Sam Barlow’s Fragments of Truth
Like a film director, Sam Barlow manipulates the codes of video games to explore new forms of storytelling. He is notably the creator of a trilogy of atypical games, Her Story (2015), Telling Lies (2019), and Immortality (2022), which have revitalized the interactive movie (FMV) genre, previously considered obsolete. These daring works explore the possibility of creating a game without traditional gameplay, focusing instead on fragmented narratives, the exploration of video archives, image editing, and the performances of filmed actors.
Throughout his creations, Barlow offers a narrative experience in which the player is no longer a passive spectator but an active investigator, piecing together the fragments of a fragmented storyline. The result is immersive desktop thrillers, unfolding across the screen of a simulated computer interface. These games rely on non-linear and interactive storytelling, on an original approach to editing, archives, and cinema, while evolving the concept of drama through innovative narrative interfaces. Barlow shows how to write a game without classic game mechanics, focusing instead on discovery, reflection, and player interpretation.
A narrative-driven start
Before arriving on the independent scene, Sam Barlow cut his teeth in traditional video games. Passionate about interactive writing since the late 1990s, he first made a name for himself with Aisle (1999), an experimental text-based adventure game that has since achieved cult status. Aisle offers players a single action to influence the course of the story, providing dozens of possible endings from a single choice. This fragmented and deliberately disjointed narrative already foreshadows the non-linear experiments that would become Barlow’s trademark.
Barlow then joined the British studio Climax, where he contributed to several titles and rose through the ranks of game design. He made a name for himself by taking on a prestigious horror franchise: Silent Hill. As lead designer and screenwriter on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009), he delivered a very personal reinterpretation of the license. This Wii game, far from classic survival horror, emphasizes psychology and storytelling: it removes all combat and adapts its storyline to the player’s psychological profile, established through psychiatric interview sequences integrated into the gameplay. Shattered Memories thus breaks with the conventions of the horror genre and is praised for the very personal vision that Barlow brings to the Silent Hill series. As the creator himself points outhimself, this project allowed him to bring to life ideas he had been mulling over for a long time in terms of interactive storytelling.
Despite this critical success, Barlow’s next project at Climax was canceled along the way, and the game designer increasingly felt the limitations of the conventional industry in the face of his narrative ambitions. In 2014, he took a decisive turn: he left the studio to go freelance and tell the kinds of stories neglected by the mainstream industry. This creative freedom gave rise to Her Story, the first game developed solo by Sam Barlow, which marked a turning point in the way video game storytelling is conceived.
Her Story: the interactive detective story
Released in 2015, Her Story is the game that brought Sam Barlow to the attention of the general public and restored the prestige of interactive movies (FMV) in the world of video games. The experience it offers is unique: players are immersed in front of the cathode ray screen of an old 1990s computer and must search through a database of police video archives to solve a murder case. No clear objective is displayed at the start of the game: the retro interface just features a text search engine (called L.O.G.I.C.) that allows you to type in keywords. Each query returns up to the first five videos where the word appears. These videos, 271 in total, are short excerpts from a set of seven police interrogations filmed in 1994, in which a young British woman, Hannah Smith, answers investigators’ questions about the disappearance of her husband Simon.
There is no linear progression: players can view these excerpts in any order, depending on the words that come to mind. For example, from the outset, the word “murder” is suggested in the search bar: selecting it displays four clips in which Hannah utters this word. Each of these initial clues leads to new leads, arousing the player’s curiosity and encouraging them to refine their search. The limitation of five results per query also forces them to be resourceful, varying keywords and cross-referencing the information they gather. Little by little, like a detective, the player pieces together the story hidden behind these fragmented testimonies. They take notes, form hypotheses, and attempt to separate fact from fiction in Hannah’s statements, whose sincerity and very identity become increasingly questionable as revelations unfold. Her Story thus places the player in the position of an investigator, but without the linearity typical of traditional detective games: here, there is no scripted progression like in L.A. Noire, only the freedom and challenge of searching through a mass of archives to extract meaning.
A narrative to reconstruct yourself
The originality of Her Story lies in this fragmented narrative that the player must actively reconstruct. Rather than following a pre-written storyline, we put the different pieces of the puzzle together ourselves, making connections between scattered fragments of the story. Sam Barlow had already experimented with this approach in Aisle, and he revisits it here on a larger scale thanks to the videos. It’s a unique way of interacting with a narrative, a sculptural way of looking at a story, something that is only possible in interactive mode. The player literally sculpts the story by choosing the order in which the sequences are discovered, making each playthrough of Her Story unique. No two players will experience exactly the same journey: one will type in a certain keyword that will lead them down a certain false trail, while the other may discover a key element earlier that will guide their understanding in a different direction. This freedom, which is confusing at first, gives the game a very personal dimension: meaning emerges from our investigative approach and the way we connect the scenes we see.
The fragmentation of the narrative is accompanied by a reflection on the reliability of images and testimony. In Her Story, we never hear the police officers’ questions: we only have Hannah’s filmed answers, taken out of context. This clever device means that the player has to read between the lines, guess the implied questions, and fill in the gaps. Is Hannah playing a role? Are her silences or hesitations significant? Very quickly, doubts arise as to the veracity of her story, and we realize that part of the truth lies as much in what is not said as in what is shown. The game thus prompts us to question our relationship with images and the trust we place in video testimonials. Barlow uses the device of the filmed interrogation to portray an unreliable narrator (or rather, an unreliable female narrator), a rare theme in video games, which he was keen to explore further as an independent developer.
Without giving away all the twists and turns, it appears that the woman on screen is not exactly who we think she is, and that her story is woven with lies and murky identities. This final revelation, which each player can discover at their own pace (some will only understand it late in the game, while others will pick up on it early on when they come across the right clip), is the culmination of the player’s narrative archaeology work. Barlow deliberately left elements open to interpretation so that the story would continue to live on in the minds of the audience once the game was over, an approach he is fond of and which is inspired by auteur cinema (he cites, for example, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Cure, which doesn’t explain everything, so that the film continues to live on in your mind after you’ve seen it).
A cinematic performance at the heart of the game
Her Story is so captivating thanks in part to the striking performance of its sole actress, Viva Seifert. The former musician plays Hannah with a precision and intensity that has been widely praised. Facing the camera, alone in the interrogation room, she brings a complex character to life with disarming credibility. Through her words, gestures, and attitudes, she provides you with material to fuel your investigations. Every emotion, every movement, every glance is intelligently controlled. The minimalist staging, a fixed shot, a slightly blurred VHS video filter, reinforces the authenticity of these recordings, as if you were watching real police archives. Without special effects or technological flourishes like those found in L.A. Noire, the game manages to create an intimate connection between the player and the filmed character. We really feel as if Hannah is talking to us, the anonymous investigator behind the screen. This emotional connection, forged by the actress’s performance and the skillful editing of the videos in response to our investigations, is one of the great successes of Her Story. It perfectly illustrates Barlow’s belief that the best way to tell stories with characters is to use real actors. Indeed, he explains, an actor can express a multitude of things with a simple intonation or a glance, and our viewer’s brain instinctively knows how to decode these nuances. Relying on film performance therefore allows a lot of storytelling to be condensed into a short space of time, through non-verbal and implicit means.
Barlow also sees video technology as an opportunity for independent games to showcase performance. He cites the phenomenon of YouTube Jury as an example: real criminal cases where filmed interrogations (such as those of Jodi Arias or Amanda Knox) are broadcast and dissected by the online audience. Her Story explicitly follows in this vein, mixing television influences and media reality. By immersing the player in the role of a detective in front of their screen, Her Story questions our fascination with news stories and the way in which our biases and clichés can cloud our judgment when faced with simple videos.
Telling Lies: voyeurism in the digital age
Building on the success of Her Story, Sam Barlow continues his exploration of interactive thrillers in 2019 with Telling Lies. Presented as the spiritual sequel to Her Story, Telling Lies takes up the basic principle of a non-linear detective story to be pieced together by sifting through videos, while considerably expanding its scale and scope. This time, the player no longer has access to simple interrogations, but to a mass of NSA videos covering two years in the lives of four interconnected characters. The game opens on the screen of a modern laptop, apparently belonging to a young female hacker who has just stolen a hard drive containing these confidential recordings. The screen interface is reminiscent of Windows 10: it features the hacker’s introductory video, a few text files, and, most importantly, software for searching the video database (a fictional application called Retina).. The player implicitly plays the role of this person in front of their laptop, with the game’s camera sometimes reflecting their face on the screen, a clever detail that accentuates the feeling of immersion and voyeurism.
The player’s mission: to uncoverthe truth behind a lie that has turned the lives of these four individuals upside down, by sifting through their intimate video exchanges recorded without their knowledge. In concrete terms, Telling Lies works like Her Story with keywords: you type in a term, and the engine returns the videos where that word is spoken in the dialogues. However, the video interaction here is more advanced: the player can play each clip forwards, backwards, pause it, adjust the speed, and even click on the text transcript to launch a new search. Above all, a key feature is that most of the videos are recordings of Skype or FaceTime conversations between two characters. However, the database only contains one side of each conversation. In other words, you might watch a video of a man talking to his webcam, pausing as if to listen for a response… a response that you don’t see, because it’s in another file (the other person’s). The challenge, and the fun, of the game is to find the missing part of each exchange. After watching a 30-second monologue in which a young woman responds, ” Yes, I love you…”, seemingly moved, we are eager to discover what her interlocutor said that prompted her response. We note a keyword she uttered, search for it in the database… and little by little, we piece together the video duos that form entire calls. This clever mechanism transforms the player into a real editor: they assemble the scenes in their head to reconstruct complete dialogues, giving them the exhilarating feeling of being a little mouse eavesdropping on coherent private conversations.
Lies, surveillance, and intimacy
The title Telling Lies was not chosen at random. The game deals with lies and double lives, both on an intimate and political level. The story revolves mainly around David, a mysterious man who initially presents himself as a simple consultant or failed musician, but who we soon suspect is much more than that. By cross-referencing information, the player discovers that David is actually an FBI agent infiltrating an eco-terrorist militant group. For two years, he has lied to his partner and young daughter about his activities, while getting dangerously close to an activist he is supposed to be spying on. The videos show David’s interactions with three women: his partner Emma, his daughter Alba, the activist Ava, and a cam girl named Michelle whom he pays for online erotic shows. Through these four characters, Telling Lies explores a variety of themes: the weight of lies in a relationship, loneliness and online confessions, political radicalization, and the way surveillance (and self-surveillance) invades our digital lives.
By adopting the perspective of an analyst who delves into these people’s lives, the game immediately creates an atmosphere of voyeurism. At times, we almost feel guilty watching these intimate moments stolen via a webcam. The characters open their hearts without knowing they are being recorded: couple arguments, declarations of love, mundane discussions, or moral debates… We witness raw slices of life, filmed in a naturalistic way. Barlow ensured the authenticity of the process during filming: the actors (Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé, Angela Sarafyan, etc.) actually conversed via simultaneous video calls, each in a different room, in order to faithfully reproduce the dynamics of a real online discussion. The result on screen is stunningly realistic, reinforcing the player’s immersion as an invisible spy. As one critic noted, Telling Lies feels like an authentic fly-on-the-wall experience, an invisible witness to the moments of truth (and lies) in these characters’ lives.
Narratively, the game weaves a complex web of secrets and contradictions. Each video offers only a partial view of the situation, and often from a subjective point of view. We hear what David says to one of the women, but not what he tells one of the others the next day. As a result, the information gathered may contradict itself from one clip to the next. For example, David claims in one video that he has given up his music career, while elsewhere he claims to still be a musician. We also discover that he lies to Emma and Ava in turn, hiding crucial information from each of them. Similarly, the other characters are not always sincere with each other. The appeal of the game is that it makes us untangle the true from the false in this maelstrom of conflicting confidences. The truth seems difficult to attain, as each character reveals only one facet of the story, according to their own agenda. Barlow explains that the writing challenge was to orchestrate these four parallel trajectories in such a way thateach small piece of the story is interesting in itself and reflects the overall themes of the narrative. In this sense, Telling Lies takes the logic of Her Story further by multiplying the points of view and intertwined narrative threads, while ensuring overall consistency.
The investigator trapped by the screen
While Telling Lies uses the familiar interface of a computer (hence Barlow’s description of it as a “desktop thriller”), it also subverts its conventions in interesting ways. On the one hand, as mentioned above, we occasionally see the reflection of the player avatar’s face in the blank screen, creating an unusual mirror effect: we ourselves are visually integrated into the interface, as snoopers. On the other hand, the game incorporates the notion of passing time: a clock in the bottom right-hand corner shows the current date and time, and some videos are only accessible after a certain amount of actual playing time, simulating the fact that you can’t go through everything instantly. This adds to the diegetic immersion; you really feel like you’re spending hours at night on a computer searching through confidential documents.
Barlow says he wanted to go even further than Her Story in exploring what video can bring to video games that traditional cinema cannot. Interactivity, of course, is the key. Here, the editing is left to the player: it’s up to them to mentally piece together the sequences to reconstruct a timeline or dialogue. This is the opposite of a film edited linearly by a director. Barlow went so far as to describe the script for Telling Lies as an “anti-film,” so far removed is it from the passivity of the movie theater audience. In a film, the director controls the pace and the assembly of scenes, with the audience sitting back and letting themselves be guided. In Telling Lies, it’s the opposite: the viewer becomes the editor and narrator, and it’s this almost manic intensity of the player’s imagination and concentration that makes the experience so compelling. Barlow seeks to exploit what he calls the “sophisticated simulation tech” of video games, which is the player’s imagination. Rather than giving them a 3D world to explore freely (which, according to Barlow, gives the illusion of freedom at the expense of narrative engagement), he gives them a story to explore, relying on their intelligence and curiosity to piece together the puzzle.
Immortality: the game that challenges cinema
With Immortality, released in 2022, Sam Barlow reaches a new level in his work. This third independent game is undoubtedly his most ambitious and accomplished project—a true masterpiece at the crossroads of video games and cinema, praised for its formal audacity and thematic richness. Immortality continues the exploration of desktop drama initiated by Her Story and Telling Lies, but this time transporting it to the very heart of the seventh art. The game invites players to investigate the fate of a movie actress by directly manipulating excerpts from her films, like an editor in his editing room. The result is a fascinating blend of cinematic homage and interactive metaphysical thriller.
In Search of Marissa Marcel
The synopsis of Immortality is intriguing: Marissa Marcel, a fictional actress of French origin, starred in three feature films in Hollywood in 1968, 1970, and 1999, but none of these films were ever released in theaters. After the last one, Marissa mysteriously disappeared without a trace. The player is given a vast collection of film clips related to these three lost works (edited scenes, but also rushes, rehearsals, promotional interviews, etc.) and must unravel the mystery of the actress’s disappearance by exploring this material. The player, in possession of a large number of reels, will navigate from sequence to sequence, from rushes to making-of footage, to determine the reasons for the actress’s strange fate. In a way, you take on the role of a film archivist/investigator, trying to piece together Marissa’s unfinished filmography in order to find clues about her fate.
The great originality of Immortality lies in its mechanics of navigating between videos, which departs from the text-based search system of previous games. Here, Barlow takes advantage of the visual nature of cinema by introducing editing gameplay. The interface takes the form of a virtual editing table: you can play a film clip, watch it, rewind it, fast-forward frame by frame, etc. At any time, the player can freeze the image and click on a visual element in the shot (an object, a face, a setting, etc.). This click triggers a match cut, a transition that instantly transports us to another clip containing the same visual element. For example, we watch a scene where Marissa, in the 1968 film, is holding a glass of wine. By clicking on the glass on the screen, we are teleported to another sequence, perhaps a 1970 making-of, where an identical glass is present in the frame. Similarly, clicking on a character’s face can take us to an interview featuring that actor. This entirely iconographic navigation creates a network of associations across the three films and related documents. This is the only way to discover new clips: you move forward step by step, from link to link, gradually completing your collection of excerpts. Barlow compares this process to a puzzle in which you look for visual correspondences to advance your exploration.
Three films, three eras, one hidden truth
Marissa Marcel’s three fictional films form the narrative foundation of Immortality. Each has its own identity, inspired by real genres and directors, giving the game an unusual richness of tone. The first, Ambrosio (1968), is presented as an adaptation of a Gothic novel (The Monk by M. G. Lewis) by a lecherous and provocative filmmaker reminiscent of a deviant Alfred Hitchcock. Ambrosio is steeped in an erotic-religious atmosphere of the late 1960s, with Marissa in the role of a nun who is sexually abused by a priest. Lewis) by a lecherous and provocative filmmaker reminiscent of a deviant Alfred Hitchcock. Ambrosio is steeped in an erotic-religious atmosphere of the late 1960s, with Marissa in the role of a seductive young nun. The second film, Minsky (1970), is an artistic crime thriller set in the New York art world. It is reminiscent of the French New Wave, while displaying baroque accents à la Stanley Kubrick, with shots that openly parody A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. Marissa plays a sensual muse involved in the murder of a painter. Finally, the third film, Two of Everything (1999), is a contemporary thriller on the theme of doubles and celebrity, in the vein of Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick’s last work, released in 1999) or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, mixed with 1990s eroticism. Marissa plays both a pop star and her impostor doppelganger.
Barlow didn’t just imagine these films: he wrote large sections of the screenplay and shot numerous scenes as if they were real productions. To do so, he surrounded himself with prestigious collaborators from the world of cinema: screenwriter Amelia Gray (Mr. Robot) and two veterans, Barry Gifford (co-writer of David Lynch’s Lost Highway) and Allan Scott (co-writer of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now). Each contributed to giving the films of 1968 and 1970, and 1999, respectively. The game includes nearly 10 hours of filmed sequences of all kinds, with a script of around 400 pages. This excess serves a purpose: to create the illusion that these films could exist, that Marissa Marcel really did live through three decades of cinema. And the gamble pays off remarkably well. The camera movements, lighting, composition, and sets are astonishingly faithful to the works of their respective eras. The graininess of the image lends a disarming sense of authenticity to these films that never existed. The obsessive attention to detail (35mm film for the 60s/70s scenes, camcorder for the 90s interviews, production techniques consistent with the era, etc.) is a testament to the obsessive expertise of Barlow and his teams, which explodes in the player’s face. Thanks to this credibility, Immortality can engage directly with cinema: the game becomes a space where we can examine the seventh art itself, its beauty as well as its flaws, through the prism of an interactive story.
At first, the player is naturally fascinated by the films themselves and by the performance of Marissa, played by actress Manon Gage. Marissa appears successively as an innocent ingénue in the 1960s, a sensual femme fatale in the 1970s, and then a troubled pop icon in the late 1990s. Her personality seems to change from one era to another, depending on her roles, making it difficult to pin down who the real Marissa Marcel is. The off-screen footage (interviews, rehearsals) only adds to the mystery: on talk shows, Marissa puts on a fake smile and tells predictable anecdotes; in rehearsals, she can be capricious or lost in her thoughts. There is a sense of strangeness about her, a perhaps dark depth that shines through at times. And the player’s investigation consists precisely of digging beyond the surface of the film, searching for the truth behind the artifice. Very quickly, Immortality reveals that Marissa’s films, as captivating as they are, are only the tip of the iceberg. By exploring far enough, the player unlocks secret scenes, often hidden between the images on the reels, which show events that took place off-camera: behind-the-scenes discussions, stolen moments on set, and even stranger things. These hidden clips, sometimes in black and white, show Marissa in unscripted situations, facing an unknown character. For example, we discover a sequence where Marissa seems to be conversing with a mysterious woman in the shadows, with no film crew around. Little by little, the existence of a parallel, supernatural, and cryptic narrative layer emerges, haunting Marissa’s films.
Barlow then orchestrates a dizzying game of mise en abyme. First, there are the fictional films (in which Marissa plays a role), then the level of reality (the making-ofs and interviews, where we see the actress in the reality of the shoot)… and finally a third, phantasmagorical level where two mysterious entities replay key scenes, as if an immortal presence were lurking behind each image. These cryptic conversations between two strange beings gradually reveal the real stakes of the game, which we won’t completely spoil here. Let’s just say that Immortality then shifts into a quasi-metaphysical dimension, reminiscent of the world of David Lynch, particularly Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire, two films about Hollywood and its evil doubles. Barlow openly acknowledges Lynch’s influence and wanted players to be able to create their own Lynchian montage by searching for meaning in these labyrinthine image sequences. The character of Marissa Marcel and her mysterious double thus evoke duality, illusion, and the thirst for eternity, all themes dear to Lynch. The third dimension of Immortality is similar to David Lynch’s films in that it superimposes reality and imagination to reveal the characters’ hidden intentions. Indeed, it is in these dreamlike scenes, where the same dialogues as in the films are replayed with disturbing variations, that the key to Marissa Marcel’s fate is hidden. The game thus invites the player to interpret, fill in the gaps, and confront an open, esoteric conclusion, leaving room for discussion and theory.
Interactive cinema and Hollywood criticism
Beyond its narrative mystery, Immortality stands out as a true critical reflection on the film industry and the representation of women on screen. By exploring Marissa’s fictional filmography, the player witnesses how the actress is treated and consumed by the Hollywood system. The three films, although of different genres, often sexualize her (she plays femme fatales with poisonous charms) and are marked by the vision of male directors who shape her as they see fit. The game does not shy away from showing the symbolic and sometimes physical violence suffered by Marissa: there are scenes of full frontal nudity, explicit sex (always justified by the context of the films, but still raw), bloody images in the style of a giallo horror film, etc. Indeed, the player is sometimes made to feel uncomfortable in their role as a voyeuristic director manipulating these intimate and violent images: the game forces them to linger on disturbing shots in order to uncover secrets, blurring the line between guilty curiosity and legitimate investigation. This approach questions our own perspective as spectators: to what extent are we complicit in the exploitation we observe?
Barlow, as an enlightened cinephile, infuses Immortality with references and tributes, but only to better distort their meaning. For example, the character of the director of Ambrosio, a pot-bellied and perverse Hitchcock doppelganger, is a pastiche that highlights the dark side of the Master of Suspense. Barlow applies this lesson precisely in Immortality: he bombards the player with seductive or shocking images, knowing full well what we expect to see, then gradually subverts those expectations by revealing what lies behind the scenes. The game thus questions the power of the image and our tendency to take it at face value. An old saying claims that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sam Barlow proves that, on the contrary, there is nothing more deceptive than an image. The core message of Immortality could be summed up as follows: blindly trusting images (whether from movies, television, or even video games) is illusory, because they reveal only part of the truth. It is up to us to dig deeper, piece together, and read between the images to get closer to reality. This message resonates particularly strongly in the current era of fake news and fragmented media narratives.
Towards a new form of video game writing
Studying Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality, we see a coherent vision emerging from Sam Barlow: that of a new form of video game writing, freed from classic game mechanics and focused on narrative and interpretation. His games offer an answer to the question: how can we get the audience to play with a story? For Barlow, the answer lies in non-linearity, fragmentation, and the intellectual participation of the player. It’s about making the act of exploring or experiencing a story expressive for the audience. Rather than advancing an avatar through levels, Barlow advances the player through a narrative, choosing their own path through the available information. This approach could be described as narrative game design: the way the player interacts (typing a word, clicking on an image, etc.) is entirely at the service of discovering the story. There is no external “challenge” (reflexes, strategy, etc.), the challenge is cognitive and emotional: understanding, assembling, interpreting.
Archiving and the power of fragments
At the heart of Sam Barlow’s narrative approach is the idea of the archive: not as a simple repository of silent documents, but as a territory teeming with meaning, where each element can be contemplated, cross-referenced, and reread ad infinitum. Rather than designing a classic interactive feature film, Barlow chooses to cut the raw material of the story into short units, thirty-second video sequences, unedited rushes, off-screen excerpts, silent soundtracks, screenshots, and even diaries, turning them into potentially autonomous fragments. Each of these fragments presents itself as a narrative object in its own right, conveying information, emotion, or a question, but whose true meaning is only fully revealed when juxtaposed and related to the other pieces. This multiplication of units stems from Barlow’s conviction that a story is never a continuous flow: it is a network of moments, tipping points, scars, and ellipses. By depriving the audience of a preordained linear narrative, he instead offers them the freedom to navigate this network, extract connections, build bridges, and construct their own interpretation.
In Her Story, this principle is manifested in the existence of 271 short excerpts from interrogations recorded in 1994, which are never presented as a homogeneous whole. The police officers’ questions are absent; only the answers of the suspect, Hannah Smith, remain. Each fragment reveals a piece of life, a clue, a change in tone, or a subtle facial movement. From the very beginning, the player understands that they will have to act as an archivist: rummaging through keywords, testing combinations, noting down hypotheses, then comparing these hypotheses with newly discovered excerpts. The sequence of fragments is never predetermined; it depends as much on the player’s choices as on the search algorithm, which deliberately limits each query to five videos. The fragmentation imposes a disjointed rhythm; it is up to each player to sort through the fragments, prioritize them, and remember dates, first names, and significant details. In this architecture, archiving becomes a playful practice: the player is led to mentally classify their discoveries, reconstruct the timeline of events, and then gradually assemble the mosaic of a story that initially seemed arbitrary.
The same principle is amplified in Telling Lies, where the archive ranges from a few hours to two years of conversations captured via webcam. Barlow no longer settles for questions and answers: he provides a gigantic repository of clips from NSA video calls, filmed without the protagonists’ knowledge. Here again, each sequence consists of a single point of view, with the other half of the exchange having to be found separately. The player is faced with a disordered catalog of intimate moments: laughter, tears, awkward silences, flashes of passion, and a tangle of lies. Each fragment has its own emotional and thematic density, but it is the juxtaposition that creates the narrative: placing one person’s response side by side with another’s question, comparing two identical moments filmed in two different places, or cross-referencing names, places, or chronological references to construct a common thread. In this context, the mechanics of the fragment become an invitation to perseverance and collaboration: forums and wikis become an extension of the experience, as an isolated player sometimes needs to turn to the community to solve a puzzle when certain segments of the archive remain inaccessible or obscure.
With Immortality, Sam Barlow takes this logic of the archive and the fragment to an almost dizzying degree. The material is no longer the fragmented testimony of an interrogation or an interrupted conversation, but the corpus of a lost filmography: three fictional feature films shot over several decades, trailers, rehearsal rushes, promotional interviews, fragments of diaries, and even behind-the-scenes footage. Each sequence, whether part of a meticulously reconstructed fiction or an improvised off-screen moment, offers a visual or auditory cue: an object, a gesture, a light pattern, an intonation, which can serve as a key to exploring other excerpts. The virtual editing table imposes no hierarchy; it does not sort sequences alphabetically, chronologically, or thematically: it is up to the player to decide which connections to make. The act of clicking on a visual medium to activate a match cut engages an archaeological approach: one shot refers to another shot, one visual clue triggers the revelation of a new fragment. Through this mechanism, the archive of Immortality resembles a labyrinth where each corridor leads to several branches, several interpretations, several mysteries.
This micro-narrativity, inaugurated by fragmentation, breaks with the conventions of video game narration, where we generally follow a marked path, where each sequence finds its place in a continuum. In Sam Barlow’s games, there is no mandatory passage, no straight line between the beginning and the end. The narrative is constructed in a fragmented manner, at the pace imposed by the interface but above all by the player. Some fragments are minor, almost anecdotal; others contain the key to a dénouement, a crucial piece of context, or a reversal of perspective. It is this oscillation between triviality and major revelation that gives the games a particular dramatic intensity: the anticipation of the next discovery, the constant possibility of stumbling upon a shocking fragment, or, conversely, having to wait to discover a broader aim, maintain a continuous tension.
In this context, the player successively takes on the roles of investigator, historian, and poet. They investigate by searching for keywords, adopt the posture of a historian by placing each document in its context (date, environment, archive image), and they become poets when they mentally compose the plot of their story, when they associate a fragment of a diary with a scene from a film shoot, or when they perceive a character’s confession in a subtle gesture. It is precisely this narrative polyphony that highlights the uniqueness of Barlow’s approach: the true story does not exist until it is explored and woven together by the player. This approach is similar to hypertextual literary creation, where the reader chooses their own path from among several nodes, but it amplifies it in an audiovisual context, where image, sound, and gesture play a decisive role.
This method of storytelling through fragmented archives also offers great accessibility. Players do not need long, uninterrupted sessions to progress: they can consult a few fragments, note down their ideas, come back later, integrate new elements, and continue the reconstruction at their own pace. In a world where attention is scattered and content is consumed in small bites, Barlow’s approach is in line with contemporary modes of media consumption: we rummage, we pick and choose, we tinker, we assemble the narrative ourselves. However, unlike the chaotic fragmentation of the internet or social media, here each fragment is intentionally designed, meticulously crafted and indexed, ensuring that each element has its place and its importance. It’s a subtle balance between player freedom and artistic integrity of the narrative: the archive is open, but it is neither anonymous nor infinite; it contains just enough material to feed curiosity without ever leaving the player completely lost.
The game of pretense and trust
Sam Barlow’s interactive writing is based on the question of trust: how much can the player trust what they see, hear, or read? In his early games, Barlow raises this dilemma through the simple trick of isolating narrative fragments. In Her Story, the player never hears any of the questions asked by the investigators; only Hannah Smith’s answers are accessible. As a result, each filmed exchange becomes enigmatic, laden with innuendo, silences, and narrative gaps. The player must simultaneously interpret the words spoken and guess the implicit questions, mentally reconstructing the context of each exchange. By removing the interrogator’s words, Barlow breaks the relationship of completeness expected in a video game interrogation: we expect dialogue, but we only get a monologue. This discrepancy creates a zone of doubt where the veracity of the testimony is constantly questioned. Hannah can lie, contradict herself, conceal information, or manipulate her interrogator, and the player, deprived of a view of the entire scene, becomes an uncertain investigator, as much a captive as an accomplice to a suspect whose sincerity eludes them.
With Telling Lies, this principle of pretense takes on another dimension. This time, Barlow introduces the notion of a missing side to each conversation. The exchanges take place via video calls, but the database contains only one of the correspondents at a time. We see one character talking, pausing, reacting, without ever having access to the other’s response. This tactic forces the player to meticulously search for and piece together the two fragments of the same call to reconstruct the entire dialogue. Each filmed monologue thus becomes a clue, each fragment conceals a blind spot, and each disappearance of the other side of the call becomes a reminder that the truth is never given in its entirety. The mechanics maintain a moral tension: the act of voyeurism is both necessary to reconstruct the plot and disturbing in its intrusive dimension, as we discover intimate moments filmed without the protagonists’ knowledge. This double constraint, both technical and ethical, plunges the player into a world where the desire to know clashes with the awareness of prying into the private lives of others, reinforcing a feeling of troubled complicity.
When we arrive at Immortality, Sam Barlow further broadens the horizon of pretense by multiplying the narrative layers. The player navigates not only the final edits of Marissa Marcel’s films, but also the raw rushes, rehearsals, promotional interviews, and behind-the-scenes footage. At first glance, these documents seem intended to enrich our understanding of the three lost feature films. But it quickly becomes apparent that they conceal hidden revelations, such as snippets of supernatural events or dialogues absent from the final versions. This superimposition of fictional, documentary, and esoteric levels creates a dizzying mise en abîme. The player no longer knows whether they are looking at a fragment of a script, a personal memory of the actress, or a clue pointing to a supernatural dimension. Each shot is sometimes historical justification, sometimes metaphysical deception. Barlow thus plays with the perception of reality: a shot may seem authentic and, a few clicks later, turn out to be part of an occult fable. This layered narrative construction forces the player to distrust their own sensations, to question the status of each image, and to challenge the reliability of the archive.
The documentary on Immortality, broadcast by NoClip, sheds light on the meticulous care taken by Barlow and his team to infuse the filmed material with this permanent ambiguity. The very texture of the image becomes a vector of doubt: scenes supposedly from the 1960s and 1970s were shot on 35mm film with authentic grain, while segments from the 1990s feature the blurring characteristic of VHS recordings. The sparks, signs of wear on the tape, and flickering from the VCR are all visual cues that instill the feeling of watching genuine archives. In the interviews, the ashen light and shallow depth of field evoke the television of yesteryear, but the flickering backgrounds and projector noise sometimes reveal anomalies, like disturbances meant to reveal a metaphysical disturbance. Through these devices, the interface and editing table stage a dialogue between the comfort of historical archives and the fear of the unknown, creating a space where the player’s confidence wavers with each discovery.
The use of these different textures is not limited to a nostalgic homage to past formats. It serves a purpose: to show that every image is constructed and that our trust in it can be questioned. Barlow plays on the viewer’s knowledge and memories, who unconsciously recognizes the grain of the film or the hiss of the VCR, even before doubting the authenticity of the content. This sensory perception gives rise to reflexive cognition: we become aware that we are watching a reconstruction, an artifact, an artifice. Moreover, the interactive dimension gives the player the power, and the responsibility, to manipulate these representations. When we click to launch an excerpt, we are not passive: we engage in an act of active trust and agree to be led to a side of the story whose integrity is never guaranteed.
During these games, the dynamic of betrayed trust plays out sometimes through a lack of information, sometimes through an excess of it. In Her Story and Telling Lies, it is the absence of the question or the complete reply that creates the lack of trust. In Immortality, it is the abnormal flickering, the striking transitions, and the unfinished dialogues that create the same tension. With each new fragment, the player is tempted to believe in a pivotal clue, before encountering another facet of the mystery. The stylistic echoes, the shift in brightness, the crackling of the tape, remind us that each document has been the subject of a precise stylistic choice to solicit the player’s attention and caution. This game of pretense, between perceived authenticity and the actual instability of the medium, gives rise to a trompe l’oeil narrative, where illusion becomes an instrument of creation, not just a hiding place.
The player’s trust is both the lever and the prey of the narrative. Barlow establishes a complex relationship in which we feel responsible for validating each clue and weighing the credibility of each image. This stance, which echoes the relationship between researcher and archive, transforms the playful experience into a critical exercise. The player is no longer invited to blindly follow a scenario, but to question the mediation itself, to decode the way in which the author shapes each document in order to extract (or conceal) the truth. This questioning gives rise to a unique narrative experience, where the game of pretense becomes a poetic and philosophical strategy, questioning our relationship to images, memory, and, more broadly, the construction of reality.
Intellectual participation as gameplay
The very term “gameplay” is redefined and expanded in Sam Barlow’s games: it is no longer just a matter of mastering a pad or keyboard to face enemies, solve mechanical puzzles, or optimize key combinations, but of mobilizing the player’s narrative intelligence. This intelligence manifests itself in the ability to carefully observe fragments of archives, compare clues scattered throughout different excerpts, infer hidden connections, and formulate coherent theories. Barlow’s games transform reflection, curiosity, and critical questioning into actual game actions, establishing a form of “intellectual gameplay” where the act of thinking becomes the main tool for progression.
The experience begins in the first few minutes: faced with the Her Story interface, the player has only a text search field and a list of videos tagged with keywords at their disposal. There are no explicit instructions specifying the ultimate goal. The first challenge is to understand that each word typed can reveal a fragment of the story, but that the coherence of the investigation depends on the finesse of the search. The player must therefore learn, through successive trial and error, to use language as a key: finding synonyms, exploring lexical fields, associating seemingly unrelated terms to bring out new sequences. The learning curve is not dictated by traditional tutorials, but by the player’s perceptive efficiency: the more they identify words that carry information, the more they unlock rich leads, which make them understand how much their hypotheses influence discovery.
With Telling Lies, the intellectual dimension of gameplay intensifies. The transition from a retro interface to that of a modern operating system does not change the nature of the exercise: the player must still observe, compare, and infer, but in a broader and more complex context. The videos come from private conversations, often between two people, but the database only retains one side of the call. To reconstruct a dialogue, the player must therefore identify the missing part: they watch a monologue, note the moments of silence and contextual clues, then investigate the other part of the dialogue. It is a mental editing task, where every interruption, every hesitation, every intonation becomes a piece of data that is compared to other data. This logic of collection and sorting pushes the user to construct a kind of internal narrative model: a mental diagram of the relationships between the characters, their psychology, and the events. The absence of visual mapping imposed by the game reinforces the presence of this model, which is unique to each player and becomes the breadcrumb trail of the investigation.
The major turning point came with Immortality, which turned the editing table into a playground where intellect took precedence over skill. The documentary about this title reveals that Barlow and his team iterated many times to perfect the learning phase: how to guide the player without explicitly explaining the mechanics of the “match cut,” how to lead them to discover for themselves that they can click on any visual element to move on to another excerpt. In the early prototypes, many testers got stuck, using the editing table too literally without exploring the intertextual dimension of the system. To remedy this, the developers incorporated introductory sequences where visual cues—a slight halo around clickable areas, a subtle cursor change, or a small haptic vibration—gradually teach the player the principle of iconographic continuity. This subtle teaching method fits naturally into the narrative without seeming intrusive: the player acquires the skill not because they are told to click here, but because they realize, while playing, that their hypotheses lead to new revelations. The interface itself becomes educational: it teaches the player how to think about the game and how to play the story.
The game of observation is thus elevated to the rank of playful action. In a traditional game, spotting a hidden object or unlocking a shortcut can give a tactical advantage; in Barlow’s universe, spotting a particular intonation, comparing the gestures of two rushes, or matching two visual motifs is what moves the narrative forward. Players are encouraged to pay attention to the smallest details: a blink of an eye, a crease in clothing, a reflection on an object. Each of these micro-observations can serve as the basis for a narrative theory, which is then compared with other clues in the archive system. The exercise is infinitely more demanding and personal than a classic QTE (Quick Time Event): it requires memory, critical thinking, and imagination.
This transposition of thought into action is perfectly understandable when you analyze the very structure of these games: it is based on loops of hypothesis and verification. The player makes a hypothesis, for example, “Hannah is lying when she denies seeing Simon,” then tests this hypothesis by searching for a keyword or clicking on her face to access another excerpt. The result confirms or refutes the assumption; in the latter case, the player must go back, rethink their search strategy, and formulate a new conjecture. The prototypes of Immortality showed that without this explicit but unspoken loop, players could become discouraged. The designers therefore calibrated the saturation of clues, the accessibility of key fragments, and the density of superfluous elements to maintain a delicate balance between intellectual challenge and the pleasure of discovery. The aim is not to punish the player with an opaque maze, but to encourage them to persevere, adjust their logic, and become the architect of the narrative themselves.
From this perspective, success in the game is measured much more by mental engagement than by the player’s dexterity. A successful QTE gives a rush of adrenaline; the success of a sequence of hypotheses in Her Story or Telling Lies, or a synchronized montage in Immortality, provides a sense of intellectual accomplishment that is rare in video games. It is the joy of the eureka moment, of suddenly unraveling a clue, of completing a narrative loop. At a time when many video game productions rely on escalating intensity and sensory stimulation, Barlow’s approach reminds us that cognitive pleasure—learning to decode, understand, and infer—remains a fundamental driver of interactive entertainment.
The social dimension of this intellectual gameplay should not be overlooked either. Gaming communities, forums, and wikis dedicated to these games are multiplying because the very nature of the investigation encourages collaboration. When you come across a fragment you can’t find or a visual motif that doesn’t appear for another player, sharing screenshots, notes, and hypotheses becomes an extension of the gaming experience. This co-investigation extends the game interface to a collective space, where players exchange research strategies and possible interpretations of the narrative. The intellectual dimension of gameplay thus extends beyond the screen, combining solitary reflection and collaborative intelligence, much like research laboratories where several people work on the same corpus.
Finally, intellectual participation enhances the player’s power. Far from being a mere guided spectator, the player becomes a co-author of the narrative through the very power of their interpretation. Sam Barlow is part of a tradition of interactive authors who consider the audience to be an active agent whose subjectivity enriches the work. This approach resonates particularly with contemporary artistic practices, where the boundary between author and recipient is blurred. In Barlow’s game, interactivity is not a gimmick, but the foundation of an aesthetic of thought, where one plays while thinking, where one advances by guessing, and where pleasure is found as much in the act of reflection as in the final revelation.
Narration through emotion and performance
Sam Barlow believes that human emotion cannot be reduced to mere words or lines of code. In his games, he draws on the expressive power of the body and the face to convey tensions and unspoken messages that no voiceover or text could convey as powerfully. In Her Story, actress Viva Seifert plays Hannah Smith with rare intensity: a trembling lip, an evasive glance, or a prolonged sigh become crucial clues to understanding the character’s psychology. Without special effects or dramatic music, Barlow relies on cinematic rawness, a fixed, tightly framed shot, slightly blurred by the VHS quality, to capture every micro-expression, every twitch of the shoulder, and leave it up to the player to interpret them.
The filmed reality imposes an almost visceral presence on the screen, creating a disturbing form of intimacy: we are not looking at a digital avatar, we are looking at a flesh-and-blood human being. The player becomes, in turn, judge, confidant, and accomplice to this silent confession. It is this effect of proximity that underpins the narrative power of the work: Hannah’s hesitations, her silences, her false notes of emotion, all contribute to an invisible narrative that unfolds as the player connects the fragments. Barlow thus exploits the power of the nonverbal, because the true meaning often lies in what is not said, in what is barely perceptible.
With Telling Lies, the approach goes even further. The dialogues filmed on webcam become moving psychological portraits, where the raw and sometimes contradictory emotions of the characters are captured in the digital grain of the webcams. By filming both sides of a conversation simultaneously, with each actor in a separate room, Barlow captures the actors’ true reactions: a facial expression that precedes the sentence, a start when a word touches on the truth, a smile that freezes. The documentary of the play shows that numerous takes were necessary to extract these moments of life: takes where emotion arises without warning, where the actor lets go of the script to offer a more organic performance. The result is participatory acting, where the couple’s infidelity, contained anger, or the pain of lying can be read through fleeting expressions highlighted by the interface.
Immortality takes this alliance between performance and interactivity even further. Sam Barlow called on professional actors and renowned screenwriters to bring Marissa Marcel and the characters around her to life. Behind the scenes, rehearsals lasted for days: every micro-gesture was rehearsed, analyzed, and calibrated to become a real clue. The NoClip documentary reveals that the film crew studied the works of great directors such as David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock to guide the nuances of the actress and supporting actors. The shadows and lighting, the position of the hands, the movement of the gaze—everything is orchestrated so that each shot can be linked to another, serving as an iconographic anchor. When the player clicks on an object or a face, they activate an emotional response: a shiver, a flutter, a sudden tension. Emotion is not a side effect of the narrative, but its driving force, because it is what pushes the player to search, click, and piece together the story.
Directing actors becomes a central discipline in the creative process. Barlow provides the actors with a detailed context, a backstory for each character, and intentions for each word. The filmed rehearsals show that he focuses on the actors’ eyes, demanding that their gaze convey ambiguity, a mixture of strength and fragility, certainty and doubt. These sequences demonstrate that the interactive experience is built not only by code or design, but by the richness of human performance. The actors themselves become co-authors of the narrative, their interpretations suggesting paths, sowing areas of shadow or clarity.
When the player views these sequences, they are confronted with a dramatic truth: emotions do not lie. A player may doubt words, but they cannot escape the sincerity of a tremor. Barlow uses this truth of the body to shift the narrative, to offer silent twists: an evasive glance that casts doubt on the official version, a smirk that betrays a lie, a hidden tear that reveals deep pain. The filmic performance replaces the linearity of traditional cinematics; it requires an active reading of each image, an emotional reading that transforms the player into a spectator-sensor, attuned to the slightest human vibration.
This approach to storytelling through emotion fits perfectly with Sam Barlow’s idea of auteur gaming. At a time when most AAA productions seek technical excess, he reminds us that the power of video games can lie in the most humble expression of a face or a gesture. Far from limiting himself to a single style, he draws on the repertoire of cinema to extract its essence: the authenticity of performance. The actor is not simply a support for a digital character; they are also a vehicle for meaning, a reliable source of emotion that nourishes and enriches interactivity.
Through Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality, Sam Barlow has forged a form of auteur gaming in which interface, fragmentation, doubt, and performance interact to offer a unique narrative experience. He has demonstrated that the power of video games is not limited to traditional mechanics or graphic prowess, but can arise from the encounter between human sensitivity and interactive techniques. The interface becomes the narrator, imposing a medium that goes beyond simple navigation; the fragmented archive invites creative investigation, where each segment is constructed in relation to the others; the pretense and doubt provided by the absence and partiality of the documents transform the player into a critic and detective; intellectual participation replaces manual skill, elevating reflection to the level of playful action; finally, the filmic performance, with its micro-expressions and silences, becomes the emotional vector and human anchor of demanding and open narratives.
By combining these elements, Barlow opens up new avenues for narrative design, interactive UX, and game writing, offering students, screenwriters, and informed amateurs concrete tools for thinking about interactive writing in a different way. His work shows how video games can assert themselves as a critical, introspective, and political medium, capable of rivaling auteur cinema in its ability to move, intrigue, and remain present in the mind long after the screen has been turned off.
