Found Footage
IN 2015, BRITISH GAME DESIGNER SAM BARLOW RELEASED HER STORY FOR PC AND mobile devices. Its curious gaming interface mimics a mundane database search engine that accesses a trove of interviews recorded with a single subject, a woman undergoing a series of police interrogations. That the game is built entirely around full-motion video (FMV) clips represented something of an anomaly in the gaming scene. The player watches the interviews to learn more about the woman’s tale, gleaning new information to search for more clips that help further the narrative.
Playing it on my iPhone, quickly calling up video after video, was something of an astonishment. I can still remember the day nearly 20 years ago when I fired up my rudimentary PC, popped in the first of many CD-ROMs containing the data for , and was treated to FMV cutscenes starring the was a sign of new life for FMV, and Barlow’s recently released follow-up, , expands upon its core ideas and adopts a similarly structured interface.
