[4] In 2017 he founded Half Mermaid, a video game production company based in Brooklyn, New York.

Like his later Silent Hill games, Aisle features a psychologically damaged viewpoint character, a contemporary setting and a positive meaning at its heart.

He claims that Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and J. G. Ballard influenced his work on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

He has also been inspired by David Lynch, Mark Z. Danielewski, Paul Auster, Shirley Jackson, The Exorcist and Gene Wolfe.

[13] Barlow cites Cronenberg's The Fly and Paul Schrader's Cat People as showing how best to reboot an existing story.