Her Story

Recommended with the caveats that it is (1) extremely short and (2) a bit underbaked in terms of design. Play this if you are interested in the design of detective games that dare to thread in experimental waters. In 'her story', you attempt to solve a case by spitting through hours of police interview footage of a woman under question. The game uses live FMV footage of an actress. You cannot watch the footage sequentially, instead, you have to search the interview for certain keywords to see how they are mentioned. This creates an entirely non-lineair way of experiencing the story. Reminiscent of 'Return of the Obra Dinn' or 'Case of the Golden Idol'. I love the dedication to non-linearity: There are no gated clips or footage, the experience of the story is entirely guided by your curiosity, which makes it an almost frictionless puzzlebox to uncover. However, I now discover why these guardrails are generally in place, since one trope-savvy keyword search unveiled the major twist to me within 10 minutes of playing the game. Non-linearity has no respect for a dramatic structure. A similar thing happened with solving the crime, but here I just stumbled upon the most incriminating message, which undid al the sleuthing I had done in reconstructing the crime. The game also doesn't have any true mechanic on solving the crime. Instead, a prompt will show up and politely ask you if you feel like you have gotten what you wanted from the experience, which is slanted more through the question if you have an emotional understanding of the case rather than a judicial one. I actually preferred how 'Obra Dinn' makes its questions purely judicial and leaves the sympathies and moralities entirely to the player. That both made a wry political statement as well as permitting the freedom of the player. The game permits enough freedom, but so much that it doesn't feel like the game properly entices you to solve the case. It is missing goalposts and that has an effect on engagement, even if designing such goalposts for a detective game can be a real headache. That approach to case design based on your emotional connection is also very dependent on how actually emotionally engaging the case is. Overall, the actress does a fine job but the overall production feels a little cheap. There are some charming, offhand moments to find but they are too few and far between. The actual story is also very convoluted in a way that those detective stories can be, with the world inexplicably functioning like a rube goldberg machine which a lot of words are spilled on to justify its logic. In general, I think it should have leaned into the campy elements more or gone full procedural and grounded. That doesn't sound that positive now does it? Well, sometimes a strong experiment can do a lot! If you approach this like an impressive attempt of creating an immersive 'black story' (you know that card game), you will have a lot of fun with it to figure it out in a short, breezy evening.