Sam Barlow’s games as database cinema

In the branching-structures guide an environment-based structure is an archive or a space: the viewer assembles the order. In the film-or-game essay Her Story and Immortality sit as exploration hybrids: skill reduced to search and attention, the viewer edits the film. Database cinema is that bet, gathered on one author, not a reprint of the typology.

It is not Bandersnatch. There a menu switches to a pre-shot branch. Here there is no menu: a search, a tag, a frame you decided to open next. It is not a quick-time event and not a dating sim. You can “lose” only by failing to assemble the story. There is no score.

Wikipedia) records the game as an interactive film written and directed by Sam Barlow, released 24 June 2015 for iOS, OS X, and Windows. The player searches and sorts a database of clips from fictional police interviews. The interviews cannot be watched whole: answers are cut short, the questions stay off screen, and the transcript is the search index. The desktop that holds the database is part of the work, not a menu shell.

I am not retelling the case. The mechanic is the explanation: the order of clips is not authored as one reel. Each viewer cuts a different draft from the same archive. That is why “explain Her Story” without spoilers is a description of the search, not the solution.

The same Wikipedia article calls Telling Lies a spiritual sequel: not one central character, but live-action footage of four people’s video conversations. The player pieces events together by searching the clips, to learn why those people were under surveillance. Publisher Annapurna Interactive, Windows and macOS, 23 August 2019. The article names Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé, and Angela Sarafyan.

The interface changed with the corpus: no longer one interview, a set of conversations. The bet is the same. The viewer is still the editor. I am not describing what the conversations reveal. That would be a walkthrough.

On this site Immortality is already an archive from 2022: the viewer assembles a film from fragments of three unreleased pictures. I am not adding a solution, a cast list, or a hidden layer I did not open in a source today. For Barlow’s corpus the mechanic already stated in the film-or-game essay is enough: search and attention instead of a branch menu.

From Her Story to Immortality the bet does not change. What gets indexed does. First a word in an interview transcript. Then a conversation among several people. Then a frame inside an unreleased film. Editing stops being a style and becomes the player’s action.

The Steam page (app 2771630), opened 6 October 2026, gives the year as 2028, not “spring”. Developers: Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow. Publisher: Kinetic Publishing. Co-author Brandon Cronenberg; the page names Possessor and Infinity Pool. Diana, after an experimental implant, sees moments of her own future. The player explores the visions and chooses what of that future to remember, in order to change it. Steam calls it a live-action sci-fi horror and an expansion of Barlow’s approach, with freedom to move across decades and timelines. The store text does not show the interface. I am not inventing a UI.

Kutok, 14 August 2026, writes spring 2028 and the platforms PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC, and that the game was teased as Project C. That is the news item, not Steam. If Half Mermaid’s own announcement does not open, the split stays: year and the memory mechanic from Steam; season and consoles “as Kutok reported”.

If we trust only the description, choosing what to remember is not Bandersnatch’s branch menu. It is closer to an archive: the viewer decides which fragment of the future enters the reel. Whether the game works that way, the Steam text does not show. I will not write that the mechanic is already known.

In an ordinary film the edit is already done. The viewer receives one reel and does not choose the next frame. In a nodal branch, as in Bandersnatch, the edit is also done in advance: several finished joins exist, and the viewer only points at which join to play. Database cinema hands the join to the viewer. The author shoots a corpus and builds an index. The order of viewing is not part of the delivered work. It happens in the sitting.

That is why the search box in Her Story is not a menu and not a token mechanic. It is an editing bench. A word in the transcript is a label on a clip, like a slate number on a can. Typing the word is what an editor does with a labelled can: pull the piece and lay it after another. The difference is that the cans are not already laid in one sequence. They have to be found.

Hence a limit that “explain the game” lists usually skip. If you never find a clip, it does not exist for you. The work is a potential archive, not a guaranteed reel. Two viewers can honestly cut different drafts and both be inside the work. That is not a walkthrough bug. It is the form. A “correct order” of clips on this page would cancel the bet, so there is none.

PRECOGNITION, if we stay with the Steam text, moves the index again. Her Story indexes a spoken word. Telling Lies indexes a line in a conversation among several people. Immortality, as already phrased on this site, indexes a frame inside an unreleased film. In the new game the index may be memory: which seen fragment of the future the viewer keeps in the reel. That is a reading of the description, not a report on the interface. Until Steam shows how memory is chosen, I am not drawing buttons.

For a researcher of interactive cinema this corpus matters not as “the best FMV” but as proof that cinema can hand over the edit without becoming a game with a score. The skill is the viewer’s attention and memory, not the timing of a press. That is the same line I draw between film and game: the recipient’s experience, not the presence of a video file. Barlow keeps putting the viewer in the editor’s chair. A dating sim puts them in the conversationalist’s chair. Bandersnatch puts them in a hall with a remote. Three chairs, three forms. Confusing them because live-action video is in all three is a description of the carrier, not of the work.

They are not ranked here. “Sam Barlow games ranked” wants a verdict. A verdict without a criterion is a shop list. The criterion on this page is one: does the viewer edit an archive?

Kutok mentions Silent Hill: Origins and Shattered Memories in one biographical sentence — Barlow was a designer and writer there. That is another form. It does not get a section.

In Ukrainian, PRECOGNITION has so far produced news items. Kutok is news, not a reading of the corpus. This page fills that gap with the mechanic, not a rewrite of the announcement.