The game I played was HerStory by Sam Barlow, available on steam for PC, Mac, as well as on mobile. The game is listed for mature audiences due to adult themes including violence, mentions of sex, and profanity, but its target audience more specifically is people who enjoy true crime. It features the woman in the video (which turns out to be potentially two women, Hannah and Eve), and her dead husband Simon. Unfortunately, I do not enjoy true crime, so I found this game both unsettling and tedious to play. Its core mechanic is a search bar that contains certain key words, like “murder,” “Simon” (the victim), and “weapon.” This loop of searching is immediately rewarded by revealing a number of short clips. The clips are all extremely short, with a play bar that starts scrolling across the top of the screen as soon as you click on one. They are also labeled with the timestamp of when the recording was made, including a note of the meeting room. The immediate feedback and learning from this loop is both the visual cues of the video being played as well as the short narrative arc provided by the video, which gives information as a reward for watching it. Because these clips are so short, you end up searching a variety of key words to try and access as much of the original story as possible. The major types of fun I experienced at the beginning was discovery of new information about the evocative narrative and challenge of finding key words that result in new clips.
There is a UI which helps you know which clips you’ve watched of the total (see below) but I found myself frustrated by the number of clips and by having to rewatch clips to gain more information because they were out of order. This mechanic which limits information and encourages you to discover more is what generates mystery and engages the player’s curiosity. However, personally, knowing the clips were once all just a sequential video did make the game itself more cool in concept but also a little more frustrating to play because, stepping outside of the magic circle, the mystery itself would not really be much of a mystery if you could just watch whichever part of the narrative you wanted at any time. However, I think the core reason I was not able to enjoy this game as much after learning how the mechanics work is because I don’t enjoy true crime, mystery, or horror narratives, which center around things like murder and negative human behavior, and I am easily spooked by things like the lo-fi aesthetic of the game. Still, I was curious enough about the story after feeling too frustrated with the mechanics and upset by the aesthetic/narrative to continue searching to search up other players’ theories and explanations–which include theories that Hannah and Eve are twins or that Hannah is dissociative. Finally, if you say you are finished with the game, there is a small narrative arc when you close the game through a chatbox that asks if you, (the player), as Eve’s daughter, understand your mother’s actions. This is a nice but a little unsatisfying end because it gives you a narrative motive for your objective but also feels a bit awkward since you’re leaving the magic circle and returning to reality.
Ultimately, I think HerStory uses narrative arcs embedded in a unique gameplay loop that extremely effectively creates a mystery that the player wants to solve; however, I personally was not able to enjoy it, because I do not enjoy mysteries and true crime.
