Her Story

This is a difficult one to review, really; any spoilers will be completely pointless for anybody that's played the game and will completely ruin the experience for anybody that hasn't.

Her Story puts you in front of a computer mocked up to look like Windows 95, and presents you with a database of 271 videos, ranging from anywhere between 2 seconds and 2 minutes in length, all of which feature a woman being interviewed by police over seven different days. You can search through the database with keywords, as the game demonstrates to you by giving you your first search term - 'murder'. Your quest is to trawl through these videos to find out what happened to the woman's husband, either by searching for words you know will be relevant to a murder investigation, or by learning new terms that are relevant to the woman's life by watching the videos you've already found.

It doesn't sound like much, but gradually unraveling the strands of the plot is utterly enthralling - I thought about 15-20 minutes had passed when I looked at a clock and realized I'd been playing it for an hour. Telling you any more than that would be doing the game a disservice, really; the power of the game comes from pulling together the disparate, non-chronological strands you find and trying to work out what happened, as the game continues to hint gently at major bombshells. On two separate occasions I was convinced I'd figured out what the key to the plot was, only to be rebuffed by finding no results to my search terms, or to find that the word I was searching for was only returning very vague videos that teased, rather than revealed, the answers I was looking for. It's a great concept, impeccably put together, brilliantly acted (though it doesn't seem so at first, for reasons that will be obvious to anybody that's finished it....), and well worth replaying to spot all the clues you missed first time out. It doesn't take long to become so wrapped up in this woman's life that you almost forget that you're trying to solve a murder; trying to figure out her childhood becomes just as much of a priority.

Frustrating when you want to unequivocally recommend a game but can't really let on why you're recommending it, isn't it?