Her Story is a unique experience as a game and as a piece of storytelling. In essence (though it’s doing it a disservice to describe it as such) the game involves watching seven police interviews (the answers only – we never see or hear the detective or their questions) and piecing together what has happened. The fact that the story has been chopped up into confetti, with 271 pieces lasting from a word or two to a minute of talking, feels extremely believable in the construct of a police database that has metadata consisting of the transcripts, broken down into discrete answers to each question.
It's easy to get a bit breathless about a story that works as confetti, experienced in pieces and out of order, summoned up as responses to a prompt word, but I think doing that distracts from how much effort it must have taken the writer (Sam Barlow) to ensure it all works as a game. Essentially, when you type in a query word the database provides you with a list of video clips that match that search term, but with the restriction that you can only watch the first five of them, and they are ordered chronologically, so if a search term brings up a bunch of results, you can only see the clips that come from the first few interviews. If a theme carries across all seven interviews, you’ll have to dig deeper to see the later clips. As a result, the script is structured extremely cleverly. Knowing that there’s more to know about a topic but that you’ll have to find another way to call up those clips is tantalizing. Barlow had to balance the words used with how he wanted the story to unfold.
When you open the game for the first time, the word “Murder” is entered into the search box, inviting you into its mystery and setting expectations. Naturally, none of the returned clips tells you terribly much about the murder, and none of the clips that actually describe the murder include the word murder (or dead, killed, death, etc. OR the names of the victim or killer). You must find another way to them.
At first, after playing Her Story, I was left a little unsatisfied, but I think that was my own problem to work around. There is no definitive answer to the questions raised by the game, and many hundreds of thousands of words have been written trying to prove this hypothesis or that one. I’m always a little put out initially when I have been denied resolution. However, I think that the fact that there are at least two extremely creditable and supportable outcomes that people believe with equal and opposite fervour is a testament to the game’s storytelling. Just because I might want to know definitively what actually happened, doesn’t mean the game would be improved if it gave me that resolution.
And as much as I say that, the more I think about it and turn things over in my mind, I’m extremely reluctant to choose an answer as the “correct” one because so much of the game’s intrigue is tied up in that dichotomy.
Her Story came out in 2015 but I didn’t play it until this year. I wish I’d played it much sooner. I have a bit of an aversion to hype and the excitement that surrounded Her Story was in many cases a kind of open-mouthed shock that a game could tell a story like that, could have a performance like that, be art like that, in all its ambiguity and aversion to truth. In my high-mindedness, I decided that I didn’t need this one game that critics had found to demonstrate to me that games could be art and tell stories. I was both right and wrong of course, as I’ve come to realise. I can now belatedly understand that Her Story’s success doesn’t diminish what other games have achieved, and now having played it, I can see that the game deserved the excitement and accolades. It’s interesting to see my own growth and development from idiot to slightly-less-idiot. I bet in ten years’ time I’ll think this article awfully shallow and naïve, but it’s what I can do for now and I hope it made you think.
Game: Her Story
Developer: Sam Barlow
Publisher: Sam Barlow
Platforms: PC, mobile
I absolutely loved this game - even though the interface was (deliberately I think) frustrating!
The sequel however… blows it out of the water entirely!!
Love the vibe of this game - good stuff