You Should Play Her Story

Her Story is the sort of game that teaches you the ingenuity of narrative pacing—one that can potentially turn around even the most mediocre of stories. That’s not to say that Her Story tells a shoddy story, but simply that it’s not its most defining quality—even for a police procedural game.

The game begins with you staring at a CRT monitor of an old computer, a database program opened to a single word, “MURDER”, in the search field. In particular, this database is filled with videos of a single lady in a series of police interrogation sessions: Hannah Smith. The point is to unearth what happened to Hannah and her dead husband, and to do so, you have to listen to and pick out keywords from these clips. Key in the right ones into the search field, and you can watch even more of Hannah’s videos, eventually giving you the clues towards unravelling its mystery, like a trail of crumbs to the final prize. 

All these busywork may sound rather tedious and arcane, but the search function is a lot more intuitive than it reads. Instead, Her Story is built upon the limitations of its search program, as it only allows you to watch the first four videos from the keywords you have dug up. That means even if there are ten clips associated with the word, you can’t watch anymore beyond the fourth. It’s a thoroughly clever manuveoure, a sleight of hand that disguises the mystery’s biggest clues until the right moment.

But like most great whodunnit, you still won’t get all the answers even after watching the final clips. What you glean from this experience, however, is the satisfaction of understanding its inventiveness, including all the twists and turns the game throws at you.