Enjoyed Her Story plenty when I played it on Steam a few years back. Enjoyed this spiritual sequel a little less, and it's easily the weakest game in the Annapurna collection so far. That's a bummer, because the scope and idea here are fairly ambitious! Like in Her Story, gameplay consists of entering search queries into a database and watching video clips that contain certain words or phrases. So in one sense you're just watching little fragments of a six-hour movie out of order. The problem is twofold. One, most of the clips are just one side of a two-way Skype or Facetime conversation, which means every time you find a five-minute clip, about two and a half minutes of it are silent reaction shots. I'd have appreciated the option to merge the two sides of any given conversation together upon finding a pair! Alas. And two, the entire point of the game is just to unravel what exactly is going on and how the various characters interact. Once you get the gist of the story, the entire rest of the game is just fleshing out details and filling in gaps, many of which aren't particularly compelling. It's cool that games like this exist and they make for interesting experiences, but the well already feels somewhat dry for this particular Sam Barlow game type.

Reviewed on Feb 27, 2021


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