Talking to Sam Barlow is kind of like playing through his most celebrated game. Pop in a keyword and it'll send him on a spiral of thought, looping through different topics and themes before landing back somewhere familiar. It's as if his thought patterns have been rewired by the games he's been working on, evolved into some kind of non-linear sprawl that his conversation invites you to tug away at until you find a thread that might take you somewhere new. Even his accent flits around in some hard to pin down nether region between Yorkshire where he was born, Tanzania where he spent some of the childhood or New York where he calls home now.
It's been some four years since Her Story, the fascinating interactive movie and meditation on narrative devices that earned numerous plaudits that helped make Barlow - already well-known for his work on Climax's Silent Hill games as well as its unreleased Legacy of Kain title - much in demand. He's hardly been absent in the time since - there was the episodic reimagining of WarGames last year - but he's now revealing the follow-up to Her Story. Called Telling Lies and due out later this year via a partnership with Annapurna Interactive, Barlow is allowing small glimpses of it on a laptop in a boxy, makeshift room in the Moscone Center during this year's GDC.
"The most sensible thing, for my accountant, would have been for me to do a follow-up to Her Story, with a different person in a room being interrogated. And some people were like, we'd love that."