As mentioned before, Sam Barlow had also worked on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a stand-alone re-imagining of the very first Silent Hill game. Set in a completely different universe from the main canon, this included the story, characters, relations and locations. For a time, Silent Hill fans were overjoyed at the prospect at having the game remade (Much like how Shinji Mikami had so successfully remade the first Resident Evil game), but soon that excitement simmered down to somewhat passive acceptance to the re-imagined version that was Shattered Memories.
While Silent Hill: Origins itself made an attempt to deal with psychological issues just as all the other titles had done (Though wounded up with perhaps one of the most cliche backstories for its protagonist more than anything), Silent Hill: Shattered Memories had most definitely taken a far more interesting approach to it that kept its fans curious (Especially with the disbanding of Team Silent after the 4th game, interest was quickly dwindling with each new title after) enough to stay around for just a little longer.
Noted for being bookended with a series of psychiatric sessions through first person view, the game in all had a far more interesting narrative structure and had some interesting questions about the role of the player and protagonist himself (Goodbye, simple, sweet Harry Mason) and how those two things kind of meld together. While choices could also be made in the other Silent Hill titles (Obviously to achieve one's desired ending, like many other games at the time), the choices you made in Shattered Memories gave you far more obvious results in the form of the man whom you have taken control of from the start.
Back to the main focus of this event, Her Story was Sam's first game an an independent developer and was released on the 24th June 2015 for Microsoft Windows, OS X and iOS (Which was apparently why I hadn't actually heard of it until I had been referred to this very event...). In the game, the players use a database of police video clips to solve the case of a missing man.
Frustrated in the difficulties faced in making a certain type of game and portraying a certain type of story, and so Her Story was in a way Barlow's opportunity to explore into areas that haven't yet been explored as much in video game design and narratives. There is necessarily no barrier between you and the fictional world in this game, especially as you, the player simply views the police video clips like a real detective would. Despite the minimalistic gameplay, players find themselves taking numerous notes as they attempt to solve the mystery of the missing man whilst viewing these videos.
Working independently has proven to be considerably different as compared to working with a publisher, Barlow has noticed that the Police Procedural genre especially had very little success in games. While it is practically one of the biggest genres in films and books, pitching a game of that genre proved to be a big challenge for Barlow when giving his pitch to various publishers. The possible issue with this matter is that this genre in particular places heavy focus on dialogue, character development, psychology, areas in which video games tend to struggle with.
Nonetheless, Barlow has always been fascinated with the genre from a very early age, with shows such as Homicide life on the Street (One of the first few shows that heavily focused on the interview process, that actually showed cases that weren't solved, and was always able to sustain the drama within the interview room alone) serving as a huge inspiration to him. Her Story was practically an experiment where they wanted to see how far they could go without the use of an avatar, 3D navigation and space. Subtext is key in any storytelling media. Video games have this conflict where the story content is instructing the player to drive the story forward, which in a way kills subtext. Again, Her Story was an exercise to move away from such constraints with heavy focus on subtext, where Barlow could write dialogue and have performance around that whilst exploring around subtext.
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