Her Story is a fantastic piece of interactive crime fiction
As far as video games go Her Story is a unique thing. It's a wholly narrative experience that gives the player just a few ways to interact with it. In doing so it creates an interesting take on traditional crime fiction and ultimately delivers an incredibly satisfying experience.
Her Story is the creation of Silent Hills: Shattered Memories designer Sam Barlow. It's set up with a sparse UI. A simple Windows 95-esque desktop display with several programs to click on and a glare of your character, a police officer, in the screen. You are prompted to look through a database of seconds long clips of FMV interviews involving a woman named Hannah. Hannah is interviewed by the police on several instances involving the disappearance of her husband in the mid 90s. Where the game becomes interesting is the fact that you search through these clips using single words or phrases of words and anytime that word or phrase is mentioned in a clip those clips pop up. Hannah is played by actress Viva Seifert and she offers a fantastic performance. While some clips you happen upon may come off as a tad forced the majority of the acting from Seifert is nuanced and thoroughly believable. It's rough to think about the acting job required in this game, not only is Seifert acting completely alone with no one to play off she has to essentially guide the player to certain searches through very calculated side looks or a certain vocal inflections when she says a certain name. At the end of my time with this game I felt like Hannah was a completely real individual who I had heard out. I experienced her tell the events of what happened and had a peek into what her life was.
The structure of this game allows you to search any clip at anytime. When you first pull up the searching database it has a preloaded prompt or MURDERED and after watching those clips you get certain names and places that lead you on to the next 20 or so clips after that though you are on your own. It's unlikely but given the right search you could find out the twist of the story immediately. While this has the potential to be anticlimactic I think it was an important and bold design choice for Sam Barlow. It forces the player to realize that the point of the game is not some big twist at the end of the story and finding out who done it but rather a look at the whole story and more importantly a look at the events of her life. Her Story is much more concerned with the why. Is there a way we can come to understand these events better through knowing this person. If your like me you found out what was going on before you had all the details and even when you thought you knew everything, it went on to surprise you a few more times.
Essentially the goal of Her Story is to try to explain and find some solace in the face of tragedy. Like so many real life cases the whole truth is never found. We want to shake the truth out of these people, why did you do it, what were you thinking. So often the truth never comes out and the people effected by these tragedy’s have to pick up the broken pieces of scattered truths and lies and come to some sort of realization that knowing why something happened might not be satisfying and they aren't ever getting that person back regardless.
In a brilliant ending the game pops up a chat client that ask if you are done, if you choose yes it takes you to the credits after offering up one more cathartic sentence that frames the game in a new light and will stick with you emotionally for some time. Her Story feels like an experiment that could not have gone better. An example of the most simple of game play mechanics resulting in an experience that is pure and rewarding beyond it's simplicity.
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