This week, I played Her Story, an interactive mystery video game created by Sam Barlow and released in 2015 for PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. The game targets players who enjoy narrative-driven games and investigation. Unlike many mystery games where players solve mini puzzles, Her Story has one single huge puzzle: players investigate a fictional police database containing video interview clips with a woman and try to reconstruct the story. While this fragmented structure creates a unique dynamic of investigation and interpretation and produces the fun of Narrative, its lack of guidance, weak information-management tools, and unclear progression systems often make the player struggle and ultimately weaken the narrative experience.
The embedded narrative of Her Story is established through its interface. The outdated computer system, digital clock, desktop design, visual glare, and VHS-style interview clips immediately place players back in the 1990s. The interface itself communicates the player’s role: rather than controlling a detective exploring a physical location, they are reviewing archived police evidence. The old technology also explains why the search system is so limited. Small details, such as mouse click sounds and the consistent background music, further reinforce the atmosphere of uncovering an old case file. The game also includes accessibility features such as subtitles and an anti-glare filter, which improve access to the video content while maintaining the feeling of an old recording system.
The enacted narrative emerges through the search mechanic. Players search keywords to discover different interview fragments, which creates an interesting dynamic because players must think like detectives rather than simply consume information. The limitation that only the first five clips appear for each search term is a clever design choice: it slows down discovery, prevents players from immediately seeing everything, and encourages them to explore different keywords. In this sense, the mechanic effectively controls pacing and supports the mystery. However, this same mechanic also creates frustration. Because players do not know which keywords exist or which clips they are missing, discovery can become dependent on guessing. Some important videos are difficult to locate, and repeated searching becomes tedious. The mechanic successfully creates uncertainty about the story, but sometimes it also creates uncertainty about whether the player is progressing correctly. With completely no guidance, I don’t know how my progress is. Mystery should make players question the answer, not whether they are interacting with the game properly.
The biggest design problem I experienced was information management. The game requires players to remember details from scattered conversations and organize fragments into a coherent timeline. However, the tools provided for this task are extremely limited. Players can save videos and drag them along a single timeline, but this system is frustrating rather than helpful. Players must open each video to see important information such as dates, previews provide little useful information, and tags are difficult to use. A possible improvement include automatically sorting discovered videos chronologically, displaying tag more visibly, or allowing players to organize evidence in a two-dimensional workspace similar to a file system. Currently, the organization mechanic feels like an additional obstacle between the player and the narrative.
The lack of guidance extends beyond organization. Many important systems are hidden from players. For example, I did not realize there was a hidden progress tracker because it required dragging the interface window to reveal it. The game provides no onboarding explaining the overall goal or how players know they are approaching completion. Because the entire game is one large narrative arc, the middle portion can feel endless, especially for players new to the genre. The discovery of new information is supposed to motivate players, but without smaller milestones or clearer progress indicators, curiosity can gradually become exhaustion. Similarly, I could not determine what triggered the final chat bubbles or why the ending appeared when it did. The ambiguity felt less like part of solving a mystery and more like uncertainty caused by unclear design. While the mystery itself is interesting, players need intermediate goals or clearer signs of progress to maintain motivation.
The hidden mirror game is interesting. At first glance, it appears unrelated to the investigation, but it connects multiple layers of the narrative. The mirror (1) is the murder weapon – searching it helps progression of the game; (2) reflects the relationship between the twin sisters. Players switch between two characters rather than compete against the computer. Through this mechanic, the player experiences the fragmented perspective that defines the story – whether is different selves taking turns controlling one body, or twin sisters using the same name. This is extremely rewarding when players actually discover these connections, or even the game being found in the Trashcan – some players may never reach the intended narrative experience. The game’s use of color is also a problem. The red and blue colors appear to correspond to the two most visually distinct outfits in the interview clips, potentially suggesting a connection between different identities. However, because many other clothing colors also appear throughout the interviews, the meaning becomes unclear. If color was intended as a narrative clue, limiting the palette more clearly would have made the mechanic easier to interpret.
The game also raises accessibility concerns, the narrative comprehension still relies heavily on memory, attention, and the ability to organize fragmented information. Players with attention difficulties or executive functioning differences may struggle not because they cannot understand the mystery, but because the game provides little support for managing large amounts of fragmented information.. The game’s fun of Narrative also relies heavily on visual and performance-based cues from the actress, such as facial expressions and tone of voice. Players who have difficulty interpreting these cues may not experience the same narrative richness. Ambiguity is valuable in mystery games, but it should challenge players through interpretation rather than unnecessary barriers to accessing the story.
Overall, Her Story is an ambitious experiment in interactive storytelling. Its embedded narrative successfully creates an immersive investigative world, and its enacted narrative gives players the rare experience of constructing meaning rather than simply receiving a story. However, its hidden systems, unclear progression, and weak organization tools make it harder for players to fully experience the narrative. By providing stronger guidance while preserving player agency, Her Story could maintain its sense of discovery without making discovery itself the biggest obstacle.
