Her Story

Sam Barlow - 2015 - Mobile/PC

Her Story is a very unusual in that it's a full motion video game that was released in 2015. Don't worry, the FMV aspect of this game works really well, it's totally not cheesy and the actress in the game does a fairly decent job selling her performance. After you complete this game, it's hard to imagine Her Story not being a FMV game, I'm not sure it would have worked any other way. Her Story was made independently by Sam Barlow, who was previously the writer and designer of both Silent Hill Origins and Silent Hill Shattered Memories. This game, if you can even call it a game, shares a lot of the interesting ideas and creativity found in those Silent Hill titles

The premise of Her Story is that you are digging through a corrupted database of video interviews from a murder case in the early nineties. The database has been corrupted and fragmented, so you can't watch the interview clips in chronological order, but each video clip has been completely text transcribed, so you can search each clip by any word that occurs in the clip. So for instance, if you search "murder", all of the video clips that contain the word "murder" are returned to you. The other catch is that you can only see the first 5 results that are returned to you, so you'll quickly learn to be clever with your searches. 

The story opens up pretty quickly, giving you some names of important characters or important events to search, but the interesting thing here is that the story is presented totally non-linearly. Somehow though, through that I'm sure was many hours of playtesting and clever organization of what words occur in what clips, the story seems to unfold in just the right way, even if you watch the clips out of order. There's many cool twists and turns in the plot and figuring out whodunnit, how they did it and why they did it is really interesting and rewarding. There's no central gameplay mechanics here, only tracking the mystery in your head and coming up with terms to search then watching the video clips. So if you're looking for a gamey game, Her Story probably won't be your thing. But if you like a clever murder mystery presented in an unconventional fashion, you should totally check this game out

Her Story Video Review:

Summary

I really enjoyed Her Story, it was one of those experiences that keeps you thinking about it long after it's over. The story and its twists are clever and I enjoyed the unconventional presentation. If searching and watching video clips doesn't sound fun to you, you may want to steer clear of Her Story. But if you can let yourself get engrossed in the story and sorting out its mysteries, you'll have a fun time with this game