Her Story

This week I played Her Story. A fairly simple game in which you are searching through a police footage archive to find out information about the murder of Simon Smith. And now I must answer how the game told it's story.

The gameplay is deceptively simple. At the beginning of the game you are shown a computer desktop with a search window open. Two readme files on screen tell you how to play. You must type key words into the search bar to find videos which you can piece together to understand the story. As you learn more you find new words to search and discover even more. This simple mechanic is the core of the game and aside from using some other helpful features like labeling videos, it is all you do in the game.

It occurred to me while I was playing Her Story that there are actually two stories in the game. There is the story of the murder, the one that you are piecing together from videos, and there is the story of the player, or rather the character you are playing as.
The murder story is one you cannot change. It is in your power as the player to see and understand more or less of the story, but no matter what you do the story stays the same. It's like reading a novel. The story happened in the past and you are discovering it as you go.
The other story, you the player, is one you can change. You decide how much your character understands. This story is happening in the present. As you make decisions the story is created.
What you eventually find out is that Eve, one of the twin girls being interviewed, is your character's mother, and you are searching through the footage to understand what happened to your parents.

The ending is open to interpretation. You could choose for your story to never end, watching and re-watching videos forever, or you could choose to end it before you know much of anything about the murder. On top of that you never get to see definitive evidence of what happened. You only hear the girls stories. In this way your experience of the game could be considered to not be a story, since a story has to end. But you do still see a story in the game, and if you play long enough (and take some notes along the way) you can understand it.

In all I enjoyed the game. It was unconventional and could be considered boring or tedious, but seeing the story unfold felt rewarding. The game relies on you to piece together and understand the story, and if you do you should enjoy it too.