GAME CLEAR No. 200 -- Her Story

Her Story (2015, Windows/macOS/Mobile)

Developer: Sam Barlow
Publisher: Sam Barlow
Clear Version: macOS
Clear Platform: 2023 Macbook Pro
Clear Date: 12/1/24

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Why should I care?
Sam Barlow’s first independent effort presents its narrative in a fun and creative way and contributed to an FMV game revival.

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Here I am again with another game that heavily features live-action footage. What’s going on here? That’s a mystery for you to solve.

If that doesn’t sound like fun, maybe solving the mystery of Her Story will. Brainchild of independent developer Sam Barlow, Her Story dumps you, the player, in the seat of an outdated police department computer. It contains a database of police interviews of a single subject from a decades-old case. All you are given is a README on how to search this database and told that you have as much time as you need to do so. It’s a pretty effective setup, and the morsels of information you receive in each clip are generally interesting enough to keep you watching until you figure out just what the hell happened with this case.

Rather than just dumping a bunch of videos for you to watch through chronologically (that’d be too easy), the game tells you that all of the videos are searchable by way of the transcripts of their contents. That is, if the interviewee says a word in the video and you search for it, that video will return in the results. The only catch is it can only return five videos at once, so you can’t just search for “the” and get nearly everything back. Oh, and the recordings of the actual questions of the interview seem to have been lost to time for some reason. Tough luck.

In all, these systems and constraints may be a contrivance that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s a pretty compelling way to present a non-linear narrative in a way that will be different for every player who ever sits down with this game. The information available to the player will grow based on what words that player latches onto in a given interview clip (or otherwise comes up with as random guesses). Some things may be red herrings, some may be critically important.

Each video is live-action footage of a real actor (Viva Seifert) talking to police. The clips are shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio and were run through a VCR to give them that real ’90s look Barlow wanted. Seifert’s performance is nothing special, but it’s competent enough to work here, and I’m sure Barlow didn’t exactly have A-list budget anyhow. It was a rather bold decision for Barlow at a time when FMV games really were rather dead, and it’s one he evidently decided to make based on the fact that he didn’t think he could map his actor’s performance to a 3D model in a satisfying way. Fair enough! I think it’s quite effective, and if anything, I was surprised to find that Barlow had initially conceived of it for rendered models in the first place.

In any case, he did not. The result is essentially a little movie that you watch in a fucked up order. Somehow it works! I found it especially enjoyable to play with a couple friends, since it engendered some heartened discussion on what leads to follow next.

Do I think the eponymous story of Her Story is great? Frankly no. It has some fun ambiguity, and its discovery mechanism is fun, but I ultimately found its plot a bit too implausible no matter how you interpret its events. But it’s definitely not a bad bit of entertainment. So far, Barlow has gone on to make two more FMV games, so he obviously thinks he’s onto something. I may not love Her Story, but I think I can at least agree with him on that. I’ve also played one of his subsequent games in the time it took me to finally get around to this blog post, so I’ll be sure to let you know if I thought he was cooking with that one as soon as I can.