Her Story

Her Story is the award-winning interactive fiction game from Sam Barlow, creator of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Aisle. The premise is unusual and brilliant: you sit in front of a mothballed desktop computer logged into a 1994 police database. The database contains live-action video footage of seven interviews in which a British woman, played by Viva Seifert (actress and half of the band Joe Gideon and the Shark), discusses her missing husband. The clips are short, fragmented, and indexed by spoken word.

The gameplay loop is a search engine. You type words into the database and watch the clips where she says them. From the answers she gives, you formulate new searches — names dropped in passing, places mentioned, emotional reactions worth following up — and gradually piece together a story that the game never narrates directly. The same clip can be unlocked from multiple search terms; the order in which you encounter them shapes what you think is happening at every stage.

There are no puzzles in the traditional sense. There is no progression bar telling you how complete the story is. What there is, is a single mystery to assemble from raw footage, and an emotional payoff that depends entirely on the connections you make as a player rather than on the game's pacing of revelations. Her Story is unlike anything most players have encountered before — a non-linear narrative experience that asks you primarily to listen carefully, and rewards the work generously.