// PC GAMER — GAMING
Ashly Burch, voice of Horizon's Aloy and star of Mythic Quest, is currently obsessed with Slay the Spire 2 and thinks videogames have too many stoic characters: 'I want more sh*tty little b*tches'
The actress behind Tiny Tina and Life is Strange's Chloe guides us through the games on her Steam Deck.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
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?"
Ashly Burch's first encounter with PC gaming was playing a Donkey Kong knockoff on a PC her mother had bought to practice typing. But the first PC game that truly resonated with her was LucasArts' Day of the Tentacle: "That was the first time I played a game that I can remember that had a narrative and comedy," she says. "It was one of those things where, when you're younger, you find something that expands your concept of what a thing can be."
Burch came to the world's attention through the online, gaming-themed sketch show Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin', before making her videogame acting debut as Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2. Since then, Burch's roles have included Chloe in Life is Strange, Parvati Holcomb in The Outer Worlds, and Aloy in Guerrilla Games' Horizon series.
More recently, Burch returned to sending-up videogames in Apple TV's game-development comedy Mythic Quest, and is currently working on her passion project I'm Happy You're Here—a YouTube comedy series that explores coping with mental health issues: "They're easy, shareable, hopefully easy to understand distillations of complicated concepts, and yeah, they're all for free on YouTube," she says. "It's something I've wanted to make for a long time."
Burch took a break from puppet psychotherapy to show me around her Steam library. We deliberated the benefits of notebooks in detective games, vetted cosy gaming's dating profiles, and discussed the secret sauce behind Slay the Spire.
The Incident at Galley House. I just started playing yesterday. It's brand new. I'm at that part that I think happens with every detective game, where you're like, "I have too many leads".
I'm overwhelmed. I resist having a notebook at first when I do detective games, and inevitably I have to cave and start physically writing stuff down. I did that with Blue Prince. I had a massive notebook for [that], and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I had to have a massive notebook for that.
Why do I resist it? Is it laziness? It might be laziness. There's a part of me that's like, "It's fun that a game is complex enough that you have to keep your own personal notes." And then there's another part of me that's like, "But shouldn't that all be internal to the system?" Like, shouldn't whatever mechanism you need to track things be housed within the game? But there's no rule for that.