Buy HER STORY

In a medium where evolution is typically measured in polygons and development costs, it’s fitting that possibly the most innovative game of 2015 would be something so unassuming.

Her Story places you in front of a computer monitor circa 1994, and lets you loose to dig through hundreds of police videos revolving around a single woman and a very peculiar case. You are told nothing other than how to operate the software needed to access these videos, and then left alone to attempt to crawl through the archive.

Her Story doesn’t lend itself well to trailers or quick descriptions. It isn’t flashy nor does it immediately show its brilliance, but that subtlety is an integral part of why it manages to do so much with so little. The low rent aesthetic provides a texture – aged video footage, a faux 90’s desktop, dated clothing – and then drapes it over the narrative to fully pull you back in time as you attempt to put the pieces of the mystery together.

How Her Story looks though, or even what it has to say to a degree, isn’t why it’s so fascinating. To be sure developer Sam Barlow does an incredible job setting the tone through familiar, nostalgic imagery, smartly opting to omit authenticity where it isn’t needed while still nailing the feel of the 90’s. It’s all remarkably well-considered, but where Her Story pushes games forward is in how it approaches narrative as nonlinear and undefined.

Because of the limitations of your in game computer, you can only ever access five videos at once, using the search box to scrub through video transcripts for keywords. What this means in practice is you have to search out every bit of the narrative for yourself, being locked out of broad searches so as to require you to actually think like a detective and put the puzzle pieces together for yourself. Her Story is the first game I’ve played where I actually felt as if I was the one solving the case, following a trail of breadcrumbs I had to seek out and which often didn’t lead in a straight line from beginning to end, requiring I go back and dig up old clues to find a new lead.

I became exceptionally diligent in making sure to check up on every name, every address; any random detail that had the potential to lead me to a breakthrough. Her Story demands a lot from the player in order to see and understand everything hidden inside it, but the depth of its narrative and the intricacy in which it’s woven together rewards those who put more time into learning its secrets. Her Story puts a lot of trust in the player to follow through on their end of the bargain and not cheat their way to a resolution, but it backs this up with such an engaging plot (delivered entirely through a masterful, demanding performance by Viva Seifert) that anyone who doesn’t give it the attention it deserves is only cheating themselves in the end.

Her Story doesn’t look like much, nor is it easy to do it justice through words alone, but it’s nevertheless a game that’s going to be talked about for years by anyone who takes the time to look below the surface. It breaks entirely new ground for narratives in games, and is perhaps the biggest proof that FMV has a place in games beyond basic comedy. It’s a very difficult game to talk about in any capacity without ruining what makes it so great, but it all the same demands discussing and is a game I see creating ripples through the industry for a very long time to come.

You can read more of my writing on Kritiqal.

Faulty's scorecard :-

1) Essential purchase
3) Recommended purchase during a sale
4) Not recommended unless heavily discounted
5) Not even recommended for Steam game collectors


Her Story - the new game from Sam Barlow creator of Silent Hill Shattered Memories - is bound to cause many discussion threads to spring up around the interwebz regarding its serpentine plot that is like climbing a hill with switchbacks criss-crossing all over it. It is safe to say at this point that if you plan on picking up Her Story, I would highly suggest you avoid any discussion or forums threads where the game could possibly end up being discussed because there is a good chance you will probably end up spoiling it for yourself. If you are an armchair detective who relishes unraveling crime stories such as this one then you have been suitably warned!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=483899193
Her Story opens in the English town of Portsmouth and takes place entirely on a desktop computer as you trawl through a series of video interviews pertaining to a crime that was committed many years before. Her Story gives you very little to work with initially as you are given no reason whatsoever as to who you are and why you are interrogating these archives. Booting into the game for the first time the first clue that the game supplies you with is the keyword "Murder" which upon being entered into the archive database search reveals a series of short clips pertaining to the murder of a missing man named Simon Smith and the woman being interrogated, who we soon find out is the murdered mans wife.

What starts out a simple murder mystery to unravel the "why" and if not the "why" then the "who" soon evolves into something far more complex made even more intriguing by the way in which the game hands you bits and pieces of information. Her Story consists of a series of interviews that take place over a period of time that have each been spliced and segregated into smaller clips then cataloged via the use of certain keywords within the archive database so you won't be able to access any of these videos in any sort of chronological order. It is also important to note that the database search will only ever return no more than five video clips so it will often be the case that you will need to refine your search criteria if you want to get the remaining videos returned for viewing. The delivery of this type of fractured narrative actually works in the games favor because it keeps many of Her Story's secrets deeply hidden until you finally have enough information to unlock the one video that ties certain threads together. Since most players won't be using precisely the same set of keywords at exactly the same given time means that most will uncover the secret at the heart of Her Story in a multitude of different ways.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484286597
By the time I had unraveled the mystery around the death of the local town glazier (which took roughly just over 5 hrs) I was sitting with 7 full A4 pages of keywords that I had used to search with. The last time I did this kind of note taking while playing a game was way back in the late eighties and early nineties where jotting down your thoughts was absolutely necessary if you had any hope of completing the complex adventures of the day pushed out by Sierra or LucasArts.

While Her Story is not what one could easily term a traditional game since there is not much to it other than watching video clips and listening out for clues that will enable further searches and hopefully help you uncover more of the mystery, doesn't make it any less entertaining than the running or gunning of it featured in other games. The central mystery here is so strong that you will want to continue pushing forward in an attempt to unravel all the pieces of evidence presented to you via each video clip so that you can finally understand what it is that your are viewing. It also helps that the central character at the heart of this is portrayed convincingly by actress Viva Seifert who is able to switch from manic to depressive at the drop of a hat and effortlessly so.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=483899440
Her Story is unlike any game I have ever played before and honestly made me feel like I was a true detective at the end of it. It's a totally captivating thriller told in a unique way that unravels differently for each that play it and for those of you that often search out for unique and different gaming experiences should be placed right at the top of your wishlist or better yet grabbed from the Steam store right now. I won't be one bit surprised to see this game pop up on the end of the year "best of" lists since it is really that good!

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Alot of people seem to like it but I didn't particualarly care for it. Why?
1) It's not a game it's an experience. For reasons of brevity, I don't want to get into what makes a "game" but you could easily replicate the "gameplay" in a youtube or google's video search, there's no "gamey" factors at play here.
So what if it's not a game, as long as it's a great experience? This brings me to my next point
2) Experience is extemely easy to derail. I think this game was meant to be played by listening extremely closely to the introductory clips and following them stepwise to a conclusion. If you proceed instead to search for words related to the opening topic you will get to critical clips extemely quickly and in my case in a sequence that ruins much of the suspense of the other reveals. You might say that I did this to myself, which is fair, but given that a main selling point is emergent gameplay, it disappointing how not playing it "right" can rapidly undermine the experence.
3) The game drags on pointlessly after finding the main events. I'm pretty sure progress is measured by hitting key clips, but the ones which are considered important seem almost arbitarty. I think I finally finished the game on a search for "fennel" after doing exhaustive name searches on terciary characters to open up more clips.

Like many of the recent "emergant art games" if you experience it exactly in the way the creator had in mind you are likely to enjoy it, unfortuantly this contridicts the not only the idea of emergent games, but the idea of art itself.

Maybe it's not fair to expect much when breaking the design paradigm of the game, but emergent gameplay is based on the idea that the game is at it's best when the gamers are pushing the boundries of the system and operating outside the vision of the developers, the non-linar art games are attempting to push the boundries of gaming, but ironicaly frequently fall flat when the players give the game boundries the slightest push.

I can't recommend "Her Story" as either a great game or a great expereince, the only greatness it has lies in it's novelty which professional reviewers have lauded, but if you want novelty so much that your willing to compromise both the gameplay and the expereince, I recommend that you try to find it outside of a game.

'Her Story' is a bit of a throwback to the days of the FMV/live action video adventure games. Those games would play out stories in a linear fashion based on some choices that you made in a choose your own adventure format. Then real life actors would act out the scenes of the story as if watching a television show, or movie. There were actually some well known actors in some of these games even if the stories and writing were incredibly cheesy even for the time. 'Her Story' uses these FMVs with live action video just like these old games do, but it doesn't follow a linear path, nor does it have you choosing the adventure based upon choices. Instead you are able to view all the stories and mysteries of the narrative by hitting points along the time line in a totally random fashion. Making it an interesting and fun way to piece together the mystery.

When you first boot up the game you find yourself sitting at on old fashioned police computer's desktop. It appears like you are using something along the lines of Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. It is exactly like using a computer desktop so it feels like using a computer playing this game. On the screen in front of you is a police archives search engine with the word "murder" typed into the search box. Upon clicking the "search" button you are presented with several videos of what looks to be an interrogation film from a suspect interview, which we find out immediately that it is. This woman is being questioned about a murder. Specifically the murder of her husband. Now where do we go? We have 4-5 videos here we can watch and now we are on our own. We are tasked with investigating this story ourselves to find out everything.

So how does this work? Just as you found the word "murder" typed into the search box at the start, you figure out that to find out more about this story you need to search other terms in that box. Based on the videos you watch you pick up clues like names, or other meaningful words, then search them to find more videos. Also, like anyone who may be questioning a murder suspect you think of things you would normally ask them as well that you may not have even seen in the videos such as the location of "the body". Every time you search a term, or phrase a new set of videos will pop up for you to view. They will be from random dates from the 7 or so interview sessions the woman was brought in for questioning. Each search term and phrase is something that was in the transcript from these interviews. So basically that first search of "murder" popped up every video in which the term was used. The game doesn't make it that easy though to find all the videos. You can't simply search "the" for instance and have 200 videos show up. It limits you to only seeing 5 of however many have that term, or phrase so you must either expand on the phrase to eliminate videos, or search another one to end up with those other videos. You can unlock more options after "finishing" the game to help make finding 100% of the videos easier.

It sounds simple, and it really is, but the story being woven through the randomly watched videos becomes a very fascinating mystery. Not just about the murder case you seem to be looking for information on, but there are many secrets that are uncovered through clever searching into the archives of these video interviews. Things that first seemed to be quite straight-forward end up being something else entirely. You begin to question the reality of what you have learned thus far, and you start to consider many alternate theories as to what is going on, who this woman is, and what she may be lying about. In fact, most players begin to start scrawling notes on pieces of paper so that they can remember all the things that they want to search for next. They want to find a time line, or even just want to connect some dots, but if this game gets you interested I can almost guarantee you that you will take out a piece of paper and start taking notes while you play.

I very much suggest that you DO NOT read about this game, or its story before playing it. There are many secrets that can be spoiled by doing so, and it will hurt the fun of having those internal debates with yourself that everyone carries to the forums after they have completed the game fully. It is much more fun, and fascinating to try and figure out what you think is going on yourself, and maybe even create your own theories as you play than to have a few handed to you by someone else before you get the chance.

I found 'Her Story' to be a great way to tell a story. Not just the format of giving you small pieces of it at a time through videos, but also due to the disjointed time line you watch it in. Everything is learned in such a way that you will be pulling a handful of jigsaw puzzle pieces out of a hat randomly without having the picture on the box to draw reference from. Only when you have pulled a large portion of these pieces out of the hat can you begin to sort them and put them together in a manner that shows you what the picture is supposed to look like. It asks you to ponder on what you have seen and allows your imagination to work out some theories while you play, which I found to be incredibly rewarding.

I would recommend this game to all adventure fans of both point and click adventures and Visual Novels. Obviously anyone that has enjoyed FMV games in the past must grab this immediately as well since many reviewers actually claim it is the best one of these ever made. I would say that fans of detective stories and mysteries will find this format appealing too. If you like to use clues to solve problems and mysteries you should enjoy this. This game will take you about 3 hours if you speed through it and don't bother trying to discover all the mysteries and unlock all the videos. For someone that wants to find all the depths of the story, unlock 100% of the videos present, it will take you 5-6 hours most likely, and could take more if you take your sweet time. There are achievements and 3 trading card drops. Getting 100% in all Achievements is fairly simple, but will require that 100% videos found and it will take you 5 hours most likely to go through.

I spent my late teens playing a lot of FMV games, given Sega CD, Turboduo, 3DO, CD-i and such were out. I honestly have a fondness for some of them, even though they are mostly cheesy. The thing is, I think the FMV games back then kinda saw themselves for what they were and mostly took a sort of tounge in cheek approach.

Her Story, however, takes itself very seriously. Now, here is part of the problem. An FMV game is not really much of a "game." You can barely interact with them because video is linear. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can mix it up a bit (the few rooms that randomized in Dragon's Lair, for instance) but for all intents and purposes you're on a straight path (Sewer Shark). Her Story tries mixing it up by giving you random pieces of video that you can view, in no real order, as you try to piece together a woman's story regarding a crime. I don't really want to get into spoiling that part.

Now, the video is linear obviously, but again, that's not how the game works. It's as if you're using a database that pulls up a few seconds of video using keywords.

So, by allowing you to see any piece of the video when you put in a certain term is an utter failure. As another reviewer had said, there is no real "ending" to this "game." I, like them, was about 15 mins in when I got what would be "the big reveal" or what would have actually ended the police interview. Something had popped up on the screen a few mins earlier and after some audio/video clues and the "big reveal" video, I click it. Credits roll, then the main screen.

I just sat there for a moment, confused, then hit contine and spent time getting every video bit to get an ending. I did and well, I just sat there looking at a computer screen. So I quit feeling as if I'd wasted $5 and 4.5 hours of my life.

I wanted to like it. Although I think it would work better were it a short indie film, or a YouTube video. And I'd have had more fun with it if it were. The fact that you can "beat it" in 15-20 mins, but not really know that there's no point in going back and wasting anymore time with it since there's no ending or much resolution.

I'll give an "A" for effort but don't buy this. Grab some popcorn, watch a playthrough on YouTube, have more fun and save yourself $6.