on my phone, and so I was excited to see him go big with this one and be back on my PC.
I am a big roguelike guy, but also a fan of minimalism and elegance, so the way Brough's games do this 'molecular gastronomy of Rogue' thing, deconstructing the genre to its smaller parts and then refining them to a point where a single mechanic becomes a whole universe is delightful to me. This one has a lot to it though, it's humongous, so I need to step up and prove myself worthy of the full twenty course meal.
The genius and spikiness of the 868 games is that you never feel safe or powerful. Every single move you make could be a disaster. It reminds me of Resident Evil 4 in how I can't play for too long as I find the experience so stressful. But I also need to play a lot to get good! So it is really putting a strain on my body.
Whenever I have a run that goes well and then ends in flames I feel like crap and need to go lie down to recover. It doesn't help that scores in the game can go (really) negative, so it's pretty clear how much it thinks you suck. I want to be as good a player as this game deserves!