Her Story

The game was fair, i played it with three friends and we had fun and good discussions for the 2 hours it lasted. There is no clear explanation in the end (or i didn't see it) so you can only be confident about what you found out, you won't have any confirmation. Some ideas are totally unexploited and useless, can't spoil but it's about the identity of the player in the game. I'd say it's worth 3/5 in my opinion. However, i'll penalize it because the developer has done a movie based game and didn't think it was a good idea to embed the codecs. So the videos didn't work at all. I had to lookup on strange hosting websites for re-encoded assets that would work, but i still had no sound so i had to watch the videos without audio. Honestly this is a very stupid error and proves the game has not been tested enough.

Her Story seems to recreate the feeling of being a detective trying to figure out a mystery, having only the suspect's testimony, and a clunky computer interface. It seems the suspect's video interviews were fragmented into short sections, and it's up to you to find them all, by searching for words in the videos' transcript, causing the videos containing that word to pop up. It doesn't make much sense, but you'll have to go with it to enjoy this game, and instead focus on the story and the actress portraying it. Sadly, overall, the story isn't very good, but the actress largely makes up for it, except for a few videos where she sounds a bit fake. The mystery is good enough to draw you in, and make you actively seek out new videos, but the more you learn about it, the more it feels like a hodge podge of dime novels. It doesn't help that the game has no real ending, and that you don't learn very much about the case. Videos are so fragmented, you rarely come across a long one - almost two minutes long, and instead come across mostly videos a few seconds long, with the occasional 30 to 40 seconds one. Some videos are also superfluous, such as a video of the suspect spilling coffee on herself, or looking at the detective's family photos. It seems having many videos is done to attract completionists, hurting players playing to uncover the story. But to finish the game, you don't need to watch all the videos - only enough of the main ones, which took me about 2 hours. Trying to find them all, I played 5 hours in total, still missing 17 videos. The scenery is also a problem, but only after you stare at it long enough - one interrogation room is of the stereotypical kind, and another makes videos appear as if they were filmed in someone's kitchen. But the videos are downgraded enough to make you believe they came from a tape, and the computer station you're working on has enough audio and visual cues added to it, to make it seem to be located in a dirty, stuffy office.

The first hour or so was somewhat interesting, but that's to be expected in a mystery game. As time went on, the experience boiled down to typing in keywords words (and much later on, random words) and hoping that an unwatched video will pop up in the search results. It doesn't help that the interface only displays a maximum of 5 videos as search results. I think that the limitation is there to artificially drag out the play time. Given that many of the videos are about 15 seconds long with nothing really significant being shown or said, this FMV game has yet another reason to feel like a real drag. It was also disappointing that there wasn't a way to view all of the videos in order, so the story felt pretty disjointed. I imagine law enforcement in real life would really struggle without file explorers or even command line interfaces that can list directories and ALL file contents, but that's exactly what the interface in this game lacks. In the player's case, one would be better off just going through the game files and watching everything from there. I suppose one could also find a compilation video of everything in order as well (there is one by the way). The story itself was rather underwhelming as well. It 'ends' rather ambiguously, which is not something that I mind, but the disjointed way in which it is presented had done all the damage it needed to turn me from being 'interested' to 'indifferent'. I think I actually found the experience of reading about how the game was made to be more interesting than 'playing' the game itself. At least the actress, Viva Seifert, did a reasonable job. 'Her Story' poses an interesting question, and it's one that we all need to consider before putting this FMV game on a pedestal: Does a film with a running time of about 1 hour and 40 minutes being chopped up into tiny bits and viewed in random order sound good to you?

The game goes for the whole Memento thing where the story is not told in a linear fashion. This allows the player to piece the puzzle together from the perspective of the detective, and while it was pretty fun to write down notes and slowly uncover the truth, I found it quite difficult to find the missing pieces in the storyline as I couldn't figure out the right keyword to use and the video listing only allowed 5 videos. I ended up going through the video files in the game folder manually to fully understand the story. The game's only mechanic is the video archive system and, stylished as it may be, but unfortunately it's not worth the game's price. Play this if you're a big fan of FMV.

Barely a game as it's just a jumble of videos around a central narrative. If you want a good engaging visual novel try 'tender loving care'. It's writing is still as stunted, so it must cost a lot to make anything with any truly branching story line; but it is a hell of a lot more interesting and fun.