REVIEW: HER STORY

“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
~ Jean-Luc Godard

While the sound and fury of E3 has come and gone for another year, those of us who instead found more excitement in mere mortal events like Steam’s most recent summer sale have undoubtedly begun to enjoy countless discounted games already out in the wild, both large scaled and bombastic as well as the hit-and-miss entries in the bite-sized indie game circuit.

A recent example from the latter category that I thought I’d have a quick look at and instead lost an entire afternoon to is Her Story, a 2015 interactive murder mystery brought to us by the writer and designer of the British published Silent Hill games (Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories), Sam Barlow.

Don’t worry, there’s none of this!

The game is framed inside an old school police database computer where the user has access to over an hour and a half of FMV footage recorded in 1994. The footage contains seven interviews of a woman suspected of killing her husband, all of which is divided up into several dozen smaller clips. Sadly with mid-ninties technology — being what it was at the time — the clips are not in chronological order and can only be viewed by searching out specific key words that show up in each of the clips’ transcripts. Worse yet, the computer can only display five results at a time for each of the Google-style word searches the user makes.

So in a nutshell, the whole game involves punching words into a search engine in the hopes that it will produce new clips that you haven’t seen yet, and then piecing together the story from clues found throughout each clip. That hardly seems like much of a pitch on paper, but it isn’t until I was actually reaching for a notepad of my own that I began to realize that Her Story was doing something interesting with the idea of players filling the role of “detective” which games like L.A. Noir and Heavy Rain hadn’t done in the past.

Get used to this screen! It’s here to stay!

While there doesn’t seem to be much gameplay beyond sitting and watching a woman speaking to a camera, the bulk of my experience in this game was trying to clear away the fog of missing continuity from what is in fact a very mature and already intricate story involving affairs, parenthood, miscarriages, mistaken identities and even the art of storytelling itself. You may start out as I did just trying to suss out the surface details of the murder but the more you use the misdirecting search field, the more details and back story about this woman will begin to intrude on your lines of investigation. This will force you to really have your wits about you if you plan on seeing any line of questioning through to its actual answers, and I think that’s what really sold me on Her Story as such a unique mystery solving and gaming experience.

Anchoring the experience is Viva Seifert as the woman in all of the videos. Her performance is hardly Oscar award winning but the numerous subtle differences in her attitude, body language and accounts of previous events act as the perfect conduit through which a fragmented mystery might unfold. Many of my personal “ah-HA!” moments throughout the game came from spotting an otherwise ordinary gesture or specific phrase that reminded me of a previous clip I had seen, spurring me to scribble down some new notes or race back to the search field with a new lead. Given that we have to spend all of Her Story listening to this woman, I found it admirable that I never once tired of discovering something new she had to say.

“Stay a while and listen!”

The game keeps outside distractions to a minimum as well, wisely choosing instead to keep you focused on the videos and your notes. There are a few additional tools that the game provides to help you out, like keeping a log of all your previous search terms and the number of results they yielded as well as a record of how many of the total number of videos you’ve seen and where the last video you viewed (and only this video) fits in the story’s chronology, but that’s it. There’s really very little else and even those small items only help keep you organized a little bit. You can fiddle with the cute little Othello mini game hidden in the computer’s trash bin if you really want to, but that probably won’t detour you from the main mystery for too long.

As for the game’s conclusion, I’m a little on the fence. I won’t spoil anything here suffice to say that I’m actually pretty torn between the story’s literal finishing spot and how the gameplay itself presents its final moments. For better or worse, what Her Story unquestionably does achieve is making you an active part in how the story plays out. What it may or may not do though is offer up any closure for the sleuths out there who are entirely dedicated to completely “solving” this mystery. If you like your detective work in the flavors of Scooby-Doo or Law and Order, where the bad guy is always unmasked by the time the show is over, than Her Story might be one or two crucial plot beats fewer than what you’re looking for.

Do we? Do we really?

For my money, I think the game is a great example of the old adage about journeys and destinations. I wasn’t really where I wanted to be emotionally by the time I was done seeing everything I could in this game and you may not be either, but I won’t deny that along the way the developers weren’t able to put me in exactly the headspace I needed to be in to see it through to the end. In terms of unique storytelling, Her Story is an absorbing experience masked behind a seemingly simplistic gameplay idea thought to have died out back during the age of CD-ROM and FMV games. For less than six dollars and a few hours of your time, it will definitely scratch the itch of anyone looking to do some honest to goodness detective gaming!

Her Story can be purchased on Steam for both PC and Mac, and is also available for iOS devices.