A FMV “video game”, ultimately Her Story is really nothing more than a movie with a very strange interface. This pretty much points to the primary flaw in Her Story, as the actual story being told by the videos is best viewed sequentially, but the interface of the game makes it so that viewing the videos sequentially is extremely unlikely.
Hannah is the main character of Her Story, and indeed, the only one who shows up in the videos. The central conceit of the game is that Hannah was a murder suspect in 1994, and the protagonist is going through an old police database, wherein the videos are sorted by keywords in their transcripts. This sounds like a clever idea, but in practice, it doesn’t really work very well at all; beyond being very confusing, it suffers from the fact that it is entirely possible to search for the wrong keyword and end up stumbling across the game’s central twist five minutes in.
Unsurprisingly, I did exactly this by simply searching for the most innocuous of the names I had come across first (for the record, it was the name of one of Hannah’s childhood friends). This resulted in me happening across a video which spoiled the game’s central plot twist, and consequently I spent the rest of the game trying to piece together everything else in the hopes of finding another twist, and then failing to find one.
The net result of the search interface is that you are likely to watch lots of garbage scenes, with odd scenes which are really important thrown in between them. Some of the videos are nothing more than Hannah saying “no”, while others are minute-long monologues explaining crucial plot or character details.
Worst of all, if you actually watch the videos in order, they follow the standard variances of a plot; the rise and fall of action as the police officers piece things together before Hannah finally explains exactly what is going on in the final interview. As a movie, it makes sense.
But as a video game, it makes no sense at all.
It has other flaws as well – as a murder mystery game, one would think that little details would be pretty important, but as it turns out, the people who made the videos didn’t actually pay much attention to time constraints. On many occaisions, something happens – such as a character changing clothing, or taking a ponygraph – which ignores the necessary setup time, with the videos happening too close together in time. At first, I had assumed that these little mistakes was related to the plot twist, but eventually I realized it was simple laziness on the part of the game creators.
If the plot was actually viewed in order, it might be passable, though the awkward interface of the game still would make it annoying. And if parts had been locked off until you had figured some stuff out, it might have worked. But as-is, the thing is kind of a mess, and while the central idea wasn’t a bad one, the UI and erratic pacing as a result of it being made into a “game” (which it really isn’t any more than searching for stuff on YouTube is a “game”) makes it hard to really get into it properly. It is possible to spoil the entire plot of the game within five minutes, and a lot of the videos end up feeling a lot like filler, especially when viewed out of context.
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