Critical Play: Her Story
Her Story is an interactive film-based mysteries game developed by Sam Barlow. The game begins with an old desktop screen, which is the only interface throughout the game. On the desktop, there is a window for the database of interview tapes, which are the returned results for the keyword “murder”. This single word is enough to indicate that a murder has happened and the player should dig out the truth with these interview tapes. It took me less than 2 hours to find out the murderer, although it could take me longer to go through the entire plot.
The designer as well as the director of this game has splited an approximately 90-minute movie into 271 clips and the player has to piece them together into one story. The challenge that lies in this game is that the player needs to figure out the keywords by him/herself from available clips, use those keywords to query the database for new clips, and then reorganize the clips to find more clues. While I was playing this game, this interative mode motivates me to dig into the story instead of accepting the story passively. The interface also simulates what we could see from such detective movies from the 90s so that players can imagine themselves as real detectives trying to get more clues from the suspects. The story itself is linear, but it was told in a nonlinear way which is totally based on the choices of each individual player. Players who focus more on interpersonal relationships and players who focus more on crime scenes may look for evidence from completely different perspectives. Therefore, the experience is individual for each player.
Besides this innovative way of navigating a narrative game, the script is also very well-written. It uses lots of metaphors such as “mirror” and “reflection” for the complex relationship between the twins and the stories of them. Although it seems like we are looking for the murderer, the story actually involves around Hannah and Eve, instead of Simon Smith, the victim of the murderer. As I digged more into the story, the more I was intrigued. After finding out the murderer, it is still worth watching all the clips and completing the entire story.
