At home, not in the mood to go out and thinking what to do to spend a couple of hours before I go to bed. I’m checking my steam account but nothing seems attractive at the moment. I go to humble bundle and I come across a game called "Her story".
"Her story" is an indie FMV (Full Motion Video) game directed by Sam Barlow known for Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. As the game begins you find yourself in front of an old desktop with a few files and programs. One of them, the L.O.G.I.C database is the core of the game. It contains 271 video clips of 7 different interviews of a British Woman. Everything she says on the clips is converted to text that is searchable by the program.
The interviews are taking place in a police station where this woman "Hannah Smith" is talking about her husband "Simon", who has gone missing and is later found murdered. Your objective is to find out what really happened.
The game starts by giving you the first search word "murder" and introduce you to the game with your first 4 clips. You watch them, you take notes on what she says and you hit your next search to unlock more videos and again until you find a good amount of them to make your conclusion. Every video that hasn’t been played yet has a yellow eye symbol on top. Every search you make is limited to the first 5 entries. This means that my search word "Simon" gets 61 entries but I can only watch the first 5 of them. If i want to narrow down my search I use 2 or more keywords. You can tag a video to fast search it or store clips that you think are keys to unveil the murder .
The desktop of the computer has a glare on top, which gives the story a cinematic feeling of a crime-police movie and makes it feel alive. Unfortunately, while a nice touch initially, after a couple of hours it really becomes an annoyance for the eyes. Luckily, there is an option in the settings to deactivate it.
Her story is a game that will keep you till the end. However, if you expect to buy this game and play for many hours, this is not the case. The game costs 5.99 euros on steam but you can find it on humble bundle for 1$ (even lower if you don’t want it on your steam library) in the next six days. Its a definitely good bargain and I recommend it .