Her Story

I played the game a longer time ago, but I remember it was a unique experience, unique concept and mechanics. You need to figure out search keywords in order to discover fragments of videos, in order to gather the available data related to a murder case. And then it's your turn to interpret the data and come up with an interpretation.
I don't think I have ever played anything quite like this.

Reviewing dailies meta strat. I like the twist and want to play Immortality now.

I love the concept and it's executed really well here, setting wise. Surprised at how short it was, though it would probably get a bit more tedious.

Wow, I started playing this game due to a random recommendation and a steam sale. I was not expecting much from the game but after an hour I found myself engrossed in the story. The game is definitely best played blind as it will give you a unique path towards discovering what happened. The achievements are fun and to find the last couple clips I watched a compilation of the whole set of clips in order to finally piece together anything that I missed. Some may not like how basic the concept is but for less than 10 dollars it is definitely worth playing if you like games in this genre or if you enjoy solving mysteries.

Creative, intriguing and thought-provoking. But it doesn't excel in none of these aspects. It's more of an experience than a game. For those looking for a different experience

Even after "finishing" the game, you still have many versions to the story, each with it's own set of problems. You are then left to make sense of this case on your own. The game has no "official" or canonical ending.

Very thoughtful game which leaves you to investigate and draw your own conclusions, very engaging.

I recommend Her Story for investigation fans!

Her Story has you uncover a twisting narrative by searching keywords in a database. The cool part is that you only get to see the first 5 clips by chronological order, so the obvious terms have too many hits, so you don't see the key information from the later clips. Instead, you have to find your way to that information by trying various terms you hear in the clips and following those lines of terms.

The game doesn't have a fixed ending. You can try to uncover every clip, or you can wrap up when you feel you have the whole story.

Innovative concept of the game, nicely engaging with my natural obsession of discovering all pieces of the story! The story itself was crazy enough to make its discovery rather entangled exercise. BUT. It's *no good* to set its own rules by the game itself and then playing a dirty trick with the player by deviating them! (Without spoiling, will just say that I'm pointing my blaming finger at YOU, lie detector!) I surely wasn't amused by being tricked this way and admit that it has made the game not 100% solvable for me by means of pure deduction and reasoning, hence had to search for spoilers for cracking that part.

P.S. Switching screen style to modern look in the options was a GENIUS feature saving my eyes from prospect of excruciating pain! Applauding the game designers for that.

7 guitars out 10

nearly a decade later and this game still stands as a unique experience. i always look for games that will fill the gap in the genre this game aimed to fill. leaved you wanting more, both to its favor and its detriment. a must for those who play games wanting to really feel like a detective.

What I Liked:
- Fun to play with others
- Unique gameplay
- Took enough hours to be worth the sale price of $5
- Had both overt and subtle hints to push you along, so you never got stuck

What I Didn't Like
- The ending was not as satisfying as I wanted it to be
- There is a segment that you can't get to yourself through keyword searches that seems like it will be super exciting but ends up being a let down.

Overall, a really really awesome game that I want more people to play, so I can talk to them about it.

Search through a database of short clips to piece together a story. I don't see a whole lot of replay value unless you want to see everything, but it was fun enough to go in blind.

Tried this game out on a whim because it was on such a heavy sale, only cost me $2. It can be a little confusing at first but it doesn't take long to get you absorbed into the story and its mysteries. I found it very compelling story telling and have grown fond of this creator's style.

You are spending most of your time just watching short clips, there isn't much to the actual game play itself which can be a turn off for some and that's totally valid. It won't be for everyone.

Your main interaction is thinking of keywords to type in order to find more information and unlock more clips. I found it a very nice casual experience. If you like interesting mysteries this is worth checking out, especially on sale.

If you end up enjoying it, I highly recommend Immortality as well, the creator's bigger game with many similarities. Still playing through Telling Lies so can't recommend or not recommend that yet.

i like the form factor!! i can see how the word association mechanic paved the way for the future more complex game immortality. the acting is very good though, which it has to be for this game to work, since it's just the one actor talking into the camera. she's compelling.

one thing is that the game very much ends when you choose to end it and walk away. That feels kind of underwhelming and anticlimatic especially after I pieced together the twist halfway through, but it makes sense within the framing of the game. The reality is that you won't ever get every answer to every question and you have to make peace with that.

anyway love experimental stuff like this

This is a fun investigative game, where you watch a woman being interrogated through a few days and how she changes on every day, in many ways. Very good acting and story.

Such a neat little story game. Somewhat similar in theme to The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker - but with a different spin on it. Really great, recommend to try it

Bought on sale for $0.99. Regularly on deep discount for $1.99.

You have to know what you're getting yourself into for this game. Her Story asks you to literally TAKE NOTES like a DETECTIVE to experience the joy of discovery in this game. If you want an easy to enjoy story this is not it. If you like to uncover mysteries and find clues then you will probably like this. But first really, REALLY ask yourself if you want to have a notebook and pen out to enjoy this game. There is a way to cheat the system, and there are some things that don't make sense, but it is an enjoyable experience. Also, don't play with just a Steam Deck you want a proper mouse and keyboard for convenience.

This is most certainly not a game for everyone, but if it's for you, it really hits hard. I recommend it if you like puzzles and stories. At first it can be kind of confussing but once you get going and start connecting the dots, the feeling of discovery is amazing. To me, it felt as rewarding as the feeling of discovery in The Outer Wilds (which is the highest appraisal I can give to a game)

The player is given short clips taken from interviews of a murder subject. The clips have to be put in order to assess guilt or innocence, It is fascinating.

Honestly, Her Story was the type of game that I was sure I'd love, and desperately wanted to give a positive review. I mean, an award winning indie mystery game? Count me in!

Unfortunately, though, even after my short 2.5 hours to complete the game, seeing 100% of the available content, I was left disappointed. The narrative wasn't very compelling, and while it left me with a few questions to think about, I didn't find them interesting enough of questions to ponder once I closed the game.

Any developer that tries to integrate player-led, nonlinear storytelling into their games is taking a risk, since every player will likely experience the game differently. Unfortunately for me, this meant revealing all of the major plot points and questions within my first 20 minutes or so of play, and spending the next 2 hours scrambling for tiny details, all of which validated my understanding and none of which posed any new questions. It didn't feel like there were any red herrings or big reveals since I'd already learned the biggest secrets the game had to offer.

I can only assume that I had an unlucky draw in how the nonlinear storytelling guided me around the game, resulting in an unsatisfying experience and resolution. I hope others have better experiences with the game, but I can't reccomend it and wish I had spent my 2.5 hours elsewhere.

I dont like it. It's supposed to work like a puzzle game, but it's either impossible and you just need to get things out of your ahh, or you can just do a pretty simple thing and you'll just have all the videos in a sequence. Then it's just a very long tiktok videos, without any real entertainment.

Maybe it's fun for some, wasn't fun for me

Pretty short and simple, but Her Story's unique presentation and investigation mechanics makes it worth checking out for those who want to see innovation in the interactive medium.

This game is like a breath of fresh air in the FMVverse. Unlike many other games in this genre, here you don't choose from any options and decide how the story should progress, instead all you do is type keywords into a video database and watch clips. That's literally it, nothing else to it.

Once you discover a certain percentage of the clips, the game ends. It's up to you if you want to find the rest of the clips - you'll be rewarded with an achievement at least.

The game doesn't have a whole lot going for it, for less than a euro it's alright tho.

Great concept, but needs more explanation on the database thing, we realized way too late how we should use it, so we kind of lost some parts of the story.

the game fulfills its entire purpose in enhancing the curiosity as well the logical and critical intelligence of the player

Cool game, but generally unsatisfying in both gameplay and story, due to the unique premises and way it's all structured (and also the story just feels a little contrived). Still, points for innovation and good presentation.

Story: ★★★★☆
Music: ★★☆☆☆
Gameplay: ★★★☆☆
Overall: ★★★☆☆
A story of all time for sure

Let me preface this in saying this is not a typical video game.

You watch video clips of a police interrogation taken place in the early 90's of a girl being questioned about an unsolved murder. Being that the lead character is SO unreliable, you must try to decide what inevitably happened by combing the database.

You cannot die.

You play this game to unravel the story and find out just what happened.

While I wouldn't consider this Sam Barlow's best game, its still a good and interesting time especially for those looking for a thought provoking experience. The truth isn't spelled out for you and is open to interpretation, but enough information is provided that you can formulate your own depiction of the narrative. So not his best work, but still decent.

There's no clear tutorial to the game. Just a bunch of videos you find via keywords and work out wtf happened on your own. Perhaps I'm missing the point here but I wouldn't go as far as galling this a game.

Neonoir hypertextual Lynchesque experience.

If you know, what those weird words mean, you will love the game.

i thought i was so smart by searching dates instead of key words so i could watch it all in order - and while it was still a good experience i wish i had actually played the game how it was intended

Do not play this at midnight. The reflections of the screen in the game were about to kill me...

This was much more of an interactive story than a game, but wow did it engross me. You are given access to a bunch video files that hold all the interview tapes of a woman whose husband is missing. That's all that the game is. You search the database and watch short clips until you're satisfied. It's a very open-ended experience.

However, the storytelling is incredible. You somehow watch all these clips and slowly piece together the whole story off your own intuition. Everyone's experience is going to be different, but mine was filled with shocks and despair. I believed in Viva Seifert's performance and emotionally latched on to the character she portrayed. It was exhilarating in the most mundane way. I filled pages of notes while trying to wrap my head around the story.

An easy recommendation, even if your experience is half of mine.

Her Story is a king of puzzle game where you have to explore database and visualise hundreds of videos to find who's the real killer. The story and the gameplay is really original and the graphics are cool, like if you're working on an old computer.
It worth it and I recommend it. 💗

Hard to call a game, but this was a very immersive experience. There pretty much is no "gameplay", with your actions limited to what you can do with a minimalistic PC in a database, CRT-era.
I imagine many will bounce off of this but I loved the puzzle of writing down every search term that comes out of "her" mouth and searching for more clues. The acting was incredible and the story interesting.

A fantastic and unique experience that requires you to focus and remember details. It's not really a game you have to "solve" so much as experience and come to some internal satisfaction that you understand the possibilities present.

A rather unique murder mystery and a rather unique narrative gameplay mechanic, even though both somewhat lose their appeal after the main twist has been served. The story, despite being presented as a precise puzzle to be solved, ends up open to interpretation on many fronts, while the search process becomes pretty random, with you just stumbling upon new stuff after trying different words instead of actively following the leads. However, opening the first 40-50% of the database is an extremely engaging experience that makes the whole thing worth it.

The #1 reason why this works, though, is clearly Viva Seifert and her thoroughly awesome performance. You’d think she’s some sort of a high-tier method actor (wikipedia says she’s primarily a musician) with how convincingly and passionately (yet never in an over-the-top manner) every line is delivered. Sometimes it’s not even the writing itself but her tone and body language that spurs your inner detective. If FMV games live and die by the strength of their cast, then Her Story was lucky to have such a talented lead.

This is for me the first time ever playing a film like video game, with a really capturing story. Through the different snippets of life unlocked by searching for the correct terms in a database you slowly get to know who she is and was her story is all about. Engaging story that also triggers some sort of compulsive arranging behaviour in me, I was trying to arrange all the clips in sequence of their time dates, which was totally unnecessary and probably unhelpful.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this kind of game as much as I did, and am looking forward to experience the next two games by Sam Barlow.

HER STORY, NOTHING MORE
Enjoyable format, but it boils down to finding just a few tapes
I was hoping side characters would play a more important role
Most people will enjoy it 4/5

This is a pretty great "game" in that there is a mystery to be understood. But it also is more like an "experience" in that there is no clear ending and solution. You explore. You theorize. You gather evidence. (All through watching movie clips, obviously.) But there are no trumpets and fanfare at the end when you sweep back the mystery and reveal the truth.
Enter this with curiosity rather than a desire for completion. As the saying goes "suffering is cause by the gap between expectations and reality." Reality is this is a great experience. If your expectations are that you will come to some grand conclusion and get a gold star... you will be disappointed. You are NOT a detective... you are a guest exploring old police files.
Oh... and for real... when you are searching for a direct quote do NOT use the quotes! You search by using the single quote ("upsidedown comma" - or whatever the game calls it). So search by saying: 'she said' not by saying "she said". You're welcome.

The story to Her Story is pretty good; there's some bits I don't like but that's mostly subjective. The gameplay, however, doesn't ever really evolve past what you meet it at and devolves from piecing together a mostly interesting tale into a half-trial-and-error slog. 100%ing the game has badly diminishing returns after you've already seen all the most substantial plot threads and being expected to complete it without a guide is absurd, ending up a guessing game for what common words you haven't tried yet before giving in. A very interesting concept, execution lacking.
4/10

Singular experience that creates a real sense that you're on a case, solving a crime. Database searching is appropriately clunky, providing leaps of disparate details that you slowly weave together. You could 'win' the game right away if you knew the exact handful of keywords to search, but the fun is in keenly observing and extracting the story.

Great, original game, that gives you that sense of being smart when you start piecing together the story.
It's short, and some moments of your playthrough might feel a little frustrating because of the way the game is structured, but it's fine, because the originality of the gameplay loop is worth the drawbacks it brings.

It's the joy of piecing together the puzzle and form your own image of truth. The game doesn't really ask you to go in all the way until you reach a single ultimate truth, and that's where I like its attitude of openness.

The premise was interesting, and I'm glad I got to try it out. This is one of the first time I've been confronted with what it means to be "done" with a game. While I enjoy playing roguelikes, I have a hard time deciding when I'm satisfied with an experience. If I can just stop this colonist from dying of their infection, or save this island from bug aliens, I'll... what? I'll stop playing? I'll take a break? With Her Story, I never encountered credits. Sometimes music may change, but there was no direct path before me or specific questmarker. I had to find my own path and put the story together on my own and while I wasn't the biggest fan of this style of game intially, it gave me alot to think about from when I resolved to "finish" every game in my library. Would I try to get every ending? Would I try to get all trophies even if it meant my only reward was a full bar and one last trophy? Gameplay wise if you like writing queries and analyzing video footage or piecing together stories on your own, you'll probably enjoy this game alot. If you're looking for something that reassures you that you don't have to play it anymore, this may not appeal to you. Oftentimes games are more than happy to encourage us to keep playing and gathering collectibles, or getting every trophy or weapon, but at the end of the day there are some calls that only you can make. Like putting down the controller, or swapping the disc out to play something else. I'd recommend this game on a sale if you're unsure if it'll be something you'll like. Despite not having played Her Story in months, my experience with it rises from the back of my brain whenever I'm deciding which game to "finish" next.

I love it when the game is original, and this one definitely is. A little gem to conquer in the evening.

There are certain things that CANNOT be ambiguous in your game, and deleting all your progress is one of them.

It's a good game, but DO NOT click the "delete session data" button thinking it will reset the queue you've built up in the bottom section.

terrible game, can't imagine playing it longer than i had to for the achievements. no introduction, no actual plot, all you do is watch 1-15 second clips of video of a woman telling her story but you are given no actual reason to do so.

story 3/10
Gameplay 0/10

just finished the game.

Story: 7.5/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Music: 6/10
Art/ grapich: 6/10

Despite having heard a lot about Her Story, the game still turned out to be very different from what I thought it would be like. I don't mean this in a negative way, but if you are, like me, ready to start this game noting down every detail the protagonist mentions, to solve a case where you have to combine information to get to the truth, you might be a little bit disappointed to find that the game doesn't really require you to answer any investigative questions by the end of it, and, (if you're persistent enough) will very much tell you what happened, just by merit of watching through all interview clips. I still very much loved playing the game, and I will explain why, but I want to preface this review by saying that I had a somewhat different idea of how the investigation will work, and was a bit disappointed because of that. I think that maybe Sam Barlow's second game "Telling Lies", might work more like that, but I am not really certain if it is.

Here's what I already knew about Her Story before playing it: You play as a sort of investigator, who is using an old PC which has a bizarre database program installed, that is filled with archived police footage. I would guess there are about 200-300 very short video clips in that database, in chronological order, of 7 police interviews done with a woman, who is interviewed for an investigation on a murder. The clips contain the mystery of how the murder suspect died and the whole series of events that lead up to it, and if you would just watch them in order, you would know what happened by the end of it.

The catch is, that you cannot watch the video clips in your preferred order - you cannot see *all* clips at once - the database program that you are using works over a search bar, where you have to look up keywords or sentences that are being said in a clip, to find that clip. Say, if you type in "murder", the program returns all clips where the word "murder" is being said.

Now, you might think, "Okay, then I will just look for a word that is sure to be in every clip, like 'a' or 'the'" - but that is where the second catch comes in: the program only returns the first 5 chronological entries that come up, when searching for a word. So reaching the later videos in the database forces you to find out enough about the case, so that you can search for keywords that will actually help you get to later sections of the investigation.

I personally really liked the experience, even though I was a bit too prepared to solve the mystery. By the end, I had the whole timeline figured out, and could answer any possible question I anticipated the game to ask me, but it's not like this is in vain by the end of the game. The game still is focussed on finding out what happened, and telling the bizarre story of the murder case that is being presented. I was just a bit disappointed that the game handed me basically all of the information without me having to "work" for it.

The way this game is structured means you could accidentally find very critical information immediately, or it could mean that you fall for an intentional deception for a while. No matter which way around it happens, you will always reach the truth after a while, but the experience is probably very different in each playthrough. I had some really wild experiences with the game, just because of the order I found clips in. But, like any crime-focussed game, this probably doesn't have a lot of replay-value and is more interested in delivering a one-time experience, which might lead to some players having a very underwhelming experience, if they find out too much way to soon, or nothing at all for a while.

Sam Barlow's games are so good with atmosphere. Watching these clips, listening to the game's music, the eerie sounds of sitting on an old PC in some archive, creates a very sad and melancholy atmosphere, and it invokes a lot more feeling than you would expect from tapes of an old police investigation. Added to this is that I think that the actress who plays Hannah is so much fun to watch, and it really makes the experience a lot more fun.

But, if you already have played Immortality before this, I don't think you will be as impressed as someone who has no experience with Sam Barlow's games, because I think that Immortality learned a lot from what didn't work in this game, and you will also have a better feeling of the direction this game might go into, which, I have to say, made me see the "biggest" twist the game has coming, more than I would have seen it coming if I wouldn't have played that game. I think there's less to "chew" on in Her Story than in Immortality in terms of themes and artistic intent, but that didn't mean that I disliked the game, or that it bored me, but if you have the option to, I would recommend playing this before you play Immortality, which is, a very different experience, but arguably the better, and more complex version of this game concept.

Overall, I think I would recommend this to everyone who is looking for a really unique experience in playing a game and discovering a story. Even if you already played Immortality before this, I think this is totally worth checking out, but I would say that if you want to pick this up, just because you want to crack a case, then maybe this isn't the game for you. I bought it while it was absurdly cheap, but I think paying 10€ for this normally is totally fair too.