I’m not sure how much time I’ve actually spent playing Her Story. The game was open for a long time while I was trying to stream (unsuccessfully), and more time passed as I searched for paper and took notes. And then there was the time spent considering and studying and adding tags to the game’s video clips… but then again, that’s a feature of the game. Was I playing, as I sat and thought?
Her Story, by Sam Barlow, continually stretches the idea of gaming itself. The video-based story, consisting of short interview clips in the wake of a man’s death, all accessed by a screen-in-screen database, is ostensibly a police procedural type of experience, though the reality is much deeper than that. More than a mystery, Her Story is a dark, twisting narrative of love and family that draws influence from fairy tales, tragedies, horror, and our desire to dig ever deeper to find anything. But what’s here to be found? Is watching, searching, thinking — and really, little else — a game? Or just an experience? Either way, is it a worthwhile experience?
Personally, I wasn’t convinced when I first saw the trailer for Her Story; the acting seemed just okay, and considering the game would succeed or not on Viva Seifert’s performance, I wasn’t convinced it was worth even the small price tag. But as someone with a constant hunger for information, even the most minute, unimportant information (and who spent long hours gobbling Serial and all associated clues, media, and write-ups), I figured what the hell. At least this was a fictional story, without all the baggage of digging up info on the lives of real people, and maybe it would be fun.
But it turns out the trailer reveals little of Seifert’s performance as the interviewee, which is richly nuanced. The clips, some short and some long, take on much greater resonance when followed by more, and still more — nearly 300 clips in all — and throughout that jumbled, nonlinear journey, the player is treated to Seifert’s great range. Details matter here; some are scripted, and some are dependent on Seifert’s performance, but any little thing has the potential to carry great weight in this story. Players are rewarded for noticing. For experimenting.
Even the interface reveals much, as curious players will discover. The game screen looks very old-fashioned, as it mimics CRT monitors, but everything within it is interactive: players can move the windows around and even peek into the recycle (rubbish) bin to see what’s been left behind. The screen suffers a great deal of glare, which the player can turn off, but it’s not recommended. Even the screen itself reveals answers in Her Story, and dealing with the glare is better than missing out on chunks of story. And the story? One of the more interesting I’ve seen in a game.
Already there’s been much discussion of whether or not Her Story is really a game. After all, the player can’t really fail, or rather, the only way to fail is to get stuck and/or stop. There’s no losing or game over for the wrong search queries. There are only more videos, videos maybe already watched, and while I haven’t yet finished, I know some and can guess more, and it doesn’t seem as though there’s any sort of neat, tied-up ending waiting at the end of the experience, either. No, Her Story is all about the journey, about watching Seifert’s eyes and body language, about making connections, and about the messiness of humanity. Much here seems like a lie, and it might be — but it might also be the truth, too. Sometimes, it’s both. And because of that, I think we’ll be debating this one for some time to come.
As for me, I think Her Story is most definitely a game, and a very addictive one with far more depth and intrigue than I dared hope for. With a strong narrative and great acting, maybe even the “walking sim” haters will jump on this one, digging into the database to solve the death of Simon Smith. It’s an experience worth the time.
