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‘Her Story’ Creator Announces ‘#WarGames’, an Experimental Interactive Series

Sam Barlow’s Her Story ($2.99) is pretty much universally acclaimed (we gave it 4.5 stars in our review and praised its acting and writing), and many players are looking forward to Telling Lies, Barlow’s other big project. Today, Barlow announced another upcoming game called #Wargames, and it looks very intriguing. The trailer for this new interactive series starts with all the big hacks that have happened over the last few years (Yahoo, Sony, etc) and takes us to a 2018 that’s not too far from what we’re experiencing right now. Barlow pointed out that they started writing the game under the Obama administration, but now it might be even more relevant.

The star of the game is a likable hacker (unlike the usual nihilist hackers we see in many movies), and the game itself echoes the 1980s movie with the same name (minus the hashtag). This interactive series is not your conventional choose-your-own-adventure story but something more experimental, although Barlow doesn’t offer any details on how it departs from the standard formula. I wonder if it’s going to play like Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic , and whether this is the start of a genre that straddles CYOA games and TV shows. The game will launch in 2018, and I hope we get it on mobile as well.