Her Story is a compelling new type of interactive storytelling

What is this woman thinking? Figuring that out is half the fun.

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To anyone who was paying attention to video games in the mid-'90s, the term "FMV game" probably still inspires snorts of derision. The handful of titles that shoehorned simple gameplay on top of highly compressed full-motion video usually suffered from low-quality sound and images, poor production values, limited interaction options, and ponderous repetition of a few short video clips through multiple plays (yes, I'm including Dragon's Lair, especially on those last two problems). The results ranged from mediocre at the high end to some of the worst games ever made at the low end. By the end of the '90s, filmed, live-action video clips gave way to polygons and animated, pre-rendered sprites as the gameplay and story-telling engine of choice.

But just as failed '90s experiments in virtual reality are leading to a resurgence in the form today, the FMV gaming failures of decades past are finally being explored with the technology and game-design advancements of today. Her Story is proof that FMV games don't have to be awful, and that filming actors on a set could be a criminally underexplored form for interactive storytelling.

Her Story takes place entirely within the creaky interface of a late-'90s database terminal, complete with a cathode ray tube screen that reflects the florescent lights behind you. A pair of readme files teach you how to search through the database, which consists entirely of transcribed video clips of a young woman responding to police questions (the questions themselves have been lost). You're not given any details or direction for what to do with this mountain of unearthed evidence, but the first default search term—the word "murder"—gives some clue as to what's going on.

Don't be fooled, though, "what's going on" is not as simple as just figuring out whether the woman on camera is guilty or innocent. The story of one murder eventually opens up to include other potential homicides, cases of mistaken identity, childhood trauma, incomplete physical evidence, complex psychosexual personality quirks, and the vagaries of memory and fantasy itself. Discussing any of those elements in any kind of detail here would unfortunately spoil the entire point of the game, which is about slowly discovering all of these complexities for yourself. Suffice to say that, playing and watching alongside my wife, we ended up constantly pausing to discuss what we had just seen and heard, trading and scrapping a series of convoluted theories to try to explain the facts as we knew them at the time.

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