Her Story

Was struggling for a bit whether this deserves 3 or 4 starts and still can't really decide. The game itself presents a very original idea and I remember it was rather hyped back on release and captured my curiosity (yes, took me some time to actually get around to it). So this is one of the games which are heavily story-driven and there's not much besides that, with a nice twist - basically you're searching through database of videos and have to piece together the whole story which I would not spoil. I found the full (or at least the ~65% of story I've discovered) to be rather unique, engaging and interesting. The nice twist is that you have to really listen and catch glimpsed of information to know what to look for next. It's can actually be fun for a while if you're into this detective work kind of thing, which not many games incorporate. It's not insanely hard but also not extremely easy and the game doesn't hold your hand, you have to figure out everything by yourself. The clips themselves are relatively short, can be 10-20 seconds to ~2 minutes top, which also make the game easy to digest in multiple sittings and friendly for short sessions if that's your kind of thing. Not that it's especially long, there's a content of around ~2 hours in total here. And not that it should be longer, as I have personally found myself getting a bit tired after spending some time with this. It does get repetitive, but I think that I'm personally enjoying more of structured experiences in video games, while here you have basically you investigating a story for your own pure satisfaction, it's not really clear when's the end (although there is an ending point an credits rolling, eventually), there are not really any stages or guildeline in-game, you just get in and look for videos and get an option to say "I'm done" when around halfway through the database. Anyway, it's worth a try for story hogs if you're one, even a decade after release.

Highly recommend this game if you like this type of game play. Take a short look at a YouTube video. You will quickly determine if you want to buy this game. I agree, like some others have said, that this is an interactive movie. The player is only entering keywords that pull up video clips of police interviews. However, each clip provides bits of data that allow you to learn about the story. You may want to play this game even if you generally do not like playing interactive movies. Do not worry if your keyword searches do not pullup all 200+ video clips. When you quit the game look at the credits. There will be a statement that provides a method you can use in-game to find the videos you have not yet seen. Once all videos have been seen, or anytime during the game, I recommend putting the video clips in order by date to get a better understanding of the story.

This is a very nice small FMV game. Without spoiling, we're looking on the footages of police interviews made almost 3 decades ago, related to a murder that happened at that time. Sadly, the digitalization of the footage was done on very old tech and is tough to handle, but that's what we've got. We have to use keywords to search for videos on the database and the listing results is very limited. This creates a very unique and original way of story telling, because the story is told in different order for each player and we gotta put the pieces together to figure it. It remembered me a lot of Nolan's Memento, but here it's much more complicated to put the pieces together! Make sure to play it with no spoiler. Don't worry on what u're doing, there's no best order to do it.

It is just boring. And the restriction to search through the database is just too much. Better play Analogue Hate story and Hate plus. Similar principle but done right.

The main plot is too obvious, and after seeing through that, there is really very little else to discover.