Raise your hands and scream if you remember “interactive movies”. The games industry has foisted some awful fads upon us over the last 40 years, but the full motion video (FMV) games of the early 1990s are among the worst. From the stodgy teen horror of Sega’s Night Trap to the blink-and-you’ll-complete-it brevity of Critical Path, it turned out that non-interactivity and Z-list B-movie footage was a bad combination.
Two decades later, Her Story is a new breed of narrative game that does looks suspiciously like an interactive movie. You play an anonymous protagonist looking at an internal police computer. The terminal has been unlocked by a friend, you’ve been left alone, and it contains several hundred interview clips concerning a fictional 1994 murder case.
The challenge is basically to work out what’s going on. You search this database using keywords, and after watching a clip can annotate, tag and set aside the particularly interesting ones. The first few snippets offer up many avenues to explore, which is just as well because you come to this case cold – no idea who the victim was, who the woman being interviewed is, or any other details.
This opening half hour is perhaps Her Story’s smartest trick, because it lets the player fool themselves into thinking they are Columbo. Before I knew the name of the interviewee I’d exhaustively tracked down every reference to a local shop, made obsessive notes on her glasses, and come up with a (completely bogus) working theory of what happened and whodunnit. The shop and glasses are illustrative red herrings, by the way, because the whole point of Her Story is finding out what you need to find out.
Her Story’s possible interactions are few and simple – anyone who’s ever used a computer could play. The complexity is in the mental challenge, as you grasp at the threads of this tangled web and begin to unweave them without ever being quite sure what’s at the centre. Her Story has a great narrative at the core, but what seriously elevates the game is an ingenious method of unravelling that narrative through pure interactivity. It’s not just that the story is fragmentary, and thus ambiguous, or that it contains well-hidden twists. It’s that you are the one assembling these fragments, and can go off in any direction your curiosity demands at any time.
Which makes Her Story that most rare of beasts, a great narrative-focused videogame. And while all the writing credit goes to creator Sam Barlow, what seals the deal is a wide-ranging performance from Viva Seifert that funnels her character’s inner life into hundreds of intense vignettes. The clips are mostly between 10 and 20 seconds long, with a few running over a minute, and such a structure means this is anything but a typical performance.
I recently watched The Jinx, a wonderful HBO documentary about alleged murderer Robert Durst, and a huge part of the show’s appeal was Durst’s remarkable face: hangdog, craggy, and capable of the most bizarre contortions under questioning. I was fascinated by his tics and coughs and odd phraseology. You could not watch the Jinx and resist, at some level, becoming intimately interested in Robert Durst’s physiognomy.
Viva Seifert creates a fictional character with something of the same allure: clearly very intelligent, clearly not telling the whole truth, and full of physical quirks. At first the appeal is simple voyeurism. The whole game is spent staring at this woman as she discusses intimate details of her life and relationships, and though the details may be salacious or sinister, Seifert’s delivery is usually matter-of-fact and emotionally convincing. As you build up an idea of the character’s life, she becomes more real, and your searches become more focused. It is a very queasy sort of satisfaction when, on a hunch, you type a word such as “abortion” into the box and find multiple entries.
Part of this performance is that the interviews are actually seven different interviews, and the character’s appearance changes drastically between them. In one of the earlier interviews, for example, she wears a low-cut blouse and a pendulous necklace that draws the eye downwards. This isn’t especially remarkable until you’ve seen a few clips from this specific interview, and realise the outfit is part of a new approach to the police. Put so baldly this may seem crass, but there’s much more to this behaviour than a clumsy attempt at seduction. The player’s realisation of what’s going on is gradual and, thanks to the disconnected nature of the clips, it’s easy to miss the bigger picture.
As well as giving Seifert’s talent a worthy stage, Her Story’s interview setup has one more clever consequence for the game’s design: it places you in the role of watcher rather than interrogator. Games often frustrate in the latter respect by not giving the option to ask what you want to ask, whereas here that’s simply not a consideration. It’s not exactly a solution, but it has the not-inconsiderable benefit of avoiding the problem entirely.
Her Story’s the type of game that had me playing along with a notebook – drawing lines connecting the protagonists, noting down new clues, and circling words then forgetting why. The user interface is perfect for what it’s trying to do: convince the player that they’re sitting at an older PC in a police station, looking through videos they shouldn’t be. The effect goes so far as to include artificial screen glare from the room’s strip lights, brief glimpses of your character’s face in the monitor, and easter eggs dotted around the desktop.
You could look over videogame history and pick out antecedents for some of what Her Story does but, even so, I’ve never played anything quite like it. It’s a murder case where you’re in the detective’s chair, a mystery where you make the running, and an engrossing experience from start to finish. With this we should consign the term “interactive movie” to history’s dustbin, because movies can’t dream of offering audiences a narrative structure as intimate and involving as this: they’re just moving pictures. Her Story points to the future.
Sam Barlow; PC/Mac/iPhone/iPad; £5
