Her Story

Her Story

Steam - World - Title card.

Developer Sam Barlow Publisher Sam Barlow Published 2015-06-23 Platforms Android, iOS, Macintosh, Windows Genres Full-motion video, Passive puzzle, Puzzle Themes Law enforcement, Mystery Distribution Commercial

Her Story is mystery puzzle video game developed and published by Sam Barlow for iOS on 2015-06-23, and then ported to various other platforms.

The player sits at a police terminal with hours of interrogation footage of a woman who appears to be a suspect in a murder trial. By searching for various words that appear in the dialog of the videos, you're able to slowly uncover what really happened.

Personal

Own?	Yes. On Steam.
Won?	Yes. 100% of videos and with 12/13 achievements (missing reversi tie).
Finished	2017-06-20.

I bought this game in a Humble Indie Bundle and played through the game and beat it. By "beat it," I mean, I discovered all the videos in the final interrogation and found out who the murderer was, then saw the credits after logging out.

Review

6	4	7	5	2

Best Version: Windows

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The game was certainly interesting, and I enjoyed trying to make sense of the whole affair by digging through old footage.
• This was certainly a creative game. I had never played anything that used this type of mechanic before.
• The display was very well made. After looking at it for awhile, I really felt like I needed to clean the dust and hair off my monitor, and was getting annoyed by the glare. But, I liked seeing the woman's reflection at certain points.

Bad

• The computer database system is probably the worst retrieval system in the world by not allowing you to simply view the videos in chronological order.
• Some of the videos contain very little dialogue and don't contain any keywords, making them impossible to find in a dutiful search. There is a section in the last interrogation which consists of nothing but "yes" and "no," which you can't find through normal searching.
• Several of the achievements seemed entirely arbitrary. Spilled coffee, fennel? WTF?
• Since there isn't anything preventing you from stumbling on the final interrogation videos, you probably will. Thankfully, they don't quite make sense until you've learned more about the earlier videos, but it short-cuts a lot of the videos. If the game had made certain video classified, and required a password that was accessed later in the game, it would prevent this problem.
• I would have preferred if the ending conversation required you to answer several key questions proving that you actually understood what happened before showing you the ending, rather than just allowing you to say, "yes."

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

Screenshots

• 

  The police computer's desktop.

• 

  An interrogation video playing.

Fan Art

• 

  Comic by Nate Robinson.

Videos

Trailer.

Longplay.

Representation

Strong female character?	Pass	Hannah is a very deep and troubled character.
Bechdel test?	Fail	No women talk to each other.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	Every character is white.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Cheat

This isn't so much a cheat, but rather, an exploit of the search mechanic. You are allowed to enter your own text on each video, but the custom text is blank by default. You can also search empty text, which will match every video that you haven't added custom text to. So, by adding text to every video you watch, and searching for empty text, you can effectively watch every video in order.

Links