'I am a big roguelike guy, but also a fan of minimalism and elegance': Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story, guides us through the games in his Steam Library

Sam Barlow is the director of Half Mermaid and one of interactive fiction's modern luminaries. Breaking into game development with his one-move choose your own adventure Arrival, Barlow worked on games like Ghost Rider and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories before striking out on his own with 2015's Her Story.

Blending FMV-style video with an investigative branching narrative, Her Story was a pioneer in the detective game genre. Since Her Story, Barlow has further experimented with combining live-action footage and interactive fiction in 2019's Telling Lies and 2021's Immortality.

Barlow is currently working on two different projects, one with director Brandon Cronenberg, the other with Blumhouse Productions. But he took a break from those to show me around the mystery-riddled file-stack of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I am trying to find the time to do justice to 868-BACK. I am a huge fan of Michael Brough's work—at this point [they're] the only games I still have and play on my phone, and so I was excited to see him go big with this one and be back on my PC.

I am a big roguelike guy, but also a fan of minimalism and elegance, so the way Brough's games do this 'molecular gastronomy of Rogue' thing, deconstructing the genre to its smaller parts and then refining them to a point where a single mechanic becomes a whole universe is delightful to me. This one has a lot to it though, it's humongous, so I need to step up and prove myself worthy of the full twenty course meal.

The genius and spikiness of the 868 games is that you never feel safe or powerful. Every single move you make could be a disaster. It reminds me of Resident Evil 4 in how I can't play for too long as I find the experience so stressful. But I also need to play a lot to get good! So it is really putting a strain on my body.

Whenever I have a run that goes well and then ends in flames I feel like crap and need to go lie down to recover. It doesn't help that scores in the game can go (really) negative, so it's pretty clear how much it thinks you suck. I want to be as good a player as this game deserves!

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

That would be Warp Interactive's D: The Game. I went down a bit of a Kenji Eno rabbit hole after reading that amazing viral interview between him and Miyamoto and it prompted me to go buy D on steam for a replay. It is in some ways creaky as hell and is not the best and most elegantly or fairly designed point and click game, but that said, it has the juice!

The actual cinematography and vibes are great and once you adjust your mind to how slow things move (every single movement in the game is via a pre-rendered animation from point A to B) it has a pleasant kind of atmosphere. It is still installed because a cool feature of the game is that it only lasts 2 hours and you can't save. If the timer runs out before you complete it, GAME OVER.

The idea was to make you consume it more like a movie than a game. The time limit is fairly reasonable, however when I sat down to play it, I was alt-tabbing to work and multi-task and so whilst I only put in say an hour of game time, my minimised D was still counting and I hit the time limit and was murdered right in the final stretch, so I plan to go back and turn off my distractions and give the game full attention and beat the thing.

RIP Kenji Eno, really one of a kind. The story of how he swapped the gold master discs to slip in content past the censors; and the one about how he announced D2 being a SEGA exclusive on stage at a Sony press conference. He was a wild one.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

If we're allowing ROMS, I never leave a system without a copy of TAITO's 1988 The New Zealand Story—the finest maze game ever made, and one of my all-time favourites (I used to have a Jamma cabinet with an original board in it, but alas had to leave it behind when I crossed the Atlantic).

But if we're sticking to legally above-board digital ownership, it looks like the earliest would be Dragon Wars from Interplay in 1989 over on GOG. I have a lot of games from this period that never get uninstalled because they're pretty small file sizes, but this is one that I always re-install whenever I get a new machine.

Details

It's essentially Bard's Tale 4, but has a slightly more unique setting and was helmed by the legendary Rebecca Heineman. A lot of people have their foundational CRPG and this was mine. It's a gorgeous game, it feels so complete but evokes so much. It uses skill checks like in Wasteland, so you might be imprisoned in the walled city and you see a pile of corpses they're transporting for disposal and you go to the menu and choose to use one of your character's skills, "hide"—and the game responds and you hide in the corpses and get transported out past the guards.

These secret actions that are never signposted, mean[ing] you have to conceive the idea and then go deep into the skill menus, so there's a real delight of having your idea pay off. It's the kind of thing that's very hard to execute in a modern, 3D, real-time simulation.

The game has lots of these moments, and it carries over the feel of open spaces from Bard's Tale's cities, but here expanded over a huge sprawling above ground map. It has such a tone and atmosphere to it. I love this game.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. Over 500 hours of this masterpiece. The game is only a few years old, but I've been a huge fan of this series since the first title was remade on the Nintendo DS and I encountered it for the first time.

It is perhaps the greatest videogame, and certainly in my opinion, the greatest roguelike ever made. The depth of the game systems and the sense of anything being possible is unmatched. Serpentcoil is arguably the best of the lot, with a lot of clever iteration of the interface, and whilst it's easy to lament the loss of the classic pixel art, the variety of locations and enemy types and just the lovely pastoral richness to this world is really lush.

The combination of Japanese mythology and landscapes feels fresh alongside other games' more traditional Tolkien-inspired fantasy tropes. I have completed every dungeon in this game bar one—the harder version of the harder version of the hardest dungeon in the original game that was added in the final round of DLC. I keep trying and failing. But it never stops being delightful and I keep discovering new layers and ways of playing tricks with its systems. Shiren truly is my forever game.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I've already mentioned Shiren the Wanderer, so let's not repeat ourselves. I think the one I have around like a piece of art on my wall is Riven.

Even though the recent full remake was very carefully done, it can't beat the original for me. Such an incredible work of art. The atmosphere and the richness of the visuals, the sound design. At 640x480 it genuinely feels like a real world we're snooping on through our computer screen, the textures and lighting don't feel like CGI, it's hard to see the seams or polygonal edges like you can even in the most expensive modern game.

I always have the game installed and ready to go. Whether that's just so I can wander around my favourite spots or how, every few years, I replay from the start and make little graphs to map out the beautiful open nature of its puzzle flow. One of gaming's true masterpieces.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

Huge fan of Fade In, the screenwriting software. One of my first installs on a fresh PC. It's a marvellous thing. There's a couple of 'industry standard' screenwriting programs— Final Draft and Movie Magic—but it's always been maddening to me that they're so flawed. They charge a fortune for them, and they're feature light and prone to crashing.

So along comes Fade In, made by Kent Tessman, a luminary of the interactive fiction community. It's slicker, faster, crashes less; and has more features! If you think of something to be added, hit up Kent and he's going to work on it.

It also plays nice with a few file formats that we use at Half Mermaid to ingest scripts into our game engine and then back again. We work back-and-forth between our monolithic spreadsheets and Fade In and it all flows pretty effortlessly, helping us just write without getting too stuck on the technical stuff. It's also one of those old-fashioned pieces of software that you buy once and use forever! No monthly subscription malarky here.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Absolute chaos. Some time ago I got into the habit of saving everything to my desktop—all my documents, screengrabs, etc. Because of this I rarely look at the desktop, I'm always opening it up with a few windows left open. But every now and then I jump-scare myself by accidentally hitting the 'show desktop' button and seeing the stack of icons that looks something like the win animation in classic Solitaire meets the 'shunting scene' in the movie Society.