Her Story

You start the game. You watch the first clips the game sets in front of you. You get your first vague impression of what the situation is, in her words. Then you start your search. It's easy to get lost in time while you're seeking the answers. Which leads me to what I truly loved about this game: What you do end up finding truly depends on you. What detail or phrase caught your attention, what you choose to keep digging up. This, I feel, made uncovering the story personal. There were times when I got curious and thought "I wonder if they talked about *subject*?", looked it up and found something new and "important" by accident. THAT, for me, is what made the game fun. Imagination was as important as logical reasoning. It's a story worth uncovering, especially for its price. In hindsight it doesn't even feel like a branching story line: It feels like slowly peeling off layers to reveal the truth. Or, if you will, Her Story. And it's a story I think I'll remember a long time. I don't know how I can recommend this game enough, without giving away some of its finest qualities. I wish I could play it again for the first time. Oh, and there's an option to enable subtitles, which was great for a non-native English speaker like myself.

I give this 5/5 because it offers an experience unlike other games. I could reduce the score because of a short playtime, or lack of gameplay, but that would miss the point of what the game tries to accomplish. The gameplay amounts to this: You have a database of video clips, none more than 3 minutes long, and you can input search terms to explore this database. However, you can only access the first five results of any given search. So, you have to listen to the information you hear in the video clips to think of new search terms that will narrow down your searches and provide you access to more of the videos. It is actually one of the only games that reminds of Shadowrun for the SNES, in that regard - which is amazing. (You can also add tags to the videos, presumably to make them easier to organize and rewatch later, but I did not bother with this.) It seems like there is no win condition, except to watch enough of the videos (or perhaps certain salient ones). As you progress, the game starts doing stuff that eventually leads to an ending. But I don't know how close I am to watching every video, and frankly I am curious to go back in and dig up some of the details of this story that are still unclear to me. I think it's worth playing, especially for such a low price. It kept me 100% engrossed and immersed.

Her Story is unlike any other game I have ever played before. The FMV genre is generally often hampered by low production value and a certain element of cheese. But Her Story uses the medium to tell a story that feels authentic because of both great acting and great use of the tech. It uses its premise to its fullest potential and without being revolutionary in a technological sense ends up very much being so in a creative sense. I was hooked from the beginning and the game didn't let go until around 3 hours later when I finished it. It's not in any way a long game. But since the price matches I don't see this as a problem and having quite a large game collection I actually found it refreshing to be able to finish a game. And doing so in one sitting was very appropriate for the game at hand...

I played this with my girlfriend. She doesn't normally like any PC games, but we played this together for the whole evening - me making notes, her typing in keywords, both of us discussing our findings. It was really pleasant as we unravelled a story. Well worth the money.

I sort of knew what this game was about before starting, having watched 10 minutes of a lets play so started ready to take notes and delve into the story. However the lack of an intro, tutorial and interface did take me back for a minute until I figured out what to do. you really are dumped straight into the game and have to find your own way. The game is short, I 'finished' in around 5 hours but it was very immersive and the time flew past. Curious, I went to a websight later to find a list of search terms to finish up all the files stored, I figure that may take another hour or two. Its not necessary but there are little snippets of info I would like to find out. Like a nerd I took copious notes, even starting a fresh note pad for the game. It wasnt until near endgame before I realized that it wasnt really necessary. There is no end game for you to plug into your findings of what happened, it just kind of ends when you feel like it. Brief note taking of verbs is all that is needed to keep track of your searches. There is a neat database icon that shows how many of the films you uncover and the game allows you to come back and continue searching words until you unlock them all. The story was very interesting, the actress was really good. There was one clip, I wont say what it was, but I got goosepimples and a 'what the heck' moment. I have played many games, indeed 5star AAA games that did not hold my interest like this game did. I do feel for players going into the game thinking its a standard action game, or even an adventure game. They may be disappointed, its more like a Tale Tell game with much more interaction on your part. I liked it alot and look forward to more from the dev