“Her Story” is a game developed by Sam Barlow for PC and mobile that centers around a large collection of police interview clips of Hannah Smith, with the objective of piecing together the mystery of her husband’s murder. The gameplay is minimal—the player can search through clips by querying a term that’s stated in a clip. Most of the player experience is watching these clips. (The rest is taking notes and thinking.) Due to this, the target audience seems to be those that are more interested in narrative than actual gameplay. It is the simple gameplay style, along with the unlimited access to all clips from the beginning, that creates the micro-parallel arc-like architecture of the game and creates both narrative and discovery types of fun in the game.
With the lack of gameplay comes the lack of traditional loops. However, the individual clips can be considered loops in the sense that a player can replay them to pick up clues and gain knowledge. The game’s architecture centers around one large arc (the overarching mystery in the game). What makes this architecture special is that–due to the ability to see all clips at any time–players can be dropped into any point along this arc, and it’s not obvious how to continue along it. This provides a unique twist on the “discovery” type of fun—I often came back to the game over the weekend to try to look more into clips that I had yet to explore.
The game’s architecture is somewhat similar to the “micro-parallel arc” structure—as the story contains multiple moving parts, players may find themselves in an arc that in some way contributes to the actual overall arc, but doesn’t directly feed into the events of the murder. This makes the narrative somewhat personal to the user. Although all clips are the same for all players, the way that the story unravels for a player is specific to what micro-parallel arc interests them enough to dig deeper into.
When I started the game, I immediately stumbled upon a very important clip in the game (pictured below), in which a woman (assumed to be Hannah) takes a lie detector test. However, when asked if her name is Hannah, she fails the test.
Now that I’ve finished (and read theories online to confirm my suspicions), I understand how this clip feeds into the overall arc. But at the beginning, I just rewatched clips that mention the lie detector to try and gain clues as to why she responded to certain questions in certain ways (a loop). From the lie detector clips, I found myself watching clips in which Hannah describes her childhood, and then her adulthood, and then finally back to the murder (now with additional information about Hannah’s and Eve’s lives). This is also how the game builds a discovery type of fun that forces the player to explore the narrative and uncover the truth.
