Her Story

I liked the Roottrees are dead and Obra Dinn. Her Story comes up frequently when you look into games that you may enjoy when you liked these two games.

So obviously, I played it.

The premise is great. You have access to a database of short videos about a woman being interrogated by the police. The videos have been cut every few sentences so that one can easily review some parts. Some are 1 second long, others around 1 minute. Sadly, the case is from 1994 and we are in the year of June 2026 income (I did pick the right year to play it, didn’t I), so the database is kind of a mess and you do not know what exactly you’re looking for. You can add search terms and the database will give you up to 5 videos at a time that correspond to the search term. Search for “murder” and a maximum of 5 videos will pop up where the word murder has been said. Or maybe just 1. Or maybe one. You can save the videos in a queue. It is now your job to find out what happened, tracing along the lines of videos and the search terms you enter. There is a tag field where you can add words so that you can easily search some videos again, because there are over 200 videos and adding them all in the queue would be a nightmare.

But this is also the games really great weakness and I’m very confused if the devs intended for it, or if it has been overlooked. The tag fields are not blank. The word “BLANK” is written in it. So, I was curious. I entered “BLANK” in the search bar. And the 5 videos popped up, and the database told me that 200+ videos were found. Every video in a chronological order was there. You only have to change the tag, enter the “BLANK” in the search bar again, and the next 5 videos are there to watch. It is an idea so simple, so easy, so obvious to try that it baffled me. It ruins the whole idea of the game. it can be handy, though, to find the last bunch of videos, because they are getting hard to find.

The actress did a stellar job. She really did. The story was interesting enough. Trying to put it together is the highlight, it manages to really give you the impression that you’re investigating. Discovering the videos in complete disorder is great fun. Seeing the inconsistencies in her story feels very rewarding. Her body language too. I liked the open ending that the game is there “are you satisfied?” and never will give you the answer outright on what happened. Can you trust her story or not? Who knows.