Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Writer & Designer Creating Interactive Crime Drama

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories took a great series and made it work with motion controls. That is no easy feat. Now the writer and designer of the game, Sam Barlow, are creating a new IP with an interesting way to explore its horror.

Her Story sees you trawling through archive footage of a police interview from 1994. Your device is the police archive computer and you are the person that needs to make sense of it all. A woman, played by Viva Seifert, an actress and one half of the band Joe Gideon and The Shark, is being questioned by police about her missing husband. There are seven different interviews to search through, with searches in the games database bringing up clips where the words are said.

Barlow is aware the use of video is not widely used in games and, when asked, he said:

The aesthetic is True Detective via Blair Witch. I’m interested in showing that accessible technologies such as video offer a powerful way for indie games to showcase a performance. I am also putting the spotlight on the modern phenomena of the Youtube Jury, in which police forces distribute the footage of intimate suspect interviews for armchair detectives to dissect. You see it in cases such as those of Jodi Arias and Amanda Knox — cases where the suspects’ stories themselves get lost amongst the torrent of clichés and prejudices that the videos elicit.

Her Story is due for release early this year on iOS, PC and Mac. If you pre-order it from the games website you will be featured in the credits and there is a Steam Greenlight page for it too. The teaser trailer can be seen below.