What happens when a murder mystery gives you no detective to control and no crime scene to explore? In Her Story, you start by typing “murder” into an old police database and watching a woman answer questions in a video interview. The game was written, directed, and self-published by Sam Barlow, with Viva Seifert playing the woman in the interviews. It was released in 2015 for Windows, Mac, and iOS, with an Android version coming later. I played it on PC. I think the game works best for people who enjoy detective stories and slower, story-focused games. You have to be willing to read, listen carefully, take notes, and accept that the game will not give you a clear answer. Her Story makes the act of searching part of the story itself, so the player is also responsible for putting the story together.
The main mechanic in Her Story is searching the database. You type in a word, and the game gives you video clips where the woman says that word. There is no character to move around or area to explore. Your only real way of investigating is through the search bar. Because the clips are not given to you in chronological order, you have to figure out how they connect. I might search one word because I heard it in a previous clip, then notice another name or phrase and search that next. My search history becomes a record of how I investigated the case. In this way, the narrative is not just something I watch. I am deciding which pieces I see and in what order I see them.
The search system also acts as the game’s puzzle. There is no way to fail, and the game never gives you a list of objectives to complete. One important rule is that a search only shows the first five matching clips. If a word appears in many clips, I cannot simply watch all of them at once. This forces me to look for more specific words. In a way, my vocabulary becomes my main tool. I have to pay attention to the way the woman talks and remember unusual names, places, and objects. The MDA framework helps explain this: searching and watching are the mechanics, figuring out connections between clips is the dynamic, and the feeling of discovering something for myself is the aesthetic. The downside is that it can sometimes be hard to tell whether I am making progress or just searching random words.
The same idea connects Her Story to FEZ, even though the games use completely different mechanics. In FEZ, rotating the world changes the way the player sees and understands the game world. The story is connected to physical space. In Her Story, there is almost no physical space at all. The player explores through words and information instead. This connects to Jenkins’s idea of narrative architecture. A game like FEZ or Gone Home can put pieces of a story inside rooms, objects, and locations for the player to find. Her Story has no rooms to explore, so its “architecture” is the database itself. The player moves through the story by jumping from one word to another.
Accessibility is one area where the design has both strengths and problems. The game is very text-heavy, and searching requires players to spell English words correctly. It also requires remembering information from different clips. As a dyslexic player myself, I found this part of the game difficult. I had to spend more time reading and making sure I had spelled keywords correctly before I could find new clips. The subtitles helped because I could read exactly what the woman was saying instead of depending only on the audio. They also make the game more accessible for Deaf and hard-of-hearing players. However, having subtitles does not remove every barrier. Being able to read the dialogue does not necessarily mean being able to use it effectively as a search tool. I used to think that adding captions was enough to make a game accessible, but Her Story made me think about accessibility more broadly. The player also needs to be able to interact with the information the game provides.
What makes Her Story interesting is that searching, investigating, and building the narrative are basically the same action. FEZ uses space to make the player experience its story, while Her Story uses language. The result is a mystery where the player is not just solving the case, but deciding how the case is discovered.
