Sometimes I can be really creative where instead of watching an awful movie on a "Netflix and chill"night, I can convince my girlfriend to interact with a videogame or in this case an assortment of videoclips. It was a Saturday night where we found ourselves exhausted of recommendations. We're into suspense and mystery, mostly, but I was spending a lot of time digging and getting nowhere movie wise. Then I remembered that unique indie title nominated at The Game Awards Show of 2015: "Her Story."Some kind of interactive movie mystery. I thought it sounded great and took the nomination to heart. After all, the panels for the award show gave the GOTY to The Witcher 3, so their heads had to be on straight.
Her Story is played on your computer screen to show another computer screen, this one depicting an old desktop from the 90s and used as a terminal to look up video records. The records pertain to a case involving a woman and the disappearance of a man, with the keyword "MURDER"already typed in the search bar to get you started. It sets the tone, implies a goal, and successfully got us to buy in right away. Already knee deep into playing detective, and we haven't even watched a clip yet!
The queries result in up to 5 different video clips at a time that use the search term in the interviewee's dialogue. I typed in "cats"as a try at humor for our first attempt at the game, but was surprisingly met by several clips of the woman talking about the size of the cat flap on her house's backdoor. The search query worked! Though I have to say I noticed the actresses's script was laden with unnatural keyword placements, so as to make it easy to find the clips we were after. I understand it makes the game playable, but it also lessened the magic a bit hearing her dialogue so carefully written.
I'm starting with a nitpick when really the whole experience came tumbling down much before I noticed the smaller issues. It's immediately apparent the poor woman can't act. It's not even her delivery but rather the body language. I assume it's incredibly difficult to do this sort of performance of talking to a camera and trying to make hundreds of video clips interesting. So what we end up with is a lady with overemphasized gestures whenever she is frustrated, deep in thought, angry, or lying. It's a wincing level of terrible, maybe less noticed in bad slasher films but now demanding 100% of the viewer's attention in interview clips.
From the gameplay perspective we broke this thing in less than 5 minutes. We caught on to a keyword, tried our luck, and got a full confession and twist reveal from the subject. At first we were awestruck, because it was actually a creepy plot point and we thought Her Story was just opening up to something grander. Foreboding music and subtle visual effects haunted the screen now, and we were hooked. An hour later, however, we came to understand that we had really done it in those first 5 minutes. There was nothing new or interesting to pursue beyond gathering further details about the story's twist, which was absolutely mundane knowing that the mystery was more or less solved from the start.
But I defend cheesy B-rate films and amateur performances rather openly and I do stand by Her Story's ambition. It's very cool in concept and easily gets an A in a highschool drama course. And I would tell those kids they are on to great things -- not drop everything and go into production. But I'd be stupid. They're a best of 2015 nominee for indie games! And me? I'm just a dude who didn't like "Her Story."