Her Story

There's a very specific misterious style to this game. I play with my wife and we enjoy it a lot!

this game has a very simple interface and mechanic, and yet, it manages to be really thought provoking and compelling. you have bits of a story told in several successive interviews, sometimes really tiny bits, sometimes bigger pieces. you can access them by searching for keywords, so you can never hope to watch the whole interviews, in order. you must make sense of the story as you go along, trying out ideas and hunches, until you form your own idea of what happened. it might seem flat, but, believe me, the acting is really good, and the story is told in a very compelling fashion, so you will have plenty of fun guessing what went on... and discussing it with your friends. i'm not giving the game 5 stars just because sometimes you can get stuck with the keywords to search and you are forced to go on a bit at random.

Disclosure: I got the game on sale for a euro fifty. You have access to a database of clips of police interviews. All you can do is do text-searches on the video transcripts to find more. The whole game is watching the clips, and typing stuff into the search box. The goal is simple: find out what happened. At first I was frustrated with the limitations. All I wanted to do was watch the clips in chronological order, which is where I felt I would start if I was in this situation in real life. But after 10 minutes I realized that this *was* the game. It's a game mechanic. Complaining about it would be like complaining that it's unrealistic your pawns can't walk backwards in chess. Games have rules because rules are necessary in creating a puzzle or a challenge. A big design problem that mystery-solving games have to come to terms with is: how do we verify that the player solved the mystery? Giving them a multiple-choice quiz is a problem, because then the answer is right there on screen and you might give it away. Her Story's solution to that design problem is simple: why do we need to verify the player figured it out at all? The game ends when you feel satisfied you've answered all of your questions. There's really no "You won!" screen. Thankfully, the game is written in such a way that when you do solve the mystery, you'll know you solved it. Once you dig deep enough, everything is laid out unambiguously, so you don't feel unsatisfied. I don't know if you can say the game has puzzles in it, though. I did *feel* like I was solving a mystery, but objectively, I was probably mostly just watching a clip, hearing a name or reference to something, searching for that term, and watching the next clip. Sometimes guessing with catch-all words like "detective" or "corpse". I played this game with my girlfriend, and sometimes one of us would get a clue that the other didn't. So there's clearly some thinking involved. But I felt engaged, and maybe that's all that matters.

Trust your intuition, try to think like Her, search for key answers, discover unbelievable. Heart-touching.

This one is a rare one. Not exactly a game but a cool playable fmv experience. You go though old school detective mode with just watching interrogation videos to solve a crime. Finding clue words to unlock new videos and absorving new information. Pretty good acting and very interesting plot (though you start with almost nothing, there's more than meet the eye) I know this kind of games is not for everyone but it's awesome to people who enjoy thinking and psychiatry. Then, totally worth it SPOILER ALERT (kinda) The solving, the end, it's up to you; So be careful with you conlusions