Her Story Reviews
Her Story is a distinctive indie game with revolutionary gameplay. While it does have a bit of a learning curve at the start, it's incredibly rewarding in how the unpredictable story reveals.
Experimental in many ways, Her Story is as captivating as any detective novel, so long as you have the patience or ability to care about the narrative.
Her Story wants to be different from every other game out there and in that it succeeds. I can honestly say that I've never played anything like it. It's not text adventure, it's not something I would call an FMV game or a point & click. It's in a genre all of its own and what a grubby, welcome little surprise it is.
One of the best FMV games ever made, Her Story delivers a tale that all adventure game fans should experience!
Though the game is only a few hours long and its soundtrack occasionally relies too heavily on saccharine piano melodies, "Her Story" is a remarkable achievement in creating something which is personal, cinematic and playful. It's a work that's impossible to imagine as anything other than a video game, and one of the best I have played so far this year.
Thoroughly engaging from start to finish, Her Story is a tour de force of interactive storytelling and a murder mystery for the ages.
Her Story is a captivating experiment in stripped down storytelling and the best use of FMV that I've ever had the good fortune to encounter. It's a story that we get to build, and thus, despite the way that it sometimes keeps players at a distance, Her Story becomes Our Story. By obsessing over clips and trying to put them in order, trying to make sense of them all, we become embroiled in the story and can make it fit our own theories. It's unique, singular and will take a long time to stop bouncing around inside my head.
In summary, Her Story is likely worth playing if only because it is so profoundly different. When you throw in solid writing, passable acting, and the need for players to reach their own conclusions about what happened, it comes together exceptionally well.
Her Story's '90s aesthetic makes me feel nostalgic, and hearing the old computer boot up noises and seeing my silhouette rendered on the screen were nice touches. This Google Video-esque crime game isn't for the impatient or for those with short attention spans, but it rewards those who are willing to engage with its purposely-limited but complex delivery system.
Neither the artificial screen glare nor actress Viva Seifert's performance lend credibility to the game's lady-psychopath clichés.
What Sam Barlow has delivered here is an amazingly fresh experience and while from the outside it may seem there's little here to appeal to the hardcore gamer, if you give it a moment, you'll realise just how enthralling being a detective can be.
This year has blessed us with many massive, must-play releases. Her Story regally joins the list and is one that we're sure will be discussed for years to come.
This is a remarkable, progressive, absorbing game, one sure to prompt fervent discussion among its players, no two of whom will have shared the same experience. Your actions and deductions may not lead to a virtual arrest or conviction, but the curiosity of your inner Columbo will surely have been sated.
Sam Barlow's Her Story puts the player in the center of an engrossing crime story like Serial or The Jinx, letting you unravel the video game mystery as you go.
When all was said and done, I felt that my curiosity had been rewarded rather than rebuked. Her Story recognises that we have a habit of slowing down and craning our necks when we pass an accident, but it also trusts us to temper that urge with empathy. Maybe if we were separated from these events by a window and a motorway lane rather than a screen and impassable years, we'd slow down enough to pull someone out of harm's way.
With its open narrative design loaded with clever corkscrews waiting to be discovered, Sam Barlow's inventive interactive tale is a pleasure to play
It needs something extra to it to really stand as something special, but Her Story still kept me hooked long enough to dig out its secrets, and that's definitely a success.
Sophisticated, engaging, and utterly unique.
An astounding performance by Viva Seifert, immaculate writing by Sam Barlow and a completely innovative concept cement Her Story as one of the most solid and mesmerising releases this year.
It's not a typical structure for a game, but the mechanics really do work in the context of the narrative. If you like the idea of an open-ended '90s murder mystery with no guarantee you'll find a solid answer to its mysteries, then I can't recommend this highly enough. Her Story is a spectacular video game, and one of the most gripping personal narratives I've experienced in some time.