A game where it’s all in the tiny details.

Overall Score: 4.5 / 5

Full price: $5.99

Is it worth the money? : Yes

Played on: Steam

Some Initial Thoughts-

When I look for games on Steam with only $6 left over from my paycheck, I don’t really expect all that much; and when I watched the game’s trailer, I knew even less about the game than I thought I did. So obviously I had to buy it.

Her Story is a wonderful game that I often have a really hard time convincing people I know to play. For some unknown reason, I can’t quite make you sitting at a computer playing a game about someone sitting at a computer sound anywhere as fun as it actually is.

What the game is-

Her Story is an innovative game where you play as someone searching through an archive of old police interview footage of a woman we don’t know the name of yet, being questioned as to her involvement in a crime we don’t yet know about.

You play the game by listening to her speak and searching for certain keywords that she says, which you can then search for in the game’s computer. It limits you to the first five results for the word that you have chosen to search, though it gives them to you in no particular order and doesn’t sort the clips by relevance to your search. You might think that this means you’ll get a lot of results put in by the developer just to waste your time and try to throw you off the scent of the proper storyline, but the opposite is actually true.

For example: you can hear her talk about driving to Glasgow, and then she mentions her buying a cup of coffee at a gas station. So on a whim, you decide to look up ‘Coffee’, and actually get five results. One of the results is a seven-second clip of her telling her off-camera interviewer how she takes her coffee, black with no sugar. After watching this, you might think that this was a waste of time, a random clip put in just to mislead you; because certainly not every part of an interview is going to be filled with information important to the case. But a few videos later, she orders her coffee with both milk and sugar, and now you’re questioning why she gives two opposite answers for one question.

When you load up the game, it takes you a while (And some good old fashioned trial and error if you play like I did and ignore the directions on the desktop) to find out what the story is. In the game’s search bar is the word ‘Murder’ prefilled in for you, leaving you to just hit enter on your keyboard, and off you go to search through your first five results. Or you can do what I did and delete to search query, and just randomly type in ‘Susan’, which actually brought up one result to my surprise, and led to my diving into the mystery from there.

Within the first 10-15 searches, you begin to piece together some idea of what happened, only to be thrown for a loop by the time you come near the end of the game’s nearly 3-hour playtime.

Update

Image credits-

Header image: https://store.steampowered.com/app/368370/Her_Story/

Image #1: http://www.herstorygame.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Her-Story-Screenshot-White-Blouse-.jpg