Sally Beaumont, voice actor in Old Skies and The Séance of Blake Manor, extols the virtues of narrative singleplayer games 'You can have lots of them in your PC toolbelt'

Disk Cleanup

Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"

Sally Beaumont's earliest PC gaming memory is playing Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards on the family PC. "Which I should not have been playing," she stresses. "I think a lot of parents at the time just had the idea that games were silly and they were for children."

But the first PC game to have a major impact on Beaumont was The Curse of Monkey Island, as it arguably defined the course of her career. "I blame/love Dominic Armato for making me realise that being a voice actor is a real job," she says.

Studying drama at the University of Exeter, Beaumont worked for many years primarily as a voiceover artist. Since 2017, she has appeared regularly as a voice actor for games, with roles in the likes of Heaven's Vault, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, and Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader. She also wrote for and played the lead role in 2025's Old Skies—for which she was selected for the BAFTA Breakthrough program.

Beaumont is currently working on numerous projects including El Paso, Elsewhere 2, but she took a break to show me around the verb-object interface of her PC. We travelled through time, attended a séance, and ended up in hospital—not necessarily in that order.

What game are you currently playing?

I am currently playing The Séance of Blake Manor, which is a trifle narcissistic, because I am in it …. But because I'm only one of a very large cast, I've slightly forgotten that that's me. I've forgotten all the lines. I can't even remember the lines for a hint. But watching everybody bounce onto Séance because they finished Blue Prince was really cool. And also, we're in a heatwave and it's nice to play a game that's rainy and gloomy.

It's a good lesson for me. Because as an adventure game player I like to click on everything, look at everything, go through every dialogue option. And the time mechanic, it stops me from doing that. It makes me much more thoughtful about where I'm putting my attention, and I know a lot of players have been upset about that, like you're constricting me. And it's like "No, that's how it works."

I played a very early demo of it without the time mechanic, so I am in the rare position of being able to judge what the time mechanic really does with the game … and the feedback I gave to the developers was that when I finished the demo—and this was years and years ago—I just spontaneously went 'No, the game is going to be something special.'

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

It's Nelly Cootalot. I have regular replays of it just because I love it. It's Alasdair Beckett-King's love letter to Curse of Monkey Island.

It is just lovely, and the jokes in it are brilliant. There's a little bit of alchemy in it, [like] there's a joke about "I love new location smell". There are moments in the game where it opens up, like when you get to the harbour, and you're like "I can go into all the shops, and there's a musician down the road, and there's the town hall." I get really excited at the warmth of it.

Sometimes, when somebody is making a game that is inspired by another game, it can be a bit snarky, like they don't always necessarily understand what made the original special, and I think Nelly Cootalot, while being its own thing, really understands what it's an homage to. But it also does a few things which are more sensible and modern, which I appreciate.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

Oh gosh, it might be Day of the Tentacle.

I think one of the joys of adventure, narrative singleplayer games, is they tend to be quite small, so you can have lots of them in your PC toolbelt. Instead of it being an open-world game where you always have more to discover, it's more like going back home. Like your favourite pub, and it has all the same characters there, you know what you're gonna get. But that's the niceness of it.

And because I have an atrocious memory, I go "Oh, I forgot about that!" And at different times in your life, games and stories mean something different to you. So I played Day of the Tentacle when I was probably a teenager, and playing it now, I'm like "Well, Purple Tentacle kind of has a point."

The thing with Tentacle [is] you can see the consequences of things past, present [and] future. And I know practically there are dependent items and there are three separate backgrounds, and I understand how this really works. But my mind still thinks it's time travel. It's really clever … it doesn't exposition-bomb you too much. It's about experimenting and empowering you to muck about.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

It's Old Skies. I had not realised how much time I had spent with Old Skies. It's probably a maximum 15-hour game, but because of the way I write, and because of the way that we were doing like fits and starts of voice acting over the course of three years, I was using the game to ground myself back into the role.

[As for] games I haven't worked on, the highest number is Two Point Hospital. I was a big fan of Theme Park when it came out, and Theme Hospital, and I know Two Point Hospital is a homage. Not to sound weird, but in the run up to having some surgery that I was nervous about, I was playing a lot of Two Point Hospital, which seems like it wouldn't be comforting, but I think it abstracts stuff.

What I really loved about that was they give you small, manageable goals that you can work towards. It could be very open and free-flowing and you can do whatever you like. But to be able to be like "Okay, I need to get a one-star hospital" and to understand the nitty gritty of how to do something was really absorbing for me.

The way they've abstracted the health stuff to be entertaining is masterfully done. I was watching a little behind the scenes video—because I like to find out about the people that make all these games I'm obsessed with. I can't remember which one it was, but they were squirting yoghurt through a straw onto an umbrella …. They're really thinking about the sounds that the various machines make in the hospital so as to sound believable, but take the emotional sting out of it and keep the comedy.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I thought about this one really, really hard. It's going to sound brutal, but I don't have one. It's because I predominantly play narrative and singleplayer games, and it's nice to have an ending, and you're like "I'm finished with that story".

It will take me a couple of months to actually uninstall it. There is a grieving period.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

This is GoldWave. I have no idea how well-known it is. In the studio, I use TwistedWave, because GoldWave doesn't have a version for Mac, so I have a Mac in my studio. On my PC, which used to be my studio PC, because I have to hold onto things, I still have GoldWave, and it is still the best audio software I've ever used, because it is a single track and it does everything that I need it to [in] a really simple interface.

This is such a voice actor thing, [but] it has a pop and click filter on it, which any voice actor will know that is the most difficult thing to do well, is get rid of pops and clicks. It's far better to prevent pops and clicks, but sometimes you'll do an amazing take, and you know it's the only one you've got in you, and there's just like a little click on it. A lot of high-end programs will absolutely mangle the audio. It's very hard to take that stuff out, and the GoldWave one, it's just beautiful.

It's my emotional support audio. It's quite funny because the pop click thing has a passive version and an aggressive version, and I always use the passive version because I'm British. But what I really need is a passive aggressive version, because I am at the stage of British where sometimes I will speak to an American client and they're like "Are you being sarcastic with me?" And I'm like "No, I really feel this way. This is the way our voices are. We just sound like we're being sarcastic."

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Absolute chaos. It has the very familiar pattern of, on the top left side, things are quite structured and organised, and then as time goes on, you can just see [it's] all over the place. But there's no day where you wake up and go "You know what, it's a lovely day. I've got nothing to do. I'm going to organise my desktop."

But because I am a brutal deleter, because I uninstall things, there's just like weird gaps, and sometimes I have the memory of what was in the gap, which is great. It really is like kicking bricks out of a wall.

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