Her Story

First off, this is not a detective game. You will not be taking copious notes trying to catch this murder suspect in a lie or story slip ups. Here is the entire game. You start with a couple 5-45 second video clips, then use those to type in keywords to make more clips show up. For some reason, this 1994 database cannot display all its files by date, but CAN let you search by audio words inside video clips. Then for some reason, it can only display the first five results. It's two layers of arbitrary limitations just to jumble the story timeline because otherwise the unbroken, chronological story is extremely boring on its own. Remember how Gone Home relied entirely on false dread in order to mask the dull story underneath? Exact same thing here. Her Story is 2015's Gone Home. Theoretically, the jumbled timeline means that you'll get a big "WHOAH!" when you eventually figure out the twist by piecing together everything you see. In reality, it usually plays out by stumbling across the big reveal extremely early (possibly half a dozen searches in) and going, "Seriously? For real? They went with that?" I thought surely they weren't going to go with something so cliche and that a 2nd twist was going to be revealed, but nope. Looking up other reviews, most people seemed to have looked up the story conclusion thinking , "It couldn't possibly be this, could it?...nope, it was." Big pass on this. Even if it was free it's not worth the 60 minutes of your life.

The main problem I have with this game is that you DON'T SOLVE ANYTHING. But let's start from the beginning. The general idea behind the game is intriguing, mechanics are a bit blunt (and unrealistic) yet work well. The "ending" (if you may say about ending in this game) is also what it should be like - I don't want to spoil so I say no more.The problem of this game is story itself. The background is bizarre and unrealistic while the main plot is too simple and obvious. THERE IS NO SECRET TO FIGURE OUT. It's all said in a straight way. Of course there is still some space left for interpretation but I hoped (and have been promised) to solve a crime case. What I got was a case that has been already solved by someone else and I just had to find right clips to reveal it.

Weird game. The acting is good and the story is pretty affecting, with really nice detail. But it's hard to swallow that a police video search interface would have automatic speech recognition but not a "sort by date" feature, which would basically obliterate the game because you would just watch everything from beginning to end. For me that made the whole thing too contrived and artificial, and once I figured out the outline of the story I just stopped playing. No real ending to make you feel warm and fuzzy about "getting it", either. I miss the "exam" you got at the end of really old timey games like the Laura Bow series to verify you really understood what had happened.

I liked the idea. But the story, which is the only thing this game really offers, is a mindblowing stupid waste of time.

PRO: Presentation is perfect Story is cool, intricate and makes perfect use of metaphores into the concrete It feels rewarding discovering the story It unravels differently for everybody It playes on 2 meta-layers Very well acted CONS (if you wanna call it that): 2 mechanics to use making up 1 gamplay system yeah, that is it, that is why you see low rated reviews. - they put it up to feminism, because female characther equals feminism bad i guess - has no gameplay therefore not fun Let me put it like this. It has the right amount of gameplay for what it aims to be. The game is litterally to find out HER STORY. That's it. If you cannot find any appreciation for how this experience is crafted, it's preferance and you should not be judged for it. But I feel some might hold this game to standards reserved for totally different experiences, or judge it through the lense of some personal, unrelated mindset. Judging something by number of mechanics and gameplay variation as objective truth is obviously flawed. By this definition, R6S is galaxies better than CS, and Tekken is the geatest fighting game of all time, cause every character has 100+ moves. This is NOT a story about feminism. This is NOT a mechanically intensive game. it has to mechanics: -search for clips -and tag the clips the serach mechanic is more of a 3 way system - one word - 2 word - or "quotation" (this together with tagging create the one system by which you interact with the game and advance) This is the Dark Souls of interactive media, it doesn't even tell you if your deduction was accurate... but will still hold a plot twist. From a purely directional standpoint, to me it's insane that they managed that. I love my R6S and my Dota and my Tekken and my Rollerdrome, but i did not came here for that. I came here because i read the description of the game, i watched the trailer, and i got exactly what i was expecting. Not really actually... I did not expect a masterpiece.