Her Story Reviews
Neither the artificial screen glare nor actress Viva Seifert's performance lend credibility to the game's lady-psychopath clichés.
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.
You can't ever really know other people, after all. But the empathy and intimacy that Her Story evokes is a reminder that the strides we can make—incomplete and uncertain as they are—can be reward enough.
The experience is admittedly different to that of a well-constructed detective novel, or carefully charted HBO thriller, but the effects are similar. You are captivated, manipulated and spun around by the plot. Perhaps, in an era where filmmakers so keenly play with chronology, and regularly leave conclusions unwrapped, we are prepared for this kind of patchwork narrative, which leaves you, mostly, to draw your own conclusion of what really happened by the end. Or perhaps it would always have worked this well. Regardless, Her Story is a singular, unfamiliar work, essential viewing for both filmmakers and game designers.
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.
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.
Like the terrific TV miniseries The Staircase that appears to have inspired it, Her Story is less about determining guilt than growing to understand a set of characters. That's more interesting than a guilty or not guilty verdict anyway: a verdict closes the book, while understanding leaves it open for further contemplation. And as a narrative and as a game, Her Story is worthy of much contemplation indeed.
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.