No idea if there is now a name for this kind of “crawling through archives” puzzle game, but this was the first and only one that I played with this mechanic.
Her story is a puzzle game where you sit in front of a police database software with videos of interviews with the titular her woman. The interviews are cut into many smaller fragments and you can search the database for key words. You then get presented all the videos where that keyword was spoken. The catch is that the database software is shit and only the first 5 entries are shown. So you have to get creative what words you search for so you really find a new lead and not just filler. So you better have a notebook (digital or real) ready to write down things you want to ask later.
You don’t really get a direct goal, you need to be motivated just by curiosity alone to find out more.
The videos are real movies shot with real humans, which gives the whole thing an interesting twist, since graphics doesnt really matter, since its real footage. But the quality of the acting matters, and I was satisfied with it, even though its nothing exceptional
I tried the developers next project, Telling Lies, but the interaction (fast forwarding and rewinding) with the movies in that one annoyed me so much, that I only tried it 2 times and gave up after 2 minutes each time, so can’t say anything more about the sequel.
I like all of their games, but Immortality is a masterpiece. I’m not even sure which part of it I should highlight or praise here. It’s all just incredible artistic work on multiple levels. It’s the best representation of the intersection of film and video games.
Yesssss I love Her Story - that “curiosity as game mechanic” was really well done, and I wish there were more games in the ‘genre’.
I did play the later game “Immortality” which is a bit similar in gameplay - you can click on something in one scene to find other scenes with the same character / object in them. I enjoyed that, though it didn’t have the same exploration-narrative magic of Her Story. I definitely found it harder to get engaged with at first.
It must be really difficult to craft a story that reveals itself well in that clip/connection format. It’s not a simple linear narrative, and avoiding sequence breaks (where you get a clip that reveals things you shouldn’t yet know) is so important. Though I think Her Story handles that well by keeping clips short enough that you don’t have the context with just a single clip.
Oof, haven’t thought about them in years and now I want more.
I should take another look at Telling Lies. When it came out there were a lot of complaints about what you said, it drops you into the middle of a scene and I think you had to slowly rewind to the start of the clip? I read later that (?) they added a feature to skip back to the start with a single button press (or maybe that was a steam mod?). Anyways, I never ended up playing it.
I was watching the other game: “#wargames” for a while but it stopped being sold and vanished from the internet.
My wife and I played it some years ago and loved it.
Works really well with other folks offering their input and theories, imo.
Her Story has been on my radar for a while. It looks very interesting and there are so few genuine detective games out there, so I’ve had this pop up in my recommendations before. I might float it to my sister and her fiancé, the three of us are playing puzzle games together some weekends. Right now we’re working through Séance of Blake Manor and honestly it’s been kind of disappointing. So getting into an actual puzzle/deduction game again would be a nice change.
I played it together with someone and yeah, this game is surprisingly good to play in coop.
I remember playing this game in design school for a game design theory class. I found out really fascinating.
You’re the only other person I’ve ever heard mention it
