[Critical Play] Mysteries

I chose to play Her Story, a game which follows the police tapes interviewing a woman on the murder of a man named Simon. The narrative of the game is built into the collection of the interview tapes and we, as the game player, get to watch through the tapes to understand the narrative. As we watch more tapes, we learn more about the narrative and weave together more of the story as we gather more information from the interviews. This game is essentially an abstract puzzle in which we must piece the interviews together to finally be able to step back and look at the narrative that we’ve formed.

Something I especially appreciated about the game was that it didn’t take much explaining to understand our role within the story. From context clues alone, it is revealed that we are either the police or working with the police to solve the murder mystery. This is likely aided by the countless popular crime-mystery shows that are within the same genre that have primed us for this perspective. I myself have seen a decent number of CIA episodes to immediately adopt the role and tasks of a detective and take the familiar path of solving crime by working backwards through time.