We don’t quite know who she is or what she’s going through, but we’re there to hear her well-told story, warts and all. Her Story respectfully deals with mature themes such as mental illness, identity, loss, and infidelity. A real actress, Viva Seifert, plays the woman, and her performance is appropriately both grounded and absurd. The interviews are recorded in full-motion video. If Her Story hadn’t let me do that, I would have missed out on at least 15 important videos, but the effectiveness of simple guessing undermined the sense that I was working my own way through a mystery. I literally just guessed, and those guesses led to legitimate leads when the trail I’d “earned” went cold. It wasn’t a movie-perfect EUREKA! moment. The issue with this system is that when I was occasionally stumped, I’d search for common words like “she,” “to,” and “went,” and sometimes the results brought up new videos without me deducing anything. It’s refreshing to make progress based on what you learn or feel, and not on what you collect. From there, the only barrier between you and what you need to know is what you type into the search bar. Everything you could want to know is available from the start, but you won’t know which words are important to focus on until you spend some time with the suspect. It’s a simple, gratifying tool, and it gives Her Story a different pace when compared to other adventure games. You type in a word or phrase, and any video containing that word or phrase pops up.

Her Story’s main game mechanic is essentially a search engine, which let me chase down leads, investigate old claims, or validate my theories. You’re not even told exactly who you are you’re logged into a 90s-looking police computer as “AUTH_GUEST.” For reasons I don’t want to spoil, it’s clear you’re looking through these videos long after the murder investigation has finished… so what’s the purpose of it all? From the start, there’s an unshakeable air of mystery that permeates and enriches the entire experience. Play In Her Story, what you don’t know is as important as what you do.

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