A Decade Later, Her Story Is Still A Mystery--And One Interpretation Makes Sam Barlow "Uncomfortable"
10 years on, Sam Barlow reflects on police interviews, subtext, and whether he’d ever make a sequel
Barlow's inspirations for Her Story were myriad, from TV cop dramas like Homicide: Life on the Street to real interrogation manuals. He watched police interviews on YouTube, including those of Jodi Arias, who in 2013 was convicted of murdering her husband. Arias' videos went viral, becoming public performances to be consumed and overanalysed by millions.
The subject matter was heavy, but it was bliss for Barlow. He'd just gone independent after a frustrating end to his tenure at Climax Studios, the developer of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and was now essentially working half days on a passion project.
He took his young children to school in the morning and finished work at 2 p.m. to spend more time with them. He followed the actor and comedian John Cleese's productivity rule of 90-minute blocks for creative work, fitting two of these around a "luxurious breakfast," the laundry, browsing Twitter, and checking emails.
"Spring was coming out and I would sit in the garden and just read books for my research. It was the most productive I'd ever been because I would just sit and I'd work and I wouldn't have meetings," he says.
"When I realized I had the idea that the game could be really freeform, rather than a scripted sort of Phoenix Wright sequence, I remember feeling like this is possibly a terrible idea," he continues. "It's probably very risky, but it feels really exciting. And it was cool that the decision was made there and then. I didn't have to pitch anyone or explain."
The story took shape as Barlow watched more police interviews, developing a sympathy for the faces he saw. The people being interrogated weren't psychopaths, he thought, and in some cases were being coerced by the detectives sitting across from them.
"I was getting very angry about that, which maybe influenced the idea that actually, your sympathies were with the woman, and not with the detective [in Her Story]," he says.
It's an example of something Barlow didn't explicitly add but which leaked into Her Story anyway, trickling from the top shelves of his mind onto the page.
Another example: he cites a blog post by the writer and narrative designer Emily Short, "who wrote about the feeling of being a woman and projecting a certain identity, and the way in which the story allowed that to be explored," he says.
"Again, that was another very specific series of thoughts that I'd had that is five steps removed in terms of what's actually in the text."
The realization about his grandmothers carved more detail into the story.
Barlow's maternal grandmother's singing days were over after bombs hit her theatre during World War II and her father forbade her from carrying on. She got married and raised children as a housewife.
On Barlow's father's side, his grandmother "had been very much a put-together 1950s housewife, dinner was always ready at 5 p.m. on the dot," he says. But she was "getting very senile" in her old age and Barlow remembers "all of her anger about the life she'd had to lead, how hard she had had to work, and the extent to which she had always taken second fiddle to my granddad, would just come out."
He knew his grandmothers' stories had fed his ideas around self-identity, expectations, and the way people perceive others, and decided to "lean into it".
Eve, like Barlow's grandmother, is a singer. His other grandmother smoked secretly, hiding her cigarettes in ceramic ornaments. "And as a kid who was constantly trying to find cool shit, and digging into your grandparents' house, I would find these cigarettes," he says.
This manifests in another character in Her Story--Eleanor--who is described as hiding her own cigarettes in ornamental porcelain vases. "All those years of marriage and she still has a secret like that," Hannah says in the game.
Barlow had initially envisaged Her Story on a YouTube-style interface--a truly 2010s online drama--but the themes, including those inspired by his grandmothers, no longer felt modern. So he pushed the story back in time and set it on a 1990s Windows computer. “Then it was much more consciously a thing that I was kind of thinking about and exploring, and I felt comfortable doing that, knowing I'd pushed this back into the 20th century,” he explains.
The ambiguity in Her Story surrounding Eve and Hannah is only partly deliberate.
Barlow says he certainly wanted to create "negative space" in the story for readers' imaginations to fill, in a story that’s already about a woman hiding the truth.
He'd found the police transcripts of Christopher Porco, a man in his early 20s who attacked his parents with an axe, and plugged them in a Her Story-style search system. He realised that Porco kept mentioning money, even in response to bland, open questions. "And then I'm typing in words to do with money and it's pulling up more," Barlow says. "And then I learned that he killed his parents to get the inheritance, and that for me was like this light bulb going off."
If Barlow ensured his character had full backstories and plenty of things worth hiding, he could recreate this Porco lightbulb moment for players, he thought. So he wrote a huge document listing what had happened to all Her Story's characters during the last 20 years and in the weeks leading up the interviews, and told the story like an impressionist painter would, capturing its essence while allowing players to fill in the rest.
In that sense, the ambiguity was planned and deliberate.
But Barlow never intended to create a debate about whether Eve and Hannah are twins or, as the opposing theory goes, one woman who manifests two personalities, likely because of Dissociative Identity Disorder. He never subtracted anything from the story to shroud that truth, "definitely not consciously," he says.
The debate surprised him but made sense--although he sometimes felt uneasy about it.
Journalist Laura Hudson, who subscribed to the one-woman theory, wrote a thoughtful piece at the time for the website Offworld calling the game’s depiction of mental health its “fatal flaw,” arguing that it played into the damaging trope of equating mental illness with violence.
That popular theory of the story made him “uncomfortable,” Barlow says.
“That was one of the things where I was like, I'd love to comment on this, because I don't want people to think that I have bad ideas, bad thoughts," he says. "But at the same time, I was like, as much as I'm uncomfortable about people having these takes, that is the game that I put out into the world that they're reacting to.”
He knew space for player discovery and interpretation meant that people could “project” tropes onto it, he adds.
When I point out that he appears to be disagreeing with one of the two major interpretations of the game, Barlow says he’s happy for his answers to speak for themselves.
He says he never felt compelled to reveal the "true" version of the story because he was more interested in the themes of identity, self-image, our perception of other people, and how we interpret actions, than in the specifics of the narrative. And "if you're all talking about this, you are kind of engaging with what is interesting to me," he says. "All of those elements in the story work, whatever your interpretation."
Barlow admits it's "occasionally tempting" to return to Her Story.
He wouldn’t make a new version of the original because it’s so readily available on platforms such as Steam and app stores, and it still ages well, he says.
But "there's a teeny part in the back of my mind" that thinks he could make a sequel. Now that he knows the tools and can better shoot live-action footage, it'd probably be easier, he says. But it probably wouldn't be a continuation of Eve's story.
"Literally a different person in the seat, a different story. And there probably would be a huge appetite for it and it would probably be fun, a lovely chill time," he says.
But that's too sensible for Barlow. Given the choice between safe and something that "might not work"--as he feared when he set out to make Her Story--he'll pick the riskier option.
"There's only so many years you get to do these things," he says. "Whilst I'm in a position to make choices, I'm going to choose the thing that is more work and is more exciting."
Ironically, the only way a sequel would happen, he says, is if there were two Sam Barlows.
"If I could clone myself," he says, "I could have a version of me that's like, you go off and do Her Story 2."
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Her Story PCThis story originally appeared on: GameSpot - Author:UK GAG
