Her Story and the Architecture of Memory
Her Story is a 2015 mystery game developed by Sam Barlow, built around a single mechanic: searching a fictional police database of video clips from interviews conducted with a woman named Hannah in the wake of her husband Simon Smith’s murder. There is no map, no inventory, no traditional progression. The entire game is played through a search bar and a screen full of results.
My Experience
I went in knowing roughly what the game was about from a quick internet search, but I had no clear goals or milestones in mind. The opening screen showed the keyword “murder” already typed in, with a handful of video clips loaded up. Because the interface is sparse and most things are unclickable, figuring out what to do was easier than I anticipated.
After watching the first few clips, I realized the only way to find more was to type in new keywords based on what I had just heard. I started jotting down names, places, and topics that seemed worth chasing. Eric, Hannah, a pub called The Rock, and later words like “blonde,” “pregnancy,” and “Eve” all became search terms. Each query returned new clips, and each clip raised as many questions as it answered. That cycle of partial revelation kept pulling me forward.
There was also a README file on the desktop that confirmed the basic mechanics, which helped solidify my understanding early on. And at one point, the screen briefly flashed an image of a man’s face, which I later confirmed is the game’s way of signaling that you have stumbled onto something significant. It was a subtle nudge that I was on the right track, delivered without any explicit instruction.
The non-linearity is what makes the experience so distinct. You never watch Hannah’s story in order. You piece it together out of sequence, and the picture you form depends entirely on the order you chose to search. By the time I felt I understood the couple’s backstory, I had also accumulated a new pile of unanswered questions. That tension between knowing more and realizing there is still more to find is what drives the whole thing.
Analysis Through Class Concepts
In MDA terms, the core mechanic is the keyword search, and the dynamic it produces is one of investigative momentum. The aesthetic payoff is discovery, the slow satisfaction of reconstructing a fractured story from scattered evidence.
This maps directly onto Henry Jenkins’ framework of narrative architecture from “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Jenkins argues that game designers are less storytellers than spatial architects, designing environments that create the conditions for narrative experiences. Her Story takes that idea and strips it down to its barest form. The “space” is the database itself, and the architecture is the search system. Like the evocative spaces Jenkins describes, the game works by activating your existing intuitions about crime, testimony, and memory, then letting you fill in the gaps.
Ernest Adams makes a related point in “The Role of Architecture in Videogames,” noting that architecture in games serves both a functional and an atmospheric role. The database interface in Her Story does both. Functionally, it constrains what you can access at any given moment, so the clips you find feel like they were earned. Atmospherically, it mimics the feeling of combing through real investigative footage, which makes the whole thing feel authentic and slightly unsettling in a way a more polished UI never could.
Jenkins also distinguishes between embedded narratives, those pre-authored and waiting to be uncovered, and emergent ones, shaped by player behavior. Her Story is almost entirely embedded. Every clip already exists; your job is to find the right order to encounter them. But because the order is yours to determine, the experience feels personal in a way that linear storytelling rarely does.
Ethics
Her Story places you in the role of an unseen investigator picking through police interview footage of a woman describing the worst period of her life. That framing raises a real question about what it means to gamify grief and trauma. The player is essentially a voyeur, and the game never fully acknowledges that.
The portrayal of Hannah’s mental state also deserves scrutiny. Several of her clips show her lashing out, singing eerie songs, and behaving in ways that could read as markers of instability or delusion. The game uses these moments for dramatic effect, but it does little to contextualize them. Disabled players and mental health advocates have noted in reviews and forums that the game tends to aestheticize distress rather than treat it with care, leaning into the unsettling quality of Hannah’s behavior as a storytelling tool rather than engaging with what that behavior might actually mean.
In my opinion, these are not a fatal flaw to the game, but do warrant us to scrutinize further. The line between exploring difficult human experiences through games and exploiting them for tension is thin, and Her Story walks it in ways that are not always comfortable.
