Her Story is a single-player video game developed and published by Sam Barlow in 2015. The game is centered around interacting with short video clips depicting a set of police interviews from 1994, centered around the disappearance and murder of a man named Simon. The game is heavily focused on narrative, and likely appeals to players who enjoy unconventional storytelling and the detective or crime fiction genre in general.
Overall, Her Story weaves together mystery and narrative by employing mechanics that actively limit the amount of information given to a player at any one time. It is ultimately this lack of information that controls the story—without it, the player wouldn’t have an incentive to dig further, find the missing pieces, and experience the narrative for themselves. The main goal for the player in Her Story is to figure out for themselves what happened to the characters involved, and why. This is also all couched in the overall setting. Her Story uses the fact that it presents itself as an old desktop computer with a database that only functions in a very particular way to limit information and challenge the player to put the pieces together anyway. Additionally, casting the player as a detective meant to figure out what happened adds additional motivation and premise to what the player is doing over the course of the game.
More specifically, there are several mechanics that work together to restrict the flow of information to the player. The first is the video clips themselves. Most of them range from a few seconds to just under a minute—just enough to reveal hints of what may have happened here and there, but no one clip reveals or gives away the story in its entirety. In lieu of access to the complete interviews, the player has no choice but to receive information specifically cut in a way that keeps things open to interpretation and creates the mystery at the core of the game.
Another key mechanic is how the simulated video database functions in game. Once again, the player must work for information about the developing story. There is no function to view all the video clips in order, nor are they categorized for the player ahead of time. The only way to see more clips is to search for them using key terms. It is up to the player to pick up these key terms in the clips they watched, search for those in succession, and continue following the threads they present. This further adds to the mystery and the narrative by forcing non-linearity into the storytelling. What order someone chooses to search for terms, or even what terms they pick up in the first place is likely unique to each individual player, meaning the story likely unfolds in a different way for each player. Once again, in lieu of easily accessible, linear, or “complete” information, the player must work for themselves to deduce what exactly happened.
For example, when playing, the game starts off giving the player “murder” as the first search term. Following that, I then searched for “homicide”, which gave nothing. Searching “kill” though, did return a few results, one of which was most striking was Hannah (the woman being interviewed) mentioning her love-hate relationship with another woman named Eve and wanting to drown her as a child. Wanting to know more about how Hannah and Eve were related, this then led me to search for clips tagged with the keyword “Eve” and so on.
This isalso an example of the narrative loops that are extremely present in the game. The core loop is that a user searches for a term, watches the clips presented, finds something in the clips to further explore, and repeat. Thus the larger narrative arc of what exactly happened between Hannah, Eve, and Simon is revealed through a succession of these mini loops that the player embarks on, each one adding an additional “unit” to the larger story.
Overall Her Story leverages its setting to implement several key information limiting mechanics that together, create an air of mystery and non-linear narrative for the player.
