Her Story: how JG Ballard and Sharon Stone inspired the award-winning game

Sam Barlow wanted to make a new kind of police procedural mystery. So he quit his job, read interrogation manuals and created one of the most interesting games of the last five years

There are no spoilers for Her Story in this article.

When Sam Barlow was working at Climax Studios in Portsmouth, helping to design the survival horror sequel, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, he would get home at night and tinker with a couple of screenplay projects. They were just an exercise, a way to write about things that he couldn't in his day job. But then one night, he realised something: both scripts were about a man just ambling along, seemingly quite happy in life, until a cataclysmic event changes everything. "I was like, 'Oh right, this is me sending a message to myself'," he says. "I realised I needed the impetus to leave the company and go indie. I was writing this stuff to tell that to myself."