Her Story Reviews
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 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.
Thoroughly engaging from start to finish, Her Story is a tour de force of interactive storytelling and a murder mystery for the ages.
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.
One of the best FMV games ever made, Her Story delivers a tale that all adventure game fans should experience!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The hand of [Her Story's] developer never intrudes far enough to spoil the basic thrill of solving a narrative puzzle completely on one's own.
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.
A stunning realisation of what narrative can be
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.
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.
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.
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.
The genius of Her Story is right in its title: every detail and feature of its existence, from the presentation, to the script, to the symbolism of the built-in Reversi mini-game, is included in service to its female lead's story. The end result is probably the most holistic narrative-driven game since The Stanley Parable. If the FMV genre is destined for a renaissance, this game would be a fantastic example for developers to follow.
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.
A masterpiece and a game that you must play, because it is that damned important.