Her Story Reviews
Her Story is gripping. You won't stop until you find answers, and it leaves you thinking long after the credits roll
While the mystery and intrigue can only be obtained during the first play-through, Her Story makes use of a simplistic concept combined with FMV to create a personal and rich atmosphere.
Her Story's deep, dark story makes excellent use of old-school full-motion video.
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.
Her Story is a bold and largely successful experiment in interactive crime fiction.
Despite a very unconventional idea, or maybe just because of it, Her Story is a game that will engulf you with its story and atmosphere. It won't let you turn off the computer until you unveil the whole mystery.
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Don't let the FMV trappings of Her Story fool you; it uses this format as a tool, not a crutch. Sam Barlow's murder mystery uses pre-recorded video to its advantage, giving the experience a gritty, voyeuristic feel that only adds to its sense of intrigue. Simply put, you've never played a detective game like this before.
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.
True to this experience, Her Story finally operates with a sort of functional ambiguity under its veneer of objective presentation. The player is presented with a crime and a sole suspect. By the end, there is even a narrative of what exactly took place, but no archive is ever truly complete, and all the information is never really all the information. You will have questions at the end of Her Story. Making sure that they're the right ones may require figuring out exactly who is looking and how, though which camera and on which screen.
Her Story doesn't look like much, nor is it easy to do it justice through words alone, but it's nevertheless a game that's going to be talked about for years by anyone who takes the time to look below the surface.
Ultimately, above all else, the game comes across as feeling wholly authentic – and that is a word you can attribute to only a small handful of games released in this day and age.
It takes games like Her Story to allow us to step back, realize what innovation and uniqueness actually look like and actually define what special is. This isn't the type of game that will push your reflexes to the brink, but let's be fair, not every game has to do that.
A bold take on the long-forgotten FMV adventure genre, Her Story might be old-fashioned and light on what some might describe as traditional gameplay, but its sophisticated narrative and entertainingly novel take on detective work both allow it to soar far beyond the zenith of its seemingly outmoded remit.
After playing Her Story, I can assuredly say that at no point did I ever once care about what happened to these characters in their wholly uninteresting and depressing lives. Her Story is implausible, which makes the intended emotional impact of the game impossible to experience because none of it is believable.
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 is an enjoyable puzzle game that tells an engaging story. Despite a few minor complaints, it's worth checking out, thanks to the low price.
Every twist and turn you discover feels like an achievement; like you've just made a major breakthrough in a case that has remained inexplicably unsolved
Like The Blair Witch Project, Her Story seems likely to foster a wave of imitators, such is its relative technical ease. However, writer Sam Barlow has certainly set the bar high with his reimagining of what a full-motion video game can be. Whatever it ushers in, Her Story is changing perceptions of what a game can be in the here and now. Case closed.
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.