Her Story

[spoiler]Her Story is a modern day fairy tale turned true crime podcaster's wet dream. Twin sisters, separated at birth, live a shared life of secrets and connection, until it all falls apart. The narrative I've seen described as complex, but it felt largely simple, if a bit silly, when it came down to it. A stolen baby, two girls sharing one life, jealousy and separation, reunion, an affair, a pregnancy, a murder. Is it true? Maybe. Probably not exactly as it was said, but there are elements that are easy enough to verify- a tattoo, an alibi- that make me dubious of theories of DiD or the second self being a fabrication to escape culpability. I think this is, in fact, trying to stick to the fairy tale conceit it references enough to be almost hammering you over the head with it. If I were to describe the plot in flowery language, it would sound very similar to an old and dark fable, one teaching the value of sharing and following rules by a representation of the tragedy that comes from breaking them. To that end, it’s true- and it’s magical. To try and pin this down to reality, despite the grounded nature of the crime drama presentation and mothballed tech, to attempt to turn this into purely a mystery to be solved, is to lose what this game is actually attempting to do. A silver mirror. A girl in the attic. A stolen baby. Rapunzel and Arabian Nights and the Princess and the Pauper. It’s a story about stories, as trite as that may sound. What impressed me the most about that fact is that it is a story that challenges the person to analyze by necessity, to engage with it in a way you would not with a film. This is done, of course, through its core investigation mechanic and structure of being broken up into little clips, but also through the genre it masquerades as. In crime stories, something happened. In crime investigation games, your job is to figure out what that thing is. In many of those games, there is a truth you can reach or fall short of. So you pay attention. You scrutinize inconsistencies. You notice patterns. You perform narrative analysis as you play the game, you play it to experience the story, you can’t start after, it’s a constructive process within the experience itself. The search for truth runs you directly into exploring the magic. That’s a clever trick! I doubt it bats a thousand. That same pursuit can create a tunnel vision, a frustration with inconsistency, a feeling of false promise that was left unfulfilled, a refusal to bend with the genre and having the experience break as a result. I played this after Immortality, and I don't know if that helped or hurt it. Immortality is larger, a more ambitious project with a more supernatural narrative, a very explicit one at that. I think one benefit of playing Immortality first was that the magical realism of Her Story was an expected aspect to me on a subconscious level, so I didn’t fight it, even if that magic is far more metaphorical here than in Immortality. Immortality’s investigation system had its advantages and disadvantages as well- while momentum could be built through brute force if nothing else was working there in a way it’s harder to here, the directed control, the action and result, the sense of AGENCY in the process is far superior in Her Story. Still, I stalled out without completing the footage gallery of either game. For Her Story, I stopped after finding around 80% of clips, but felt I had the full story, or close enough to it that the rest was just details, by 50%. There was more to learn after that point, sure, but I never had any moments of revelation past that time, which disappointed me. Just shy of a hundred minutes and I’d cracked it, with half the road left to run. Details of the affair added a bit more context, but I quickly felt I had run out of mysteries I wanted answers to (outside of the deaths of the parents), or details I felt compelled to fill in. It’s a fairy tale after all, every telling is a bit different, taking different parts to compile a similar whole. There is, content wise, a disappointingly misogynistic undertone for me. In Immortality, the commodification of women’s sexuality felt like it was doing something, or at least trying to, most of the time, through its narrative about the predatory nature of the film industry. Here, the feeling is just… strange. Eve didn’t need to “take Hannah’s virginity” with a hairbrush, Hannah could’ve done that herself. Hannah and Simon getting married because she got pregnant at 17 is one thing, having Eve go ♥♥♥♥ random adult men in alleys to try and get pregnant to match until she got an STI is another. It feels gross, and like its intention is to be as such. This in all, has an atonal effect on the rest of the story- revolting exceptions to the modern fairy tale structure, things that would be out of place even in the Grimm inspirations they draw from, as they do not feel they serve a purpose. Her Story is a pretty tight, focused, and well executed experience. It’s one I do have respect for both the craft and cultural impact of. It did not knock my socks off, but I was overall impressed, and it got me to think about themes. That’s a challenge many games fail to meet. [/spoiler]