Pretty cool. For most of the game, you're rummaging through a database of live-action clips of a woman being interviewed by police on multiple occasions regarding the disappearance of her husband. It ended up being pretty expansive due to how you uncover new clips by typing in keywords and phrases into the database, finding these new clips and then tying them together with others made uncovering the events that transpired leading up to the interviews especially engaging. It's pretty short though, I was able to finish it in about 2 hours. The story itself is fine and I'm fond of how they were able to tie it together but some of these clips ended up being so absurd it had me like 🤨. I think the actress does a really good job for the most part, her mannerisms in certain clips stand out and add a lot to making the police interviews feel more authentic. This is definitely one of the more unique games I've played, and I recommend checking it out if you're able to catch it on a sale.

Utter brilliance compiled into such a small scale game. You get an actress who is only known for her music and yet the performance on display is career defining.

The premise and mechanics are bizarre on paper yet work perfectly and create one of the most unique gaming experiences of all time: a story that can be viewed in basically any order, and it maintains the mystery despite that. How many games do you know where you can start at any point and still have a great experience?

This is a must play if you have any love for mysteries.

Through a compilation of short videos of an interrogation room, this game manages to present a very compelling and fascinating story. Right from the get-go, it manages to captivate you with a single word, murder, and you'll have to understand what it means and you'll WANT to know why it's there.

It's amazing how this game manages to hook you so easily into doing this investigation work. The nature of the game also makes it that every player will take their own path and make reach a different answer. At the end of the game, I was honestly far from being fixated on an answer and I must admit to having watched all the footage in the proper order, in the game's folder, before I could really understand what's going on.

I think this game truly creates a morbid, fascinating atmosphere that really makes you feel the dread of your average household incident. It's a "slice of life" of real life horror.

Unique and interesting way to dissect a short murder mystery. I can agree with other reviewers that the plot is not the most distinctive, and the acting can be a little awkward at times, but the gameplay aspect is really neat, and pretty immersive. That is what got me most invested. I recommend trying this visual novel out when it goes on sale for around $1 on Steam, as in full it is only around 1-2 hours long. Get that with a Costco hot dog meal, and you got yourself an entertaining $5 evening for the night (b ᵔ▽ᵔ)b

3/5

Pep's Detective Deep Dive - Game 8
Going from "the two good non-Team Silent Silent Hill games" to this is a hell of jump for Sam Barlow. A far cry from the psychological horrors of his previous work, Her Story is a quiet, FMV murder-mystery that definitely goes into the "not for everyone" pile.

The gameplay is relatively simple: you're presented with an archaic police database system, full of clips from a series of detective interviews with a woman whose missing husband has turned up murdered. Your job is to use the search system to find clips, watch them, and find out what happened. That's it.

It's not immediately obvious at first, but you don't need to do anything other than watch the clips. You don't have to place them on a timeline in the correct order or anything like that. Hell, you don't even need to watch every clip to "finish" the game. At a certain point, the game will decide that you've seen enough to know what happened and gives you the option to roll the credits, should you so choose. But you absolutely should try to watch as much as you can. Why? Because of Her.

Viva Seifert's performance as the titular Her is nothing short of mesmerising. She's natural, she's likeable, and the gamut of emotions she runs through in a relatively short series of videos is astounding. Once you reach a certain point in the story, you begin to really notice all these subtleties in her acting, and it really brings the game to another level. That Game Award she won was well-deserved.

The narrative twists and turns as well as any good crime thriller. The non-linear nature of finding the clips means that you only get the story in bite-size chunks, and your interpretation is always changing based on what new info you've just seen. It's like Sam Barlow dumps all the puzzle pieces in front of you and says "figure it out".

The joy is in paying attention, making notes of any potential keywords and finding that next important clip to give you another chunk of the story. Finding the one clip that recontextualises the entire story was an incredibly satisfying moment for me. And even then, when you've seen every clip there is to see, there's just enough ambiguity left in certain story threads to keep you wondering long after the credits have rolled.

It's absolutely not for everyone - hell, a few years back this wouldn't have been for me either - but if you've got a few hours then grab some friends, a notebook and pen and get sleuthing.

Talked about this one on my podcast The Safe Room.

I don't mind the apparatus of this, but I do think it is poorly used here? Basically the trick of the mystery is just getting to the last run of clips, where Hannah explains the plot in entirety to you. You can do a lot of work to construct the mystery that the game ends up just doing for you. Could stand for more ambiguity.

I thought about Delores Claiborne (the novel specifically) a lot playing this, which does veer into horror briefly, but is ultimately mundane. Her Story is about women and police in only the most superficial ways. It can't really muster a systemic awareness or make that emotive. Claiborne has a scene were Delores goes to the bank to take out her daughter's college savings... only to find her husband has withdrawn them all. Her Story's direction is ultimately abstract and fairy-tale-like and it could far more biting mundanities.

A fascinating game experiment. I believe calling it more of an interactive movie rather than a videogame is justified. I first played this game around the time it originally released and was being showered with praise, so I already knew what the central reveal was this time around. But still, there were many details I didn´t remember, and was surprised by how many little things I had yet to discover.

The best way I´ve found to appreciate the game is to truly try and engage with it. Get a notebook and a pen out, put your detective cap on, and start taking notes. This is something I didn´t do the first time around, opting instead to just try a bunch of stuff and later look up a list of keywords online, which I don´t think it´s a bad option if you are just looking to clear out the last few remaining and rather inconsequential video clips. But there´s nothing that will get you into it more than paying attention and really experience it like I believe it was intended to be experienced.

There´s a real freedom in the limitations that the game imposes on you. It´s fairly easy to just discover what would be considered the ending of the story right at the beginning of your first play session, but you´ll be wrong to think that this ruins the experience somehow, you should follow the breadcrumbs, in every direction you want, and uncover piece by piece not just a mystery or a twist but a fascinating and inventively told story.

Note - this review is largely based off recollections from years back over a fresh playthrough, and while some footage was rewatched on YouTube, ultimately take the rating with a grain of salt


Her Story is a game I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while, largely cause of two big reasons. One, it was the first Steam game I ever completed, meaning it intrinsically holds a special place in my heart; and two, to this day, it remains one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had in gaming: a pristine example of how to combine past and present models into an invigorating forte.

See, much like Papers, Please, Her Story is built around a basic gameplay loop that slowly engrosses you the longer you stay with it. You star as an unnamed tabula rasa tasked with uncovering the reason why some random lady murdered her husband, your method for doing so being a sultry of chopped-up interviews assembled on a terminal called the Logic Database. The Logic Database operates very simply- type in keywords to spawn a set of videos that extensively used or featured said keyword. The catch? The clips are out-of-order, meaning you’re going to have to personally parse, arrange, and deduce each one’s placement in order to solve the mystery.

Her Story was built by Sam Barlow, who reportedly developed it out of frustration towards standard detective games like LA Noire and Ace Attorney. Barlow’s criticisms were that, in those titles, players were often relegated to going through the motions over conducting actual sleuthwork, an analysis I am pretty sympathetic to given the replicatory blueprint seen in such ventures as the Arkham series or Assassin’s Creed: you know, those missions where you just walk around an enclosed area trying to find that one conveniently-highlighted clue for the main character to pin together.

In Her Story, there’s no such monologuing - your protagonist is completely silent, leaving it up to you to determine what transpired + the motivations behind said transpirations. And for the majority of players (including myself), that’ll entail putting pen-to-paper in order to actively write out your thoughts, theories, and observations. By the end of my journey I recalled having around two pages worth of notes, and though that quantity is bound to vary depending on each person, it does exemplify the kind of investigatory framework Her Story is going for.

Don’t worry, it’s not all manual labor as the Logic Database does provide some tools to aid you in your sleuthing: personalized tags can be added to videos for later recovery, specific quotes can be outright searched, and, best of all, individual reels can be arranged at the bottom to construct a proxy-timeline. These additions may seem small, but when you’re sifting through hours-upon-hours of content, they go a long way towards making the experience palatable: like you’re actually assembling one of those spiderweb billboards oft seen on crime TV.

Outside of the Windows 2000-esque interface, there isn’t much to say about the graphics. Occasionally a sodium bulb will flicker in the back, revealing the feminine visage of your MC, but otherwise this is a title heavily reliant on its full-motion videos. And on that note, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Her Story would never have worked were it not for Viva Seifert’s performance as the interviewee. Going by Hannah Smith, this is a woman who’s clearly been through some trauma, yet has opted to funnel said trauma into a persona of lies: rarely can you tell if she’s stating the complete truth; however, at the same time, you can’t help but believe many aspects of her tale. Throughout the ordeal, she’ll make you laugh, piss you off, and even shed some waterworks, all while compelling you with an increasingly-deep story about human tragedy. It’s a wonderfully-complex performance, on par with the best of guest stars from police procedurals, and the fact that Seifert didn’t come from an extensive acting background speaks highly of her talent.

There’s no other extensive audio: music is relegated to a single track played on repeat when you’re not watching footage, while SFX is your standard Dotcom Bubble dins. Perhaps hearing the police officer’s questions might’ve made for a worthwhile change, but as a whole, I can’t deny the minimalist set-up does a sufficient job immersing you in Hannah’s world, an aspect you’ll want to embrace should you wish to partake in Her Story’s journey.

And yes, regardless of your thoughts on the FMV genre, I firmly endorse playing this game. You’ll no doubt hear some j#ckasses online claim it’s not a “true” video game, but for the majority of you out there who are more open-minded, I promise you’ll find the experience invigorating.

Às vezes o que te limita é o que te liberta.

Da mesma mente brilhante por trás de Silent Hill Origins e de Shattered Memories, Sam Barlow mostra que mesmo com pouco orçamento e retrocedendo de encontro à forma no qual a indústria dos videogames vem evoluindo que ainda é possível sim criar algo espetacular.

Her Story é nada de mais na sua carcaça, e é justamente por isso é evidente a criatividade quando elevada ao máximo. Através de um jogo no formato a lá anos 90, o full-motion video (FMV), o jogador assume o papel de investigador misterioso que precisa analisar os vídeos dos interrogatórios de Hannah Smith, onde esta conta à polícia a história de Simon, o seu marido que foi assassinado.

O principal ponto partida aqui que o jogo prega é o fato de não ser possível ver os depoimentos de Hannah de forma cronológica, isto porque os mesmos foram divididos em vários vídeos curtos e arquivados num programa de computador antigo. Sendo assim, você como investigador precisa introduzir palavras-chave na caixa de procura da interface antiquada e, se essa palavra (ou expressão) for dita no vídeo, este irá aparecer nos resultados da busca. O mais interessante aqui é que trata-se de um jogo onde você pode começar pelo final e terminar pelo começo, de forma que cada jogador vai ter uma experiência e apuração individual dos fatos ocorridos, o jogador começa a prestar mais atenção a nomes, lugares ou palavras repetidas, da mesma forma que começa a anotar tudo, a desenhar linhas temporais e a tentar encontrar contradições na medida que tenta entender o que está acontecendo.

Destaque vai também para a excelente atuação de Viva Seifert, o jogo certamente não teria o mesmo resultado sem uma atriz de qualidade e uma direção cinematográfica de peso.

O que mais amei no final das contas em Her Story é sobre como ele é individual. Que mesmo estando praticamente assistindo um filme, eu jogador que determino o que acabei de experienciar, sobre o que a história é. Que mesmo dentro da comunidade existem pessoas que não entendem e desaprovam o conceito do jogo, há também pessoas que debatem e analisam nuances até hoje. Os créditos vão subir mas só você vai poder dizer quando estará satisfeito com a história quando finalmente achar que entendeu tudo, e isso só funciona porque Her Story, mesmo que praticamente um filme, no final das contas, ainda é um jogo.