Her Story

Chosen Question

How does your chosen game(s) tell its story? Is it successful?

Her Story starts off with a search engine inviting you to initiate gameplay, and prompts to search up the term 'murder'. This quickly establishes a mystery element that intrigues the player, as they are invited to solve this mystery on their own path and own queries, based on evidence from the first 5 clips each result turns up.

A story unfolds as you play the clips left to right, sorted by date, which was possibly intended for linear storytelling, but allows the player to watch them out of order if they so wish.
The story unfolds by providing tangential stories to the case at hand to drop subtle clues and big name drops for the player to follow like a bread crumb trail to find their next relevant search term. A good example of this could be 'Hannah' mentioning names and places like Peter, Helen, Florence, Glasgow, the attic, the cellar, the mirror several times in several clips. Allowing for broader search terms to still eventually lead to the same revelations. It's up to the player to pick up on suspicious, or new details to progress the full story. The first term 'murder' already sets up Hannah, or at this point in time 'the woman', as a suspicious figure, wherein the last video she asks to speak to a lawyer, saying that all the previous details we have yet to uncover are merely 'stories' and there was no concrete evidence, thus setting her up as the immediate suspect. Due to the 'stories' comment, her accounts from this point forward are taken with a grain of mistrust, and installing a suspicion on falsehood in her words.

There is no clear instruction for the next search query, but going off what little information the prompted search gave us, I looked up 'Simon' and find out about his work history.
Interestingly enough, these videos the woman speaks of Simon in present tense, suggesting that nine days before the 'first' clip, Simon was alive.

We're then introduced to more characters, Peter and Helen, as well as a location Rockington Arms 'The Rock'.

The game is interesting in that it can clearly play out in a non-chronological order, that everyone's play through can be different if they pick up on different words or cues. To ensure similar pathways are taken, a lot of the cues relate to each other to flesh out certain details, like the events on a certain weekend, encounter, or relation to a person, for example Hannah and Eve's relation to Carl.

Interestingly, if the player chooses to pick up on seemingly random cues and word drops, as I like to call the deliberate dropping of a name in the middle of an otherwise unexciting sentence like the word 'palindrome' early on, a good portion of tension building gameplay can be skipped,  right into the reveal that Hannah has a twin sister named Eve, as both women have palindromic names.
This open pathway leaves the risk for a particularly observant player simply missing half the story, and potentially missing the child's name, Sarah completely.

However I took a step back to look up less important details to get a more complete story. That's an excellent detail about mystery games such as this, even if you reach the ending, and find the correct conclusion, the mystery element of the game compels the player to find all the details, to find out all the secrets and see the story in it's entirety. There is nothing driving the player for 100% completion other than the simple satisfaction of knowing. However after a while of 8 second clips about what Hannah/Eve did at a party or something equally menial, one could get tired and end the game early on, especially if they did unearth one of the 'big' reveals earlier than intended.

The game assists the player in taking certain queries by giving visual or audio cues to crucial information, such as screen dimming, and distant siren wailing upon the 'pregnancy' reveal, or 'twins' reveal, or 'infertility' reveal, or Simon's ultimate death reveal, or even Eve's 'confession' video.
These cues are clearly meant to tell the player to pay particular attention to the current clip to pick out further search queries from.There are also musical cues with silence, and tracks changing upon certain videos ending,

Her Story uses repetitive clips and name drops to prompt progress, 'dropping' specific details like 'silver mirror', to bring detail to the time taken to specifically describe this object so that players can search up the term 'mirror'. Unusual behaviour such as Hannah tapping rhythmically on the desk is further presented as suspicious by following it up with the entry of the interrogator causing Hannah to sit up and ask to leave, calling further attention to the clip.

Her Story is successful at setting the mood for the story, and prompting further inquiry into relevant plot details, and succeeds in compelling the player to search more just for the pure satisfaction of solving the complete mystery. However I feel after all the main mysteries have been solved the trivial details lose their allure and get simply tiresome after a while, a simple collect all the clips chore and fails to hold my interest. This open path game play allows all players to reach the same conclusions through all sorts of paths, however I feel that if so much of the story can be skipped, is that really a a successful story? I feel like this story could have afforded to 'cut the fat' a little in some places, kept clips relevant and improving on the crucial clips to tell the story better. The two part song was a nice touch, but also added no extra search results that I could pull up, as the story of Hannah almost drowning Eve is all but unimportant seemingly, only revealing Hannah's earlier symptoms of instability. Also looking up the song will only get you the second half of the song, which is irrelevant if you've already managed to piece together all the detail the song outlines such as the blonde wig, and jealousy.However I suppose if you ran across the song first, your 'case' or mystery, would revolve around the song, rather than the song simply being a nice touch.
I like the game for setting up the story that compels you to play for the simple satisfaction of knowing, however I do not like that so much of the game can become redundant over a particularly observant search inquiry of smaller details.