Her Story is an odd one.
The framing device is that you’re accessing a mid '90s police interrogation database, which contains video clips from the interviews done with a woman over multiple sessions. The database has been corrupt though, and you only have access to her answers, not to the questions asked by the police. The unstated goal is to view the clips and find out what happened.
There is no actual interaction, so the basic structure is very similar to e.g. Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. The main twist in how the set of videos available to view is determined.
The old archive computer has a search engine, which when given one or more search terms produces the 5 chronologically earliest clips that contain all the terms. You view those clips, and then make a new search. The restriction to show only the first 5 clips is the core driver that makes sure that the game doesn’t just degenerate to just linearly seeing the story from start to finish. To access the later clips, you’ll need to find terms that are present late in the story, but either absent or very rare early on.
I felt Her Story suffered from some structural problems:
First, it’s great that the narrative is non-linear. But as implemented, it’s way too easy to stumble to clips telling too much too early. I think I accidentally found the core of the mystery somewhere around word 7 or 8. It wasn’t that I was probing for that thing specifically. I searched for a fairly innocent word, and that clip happened to have some major information and a bunch of very juicy keywords to continue on with. I then had almost full coverage of the most revealing sequence while still having very spotty coverage of the bulk of the story.
That’s not what I want from a mystery investigation. It doesn’t leave me feeling clever about having interpreted the clues right, and pursuing the right lines of inquiry. Instead of having the drive to slowly uncover the mystery, I was trying to fill in the blanks just to make sure there wasn’t something important there that I’d missed.
This seems like a fundamental issue with the use of a full text index as the way of finding the next bit of data. It’s just going to be too hard to make reaching the later clips challenging but possible.
Second, Her Story is very aggressive about giving the player no closure. How do you know that you’re done with the story? Well, you just decide that you probably know what happened and stop play. How do you know whether you got it right, that you got the full story? You don’t. You can’t even find it out online, since there are two competing theories both with rabid supporters. (With the outcome that the inevitable plot holes have been revealed, and the only way any theory works is if you just arbitrarily reject some information as untrue while accepting other bits). I find this deeply unsatisfying in a game like this.
But despite these issues, Her Story was a decent enough way to spend a couple of hours. The mechanics and storytelling of the game aren’t really as innovative as the’d been made out to be, but the FMV really carries the day. I liked the acting. And I really liked having to interpret the videos for visual and behavioral clues, not just relying on text. It really adds a lot to the experience. (And must also be really hard to execute well, especially for an indie game).
Incidentally, the “old computer archives” framing device is brilliant. The usual problem with this kind of non-interactive structure is the dissonance between supposedly running an investigation, but not actually getting to ask the right questions. It’s infuriating. You know exactly which bit of information is needed, and there are characters that could provide that information. The bumbling detective refuses to ask the question, and you have no control over it. But when the investigation happened a long time ago, and you’re just looking into the case now? Suddenly it’s the most natural thing in the world that you can’t ask the obvious question.