Her Story is an award winning video game centered around investigating a crime using archival footage. You are sat as an unknown protagonist in front of a computer screen, and asked to piece together the details of a cold case and find out who committed the crime, why did they commit the crime, and fundamentally - what the crime even is; you are told basically nothing and sent spelunking within the database. If this description interested you, I more than welcome you to buy the game and experience it for yourself before continuing.

The game prides itself on its non-linearity, as you are just given a bunch of archival footage which is intentionally clunky to access. You can’t just watch the clips front to back, you can only search for clips based on the words in their transcript, and you can only see a handful at a time. It sounded interesting and innovative, so I decided to give it a shot, and man oh man - I was underwhelmed.

It’s nothing spectacular honestly. Non-linearity is an interesting concept, but it wound with me slamming my face into both plot-twists within the first ten minutes. The story you discover is fine but pretty standard. I expected more of something that won that many awards, as I finished the whole experience feeling like I’ve missed something fundamental. However I still am glad I played the game, because the things I disliked were so central to the experience I got a better understanding of what I do and do not like within games.

I played it about a year back, but only got reminded of it two weeks ago when talking to a friend who also didn’t “get it”, and within that conversation I think we reached two major issues with the experience as a whole: its interactivity, and its poor conveyance.

Defining what “a game” is is an unholy mess, but traditionally it’s expected that a game has some form of interaction with its audience. Rather than the audience being spectators who at most interact with the media within their own heads, games demand the players actively modify it in various ways. Her Story does not do that: you fairly passively consume the video files premade for you, and the most interaction you have with the game’s contents is analogous to the interaction you have with a good detective book. If the interaction is this low, does it still count as “a game”? Many have argued that it doesn’t.

I disagree with this notion, as I think the game’s “searching through the database” counts as interaction and is central to the experience as a whole, but it does point to the fact this game is so passive that some people forget they did anything beyond watch video clips. This ties into the wider gaming discussion regarding what has been derogatorily nicknamed “walking simulators” - how much agency can you take away from a player before the game becomes almost entirely predetermined? The assumption at the core of prior discussion is that more agency is necessarily good, and less agency is necessarily bad, but I don’t think that’s what’s important, really.

If you make a game non-agential, that’s fine, but it should be a core part of the experience aswell. Games are assumed to revolve around interaction in some form or another, and choosing to remove the interaction is allowed, but the game should still discuss that lack of interaction; games like Spec Ops: The Line or The Last of Us do so wonderfully. Her Story removes much of the interaction but it doesn’t replace it with anything else, leaving an odd interaction-shaped hole. This may be why some players feel it’s “not really a game.”

Moving to the next topic: if you don’t know what Conveyance is, it is a term that refers to the way information is conveyed from one entity to another. In this case - “how does a game tell you what to do?” Conveyance doesn’t have to be as blatant as a tutorial NPC nagging you to go slay 200 goblins to move forward, but is often present in more subtle ways, such as a dazzling ray of light shining through a crack in the castle wall, conveniently pointing you towards the level exit. Good conveyance, like most user experience related concepts, is something that goes unnoticed when done well but sticks out like a sore thumb when done improperly. In this case, Her Story’s conveyance pretended to look away as I ran into six different garden hoes in rapid succession.

Your method of interaction is constant throughout the game, and extremely powerful: you can look for any string of text in any of the recordings. However with all of this power comes the question of “what the hell do I look for?” And the game doesn’t give you any particularly good directions to go for. You start the game with a preset search term, giving you a few recordings to start out with, which is appreciated, but still flawed. In these recordings there are so many terms that appear to have equal importance that within the first few minutes you’re already bombarded with overchoice. You pick a term at random, get a new set of recordings, and get bombarded with even more! At some point I stopped having a list of terms to “check later” and just started chiseling my way through the archives whenever a word that sounded particularly suspicious popped up; that’s how I got the game’s biggest spoilers within a few minutes of play.

When you have so many options, a game should typically give you a nudge towards what it feels is the best way for you to start playing. This can be done in many ways (for example - rarity systems that imply rarer = better), but if not done at all you leave newbies floundering for answers and typically resorting to using google. This is a problem I am well acquanted with as a fighting game player, but it’s the same fundamental issue in Her Story: because you have so many viable options from the very beginning, you end up having no viable options. When everything sticks out, nothing sticks out, and you are lost.

Do I think Her Story is a bad game? Yeah, I do, but I wouldn’t say it’s a game not worth playing. It’s clear on steam that many people love this game, and even as someone who disliked it I have a lot to say about it which is not something I can say about every bad game I’ve played. The value of unique experiences is that even if you end up hating them, you learn a lot about what you do actually like. Go out, try new experiences, or maybe try out Her Story if you’ve read this far but haven’t actually played the game. Who knows, maybe you’ll think I’m full of it.

If you do - tell me what you love about it! Maybe I did miss something fundamental and there’s a whole world out there I am not yet privy to.