Her Story is celebrating its 10-year anniversary immediately, June 24, 2025. Under, we communicate with creator Sam Barlow concerning the central mysteries driving the sport, its legacy, and his personal autobiographical inspiration.
Spoilers for Her Story observe.
Sam Barlow needs to place one thing on the document.
“So far as I do know,” he says, “neither of my grandmothers murdered anyone.”
He is been telling me that he solely realized half means by the making of Her Story–his landmark 2015 crime fiction recreation a couple of girl accused of murder–that he was telling a narrative about his two grandmothers, and the way in which their identities have been buffeted by society and household.
Barlow’s maternal grandmother had been a glamorous singer, however he’d solely recognized her as a “Northern English matriarch, massive cuddly nana.” After she died, “I bear in mind simply feeling actually dumb that I would by no means [asked], I would love to take a seat down now and simply ask her about all the opposite stuff she’d finished in her life. As a child, particularly as a British child, you do not ever speak about emotions, feelings.
“I want I had an hour to take a seat down and interrogate her.”
Her Story takes longer than an hour however the parallels are clear: As the sport’s unnamed protagonist, you are making an attempt to grasp your mom by watching police interviews along with her following her husband’s disappearance, unfurling her story by typing key phrases to bounce round a rudimentary archive of footage. Its subtext attracts not simply on Barlow’s household, but in addition on real-life criminals, unfairness within the justice system, ladies’s rights within the twentieth century, and fairytales, and it feels as deft and wealthy immediately because it did 10 years in the past.
However the enduring legacy of Her Story, a minimum of for some gamers, is its ambiguity: the frantic multiplying of Reddit, Steam, and discussion board threads debating what actually occurred to Eve and Hannah, the on-screen protagonists memorably portrayed by Viva Seifert. Towards its finish, Eve says that Hannah is her twin sister and that she’s “by no means coming again,”–but additionally “does not exist”.
Are they actually two ladies, followers requested, or one?
Barlow mentioned on the time he needed the sport’s true narrative to stay a thriller, and sitting down for an interview wanting again at Her Story 10 years later, he is sticking to that. However he does inform me about how one interpretation of the story makes him “uncomfortable”. He additionally illuminates much more of the subtext and explains how he created that enduring sense of mystery–in methods each meant and unintended.
Barlow’s inspirations for Her Story have been myriad, from TV cop dramas like Murder: Life on the Avenue to actual interrogation manuals. He watched police interviews on YouTube, together with these of Jodi Arias, who in 2013 was convicted of murdering her husband. Arias’ movies went viral, changing into public performances to be consumed and overanalysed by hundreds of thousands.
The subject material was heavy, however it was bliss for Barlow. He’d simply gone unbiased after a irritating finish to his tenure at Climax Studios, the developer of Silent Hill: Shattered Recollections, and was now primarily working half days on a ardour undertaking.
He took his younger youngsters to high school within the morning and completed work at 2 p.m. to spend extra time with them. He adopted the actor and comic John Cleese’s productiveness rule of 90-minute blocks for inventive work, becoming two of those round a “luxurious breakfast,” the laundry, searching Twitter, and checking emails.
“Spring was popping out and I’d sit within the backyard and simply learn books for my analysis. It was the most efficient I would ever been as a result of I’d simply sit and I would work and I would not have conferences,” he says.
“After I realized I had the concept that the sport could possibly be actually freeform, reasonably than a scripted kind of Phoenix Wright sequence, I bear in mind feeling like that is probably a horrible concept,” he continues. “It is most likely very dangerous, however it feels actually thrilling. And it was cool that the choice was made there after which. I did not should pitch anybody or clarify.”
The story took form as Barlow watched extra police interviews, growing a sympathy for the faces he noticed. The folks being interrogated weren’t psychopaths, he thought, and in some circumstances have been being coerced by the detectives sitting throughout from them.
“I used to be getting very indignant about that, which possibly influenced the concept that really, your sympathies have been with the lady, and never with the detective [in Her Story],” he says.
It is an instance of one thing Barlow did not explicitly add however which leaked into Her Story anyway, trickling from the highest cabinets of his thoughts onto the web page.
One other instance: he cites a blog post by the writer and narrative designer Emily Short, “who wrote concerning the feeling of being a lady and projecting a sure id, and the way in which by which the story allowed that to be explored,” he says.
“Once more, that was one other very particular collection of ideas that I would had that’s 5 steps eliminated when it comes to what’s really within the textual content.”
The belief about his grandmothers carved extra element into the story.
Barlow’s maternal grandmother’s singing days have been over after bombs hit her theatre throughout World Battle II and her father forbade her from carrying on. She acquired married and raised youngsters as a housewife.
On Barlow’s father’s facet, his grandmother “had been very a lot a put-together Nineteen Fifties housewife, dinner was all the time prepared at 5 p.m. on the dot,” he says. However she was “getting very senile” in her previous age and Barlow remembers “all of her anger concerning the life she’d needed to lead, how exhausting she had needed to work, and the extent to which she had all the time taken second fiddle to my granddad, would simply come out.”
He knew his grandmothers’ tales had fed his concepts round self-identity, expectations, and the way in which folks understand others, and determined to “lean into it”.
Eve, like Barlow’s grandmother, is a singer. His different grandmother smoked secretly, hiding her cigarettes in ceramic ornaments. “And as a child who was consistently looking for cool shit, and digging into your grandparents’ home, I’d discover these cigarettes,” he says.
This manifests in one other character in Her Story–Eleanor–who is described as hiding her personal cigarettes in decorative porcelain vases. “All these years of marriage and he or she nonetheless has a secret like that,” Hannah says within the recreation.
Barlow had initially envisaged Her Story on a YouTube-style interface–a really 2010s on-line drama–but the themes, together with these impressed by his grandmothers, now not felt fashionable. So he pushed the story again in time and set it on a Nineties Home windows pc. “Then it was rather more consciously a factor that I used to be sort of eager about and exploring, and I felt comfy doing that, realizing I would pushed this again into the twentieth century,” he explains.
The anomaly in Her Story surrounding Eve and Hannah is just partly deliberate.
Barlow says he actually needed to create “adverse area” within the story for readers’ imaginations to fill, in a narrative that’s already a couple of girl hiding the reality.
He’d discovered the police transcripts of Christopher Porco, a person in his early 20s who attacked his dad and mom with an axe, and plugged them in a Her Story-style search system. He realised that Porco stored mentioning cash, even in response to boring, open questions. “After which I am typing in phrases to do with cash and it is pulling up extra,” Barlow says. “After which I realized that he killed his dad and mom to get the inheritance, and that for me was like this gentle bulb going off.”
If Barlow ensured his character had full backstories and loads of issues value hiding, he might recreate this Porco lightbulb second for gamers, he thought. So he wrote an enormous doc itemizing what had occurred to all Her Story’s characters over the past 20 years and within the weeks main up the interviews, and instructed the story like an impressionist painter would, capturing its essence whereas permitting gamers to fill in the remaining.
In that sense, the paradox was deliberate and deliberate.
However Barlow by no means meant to create a debate about whether or not Eve and Hannah are twins or, because the opposing principle goes, one girl who manifests two personalities, seemingly due to Dissociative Id Dysfunction. He by no means subtracted something from the story to shroud that reality, “undoubtedly not consciously,” he says.
The talk stunned him however made sense–although he generally felt uneasy about it.
Journalist Laura Hudson, who subscribed to the one-woman principle, wrote a thoughtful piece at the time for the website Offworld calling the sport’s depiction of psychological well being its “deadly flaw,” arguing that it performed into the damaging trope of equating psychological sickness with violence.
That in style principle of the story made him “uncomfortable,” Barlow says/
“That was one of many issues the place I used to be like, I would like to touch upon this, as a result of I do not need folks to assume that I’ve unhealthy concepts, unhealthy ideas,” he says. “However on the identical time, I used to be like, as a lot as I am uncomfortable about folks having these takes, that’s the recreation that I put out into the world that they are reacting to.”
He knew area for participant discovery and interpretation meant that individuals might “undertaking” tropes onto it, he provides.
After I level out that he seems to be disagreeing with one of many two main interpretations of the sport, Barlow says he’s joyful for his solutions to talk for themselves.
He says he by no means felt compelled to disclose the “true” model of the story as a result of he was extra within the themes of id, self-image, our notion of different folks, and the way we interpret actions, than within the specifics of the narrative. And “if you happen to’re all speaking about this, you’re sort of participating with what’s attention-grabbing to me,” he says. “All of these parts within the story work, no matter your interpretation.”
Barlow admits it is “often tempting” to return to Her Story.
He wouldn’t make a brand new model of the unique as a result of it’s so available on platforms equivalent to Steam and app shops, and it nonetheless ages effectively, he says.
However “there is a teeny half behind my thoughts” that thinks he might make a sequel. Now that he is aware of the instruments and may higher shoot live-action footage, it’d most likely be simpler, he says. But it surely most likely would not be a continuation of Eve’s story.
“Actually a distinct particular person within the seat, a distinct story. And there most likely could be an enormous urge for food for it and it could most likely be enjoyable, a beautiful chill time,” he says.
However that is too wise for Barlow. Given the selection between protected and one thing that “won’t work”–as he feared when he got down to make Her Story–he’ll decide the riskier possibility.
“There’s solely so a few years you get to do this stuff,” he says. “While I am ready to make decisions, I am going to decide on the factor that’s extra work and is extra thrilling.”
Mockingly, the one means a sequel would occur, he says, is that if there have been two Sam Barlows.
“If I might clone myself,” he says, “I might have a model of me that is like, you go off and do Her Story 2.”