While waiting for my 3DS to recharge (and not wanting to finish the essay for the game I was waiting on) I decided to finally check out Her Story. This game has always been on my To Do list since it won Excellence in Narrative and the Grand Prize in IGF’s 2016 awards. Being a small indie game it only takes about two hours to play, but of course I had to play it twice, since its one of those stories that you have to go through twice to catch everything.

In short Her Story is presented as a bunch of short video clips of a woman’s police interrogation about the murder of her husband. Due to the clunky interface, you have to uncover each of the couple hundred clips by searching for keywords used in the transcript. It’s made more difficult as only the first five video clips are shown so searching for a common keyword won’t get you very far on its own.

Obviously because clips are shown based on your search query, the entire narrative is presented non-linearly. Non-linear narratives are a personal interest of mine so it was interesting to see how Her Story approached the idea. Interestingly the game doesn’t gate off any of the video clips, meaning you can randomly guess the correct keyword to hear the end of the mystery if you’re unlucky enough. Thus Her Story doesn’t really focus on mystery by puzzle, rather mystery by intrigue. I uncovered “the ending” by around the two hour mark (a good pace for this game) but was able to figure out The Big Twist™ after only five minutes. Still, the game isn’t over until the player is satisfied with their understanding of the story (or until she runs out of movie clips) and given the kind of story this is, it’s hard to put down without knowing every juicy detail.

Anyway I could go on about things, like how the game subtly leads the player down a specific path by dropping a chain of keywords to latch onto, but it’s late and I have a different essay I’m in the middle of.