REVIEW: 'Her Story'

Why no Arkham Knight? Because I don't care.

I still haven't played Arkham Asylum. It's one of those games I keep playing before taking a break and coming back to it only to restart the game again because I've forgotten the controls. I'm just not getting into it, probably because the combat consists of just mashing one button until everyone is unconcious, the stealth is overly simplified, and the story makes me yawn. Maybe it'll turn out Arkham Knight is the next Les Miserables but even if I actually wanted to drop £40 for a game I didn't care about, I can't because it's been taken off Steam. The PC port is that terrible.

So instead I played an indie game. I know that foregoing a massively popular IP in favour of something no-ones heard of and with no budget is the most hipster thing you can do, but I've always belived that indie games are just as capable of both being as great and as bad as Triple A titles.

Her Story is a full motion video game, and if that sentence didn't flood your heart with terror then you're probably under fifteen years old.

If you don't know, a full motion video (FMV) game is a game that heavily utilises live-action cutscenes. Since games started shipping on CDs rather than cartridges and floppy discs, suddenly game developers had about ten times the amount of space to utilise. They had two options: Either create massive, highly detailed games or jam the disc full of badly-compressed videos.

The best FMV games were ones that treated the videos the same way modern games treat pre-rendered cutscenes: used sparingly and merely as a device to advance the plot. The worst ones were games that based the entire game around the gimmick and as a result had hardly any gameplay. So Her Story is at a disadvantage already, because it has hardly any gameplay. You're an unnamed person whose just dusted off an ancient Windows 95 PC and is browsing through some old files. Yes, you're playing as some person faffing around on a computer. Now that's what I call immersion.

BEHOLD THE MIGHT OF VIDEOGAMING!!

Whilst flicking through these files, you discover several video clips of a woman being interviewed. You can play these clips in any order, but you can only browse through them by typing in keywords. The Portsmouth police force clearly has the worst filing system in the world as each interview is broken up into clips ranging from 10-100 seconds long rather than kept as one big file.

It soon becomes apparent how unique this game is. I automatically found myself reaching for a pen and paper, which after an hour of gameplay became filled with notes. I was concerned that an FMV game with such little gameplay would fail because the worst FMV games are the ones that act like virtual novels or interactive movies whilst the best ones are standard action games with the occasional movie thrown in. But this is unlike anything I've played thus far, mostly because it has such ordinary gameplay but beneath that the story being told here is extra-ordinary.

The point here is that we're supposed to piece together the events and move them into the order they should be so you can determine what happened. This, however, is much harder than it should be. If you want to try and arrange the clips in a linear order then you're going to have a hard time because whilst you can drag and drop you can't place clips in-between other clips; you can only swap one for another, meaning that if you want to re-arrange your queue then you'll have to re-shuffle the entire thing. And there are a lot of clips.

Think this is bad? Try working in video-editing. 

The story itself is outstanding. Because there are so many layers and complications to the narrative, every other search will likely lead to a twist in the story. The way the interviews are cut and shuffled means you'll never have to trawl through the more mundane clips. Ultimately, the mystery remains ambigious. You're not going to accidentally stumble across a clip which gives the whole thing away right at the start. Also, you can't be like Sherlock and solve the case in a matter of moments whilst everyone on Tumblr ruins the upholstery.

But, just when I was beginning to fear that this was one of those games that doesn't have an ending...it ended. There's no final reveal or anything, but once you've seen enough then it's possible to jump to the end credits if you want to. Admittedly, it was a bit annoying when I'd figured out roughly what happened but I had to click around for a bit longer before the game determined I'd seen enough and gave me the option to finish. But this keeps the organic approach to the gameplay whilst giving some kind of closure to the situation.

"Anyway, here's 'Wonderwall'"

Funnily enough, the options menu that pops up at the start of the game actually lists several controls like 'Fire 1' and 'Fire 2' that can be mapped to a joypad of all things. Part of me actually thought that when you log off the game suddenly becomes a first person shooter - which would have been hilarious, albeit completely out of tone. In reality, you just need a mouse and keyboard. In fact, when you type on your keyboard the clacking sound of really chunky keys plays - and when you load a file the computer makes the chugging noise of an ancient harddrive whirring.

Little touches like that make this game feel far more polished than the 90's FMV games it's inspired by, and whilst FMV games of yore are like the bad games of today - sacrificing gameplay for cinematics - this game appealingly reminded me of Papers, Please in that it uses such a simple point and click interface to create something completely exhilarating and utterly unique.

Play it.

The twist is that she was arrested for her appauling fashion sense.