Sometimes I flatter myself with the belief that I’d make a good detective. I’ve read enough of the exploits of Sherlock, Marple and Poirot. I’ve seen enough movies about hard-boiled gumshoes snooping around monochrome cities at the behest of a wealthy damsel in distress. Osmosis implies that some of this knowledge should transfer over, yes? But then the moment passes, and it turns out that memorising how to tell if someone served duty in Afghanistan doesn’t really help you remember where you left your keys. Plus, since Reddit and Facebook came along, I’ve stored so much pointless trivia in various crevices of my brain that my knowledge base is probably corrupted past the point of salvage.
All said and done, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t pull the trigger on that trenchcoat and fedora combo during the summer sale. With my observational skills I’d be earning even less as a private eye than I do as a freelance agent in the creative industry.
Still, one can dream, and what are most video games but dreams made manifest in their interactive audio-visual glory?
Her Story is a whodunit in the police procedural vein. Instead of trudging down rain-slick streets and shaking down informants for clues, you sift through interrogation videos of a single person trying to piece together the details of a decades old case. Apparently, the Y2K bug (remember that, millennials?) messed up the file structure of the computer used to store the videos. So now you have to hunt down missing pieces of video, which help unravel the story even further.
The story, and therefore the game, revolves around a woman called Hannah Smith, and the circumstances surrounding her husband’s demise. You get a broad sense of the case early on, but as you dig deeper into the history of the people involved many threads start to stick out and tugging on them can lead you down a nice little rabbit hole.
Being entirely driven through short videos, the game is clearly a throwback to the full-motion video trend of the 90s, even down to the optional effects and filters they add to make it look like you’re watching on an old CRT display. However, the actual mechanics seem to resonate with two activities that are prevalent in the modern age – voyeurism and keyword hunting.
How it works is that you have a small number of videos to begin with, and can hunt for more using keywords. If a keyword registers as being used in a video, then it shows up in the search results. However, results that can be displayed are limited to five entries, which means you can’t just throw in common pronouns and articles and round up all the clips in one fell swoop. Some mixing and matching of keywords is definitely in order. It doesn’t really make sense that there isn’t a more effective method of sorting crucial files in a murder investigation, but once you start sniffing out interesting case theories the suspension of disbelief kicks in pretty quick.
The story itself has plenty of twists and turns in store, and the non-linear nature of discovery means you could end up missing vital clues and giveaways even in early videos simply because you don’t have the context to place them yet. And I’ve also seen that the most innocuous of searches can sometimes lead to dramatic revelations. It’s this uncertainty about how close you are to a major insight that keeps you on the edge of your seat, and it doesn’t hurt that the story is well layered and accounts for many possible variations as to how you navigate its threads.
Since the action is entirely focused on one character you can find clues by closely studying appearance and affectation, and even mere sighs and idling motions can lend insight into whether you’re being fed fertiliser or the truth. It’s a good performance, and the game makes the most of it. Her Story never throws the gauntlet at you, and if you make a few key discoveries early, you can trigger the game end without having unearthed many of its videos. It’s not an experience that needs to be beaten, simply one that asks for closure. I was happy to oblige.