The GWJ Adventure Game Club - Game 13: Her Story

Her Story (2015)

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Second time in a row we're playing my pick and second time in a row we're playing a game from 2015! Written and directed by Sam Barlow, this adventure game features an amazing actress, Viva Seifert. She portrays a woman being interrogated in a murder investigation. It's up to you to piece it all together!

You can find the wikipedia page here, usual spoiler warning apply. How Long to Beat estimates about 3 hours to completion. Available on iOS, Microsoft Windows, OS X, Android, and currently 75% off on Steam!

You can find the main thread over this way. We'll be playing Her Story in November 2019, with an extra month should you require it.

Definitely up for this.

Nice! I've had this on my iPad for ages and never got round to playing it.

I've been intrigued by this for a while. Very cool.

Was in my Top 3 GOTY list that year. Brilliant game, but also something of a once-and-you're-done, so I won't be revisiting it.

Completely understandable, Jonman, I'm in the same boat. I might dig a little deeper for extra videos and different cuts, though, which I'll post here later in the month.

Maybe I'll dig into Telling Lies instead, his follow-up, which seems to be a similar design.

Hi Everyone, I've just joined the GWJ Adventure Game Club thread and will be playing Her Story this month. Looking forward to discussing the game and seeing what gets voted for in 2020. Happy future adventures!

Jonman wrote:

Maybe I'll dig into Telling Lies instead, his follow-up, which seems to be a similar design.

That one is certainly on my to-do list. Reception doesn't seem as good, but Her Story earned some amount of blind faith.

Played quite a lot of ‘Her Story.’ I am a sucker for a disjoined story. There is something very satisfying about assembling the full tale out of jumbled, out of order pieces.

At this stage I know what happened, barring a few holes in the tale where I can easily be surmise what happened. I’ve even heard how it happened and who did it but the game isn’t over. Not totally sure how I finish the game. There is...

Spoiler:

A figure with police lights on her that seems to get clearer and less clear. I’m guessing that those are indicating when I’m getting closer to the solution.

Telling lies is good, but it's a much more straightforward story. In Her story, what actually happened is still pretty much open for interpretation by the end, but with Telling Lies once you've cleared enough videos it's very much obvious what happened, and why.

It's interesting though - has a lot of parallels to some real life stuff relating to some things that happened / are still happening in the UK (there was actually an update on THAT story around the same time the game released, which was an interesting coincidence)

...i'll not say more though as it's quite big spoilers for the game.

Higgledy wrote:

Played quite a lot of ‘Her Story.’ I am a sucker for a disjoined story. There is something Ver satisfying about assembling the full tale out of jumbled out of order pieces.

At this stage I know what happened, barring a few holes in the tale where in the events that can easily be surmised. I’ve even heard how it happened and who did it but the game isn’t over. Not totally sure how I finish the game. There is...

Spoiler:

A figure with police lights on her that seems to get clearer and less clear. I’m guessing that those are indicating when I’m getting closer to the solution.

After a certain point, you choose when to finish the game. There's a "Chit Chat" icon that pops up that - that's the path to put a bow on it.

So how is everyone coming along? A friendly reminder (because I'd forgotten about it myself!), that there's a GWJ Spoiler Section on Her Story!!
I dug my way all the way back to December 2015 in the GWJCC podcast feed on Spotify and have it queued up. Will give it another listen (has it really been so long?) and I'm definitely eager to hear everyone's thoughts too!

Oh I’d forgotten about that spoiler section. Thanks.

Hi I'm back I played a game again! (I also played NitW but never coalesced thoughts on it so maybe I'll bring that thread back next...)

I originally tried playing Her Story in early 2016 with my mom, but we struggled to find a cohesive path of inquiry and the things that weren't lining up started to lose her. She's a fan of mysteries, so I still think she could like it but we never sat down to it again. This was a good kick to go back and finish it!

Mr. Dragon and I played from the couch and finished it in a night. He started out driving, with me on notepad, and naturally the first thing he did was search MURDER. I'm kidding, he investigated every other icon on the screen instead of the search button.

Spoiler:

I won the game of Mirror flip (Othello/Reversi) by one point when he thought he had me beat. :-D

Our initial line of inquiry:

Spoiler:

Proceeded quickly into how Simon's body was found, got to the guitar bit and listened to the whole song. Mention of Hannah sent us casting about til we found mention of Eve, which pretty quickly lead us to search "twins." From there we rolled along pretty easily.

On the question of "what really happened:"

Spoiler:

I lean towards the twin explanation, even with its leaps of imagination. The multiple personalities reading doesn't seem correct to me, perhaps it feels overly simplistic as a writing device, or has to do with being a Hollywood-ized interpretation of the condition. I can see the evidence leading to it, but it doesn't do it for me.

This led Mr. Dragon to speculate that it could be one person fabricating the whole thing. Like she says in the penultimate clip, these are all just stories we've been telling one another. There's something to the simplicity of this one that makes it ultimately the most believable. But I guess the whole point is that we'll never know!

On cryptography:

Spoiler:

The code got us good. We tried Morse for a bit on the first clip ("why are you talking about Eve"), before concluding that you can't possibly separate dashes from dots from spaces between words. Learning about the knock code was cool! Immediately looked it up and decoded "LOVE U" and "BYE HANNAH" (which she does incorrectly, but it's clear what she's saying).

Completionism:

Spoiler:

We got very close to finding all the clips on our own. I did eventually do some searches for other keywords we could try when we got tapped out, and the "yes"/"no" bit for the polygraph was frustrating for people accustomed to Google search parsing, but I'm not sure how else to represent those. I think we were hoping to squeeze out that one last detail that would confirm or deny our theory, even though from chatter I knew it didn't exist. But we watched every video before exiting. The revelation that you're her daughter was pretty dramatic. I had been wondering off and on who you were and why you'd care but hadn't even thought of that possibility.

Another fun note, we went to a MBMBaM live recording soon after playing, and the opening podcast was called Hey Riddle Riddle (riddles and improv, they were pretty fun). Names that are palindromes were brought up, which had us elbowing each other over this game.

I meant to dig up the spoiler section, thanks for the link! I'll have to try to listen while it's still fresh.

ActualDragon, reading your post was an absolute treat. I'm so glad you came to share with us. I love that you played it together, I love that you went full on cryptography, I love that you were elbowing each other over this game during the MBMBaM recording. Those are relationship goals, right there!

Aww, Eleima, I showed that to Mr. Dragon and am still glowing about it. I am very thankful to have a spouse who will play through these with me. Watch the GOTY thread for our thoughts on Obra Dinn!

As for cryptography, I am a huge nerd for puzzles and code cracking and one of our favorite things to go out and do (when we remember) is the Puzzled Pint.

Oh that’s awesome! Obra Dinn is amazing by all accounts, and I need to get to it sooner rather than later!

ActualDragon wrote:

On the question of "what really happened:"

Spoiler:

I lean towards the twin explanation, even with its leaps of imagination. The multiple personalities reading doesn't seem correct to me, perhaps it feels overly simplistic as a writing device, or has to do with being a Hollywood-ized interpretation of the condition. I can see the evidence leading to it, but it doesn't do it for me.

This led Mr. Dragon to speculate that it could be one person fabricating the whole thing. Like she says in the penultimate clip, these are all just stories we've been telling one another. There's something to the simplicity of this one that makes it ultimately the most believable. But I guess the whole point is that we'll never know!

I’ve finished. A lot depends on what you register from the clips as to your interpretation but I’m pretty happy with mine.

Spoiler:

I definitely consider Hannah and Eve to be twins. In one clip you can see the tattoo on one of the twins arms and in another clip you can see a bare arm without the tattoo so, barring the tattoo not being real, it’s definitely two people.

My understanding is that Hannah said she drove to Glasgow and therefore had an alibi. Eve at one stage confesses that Hannah took the driving test for both of them as her driving was poor and whoever took the car to Glasgow crashed it. It’s not what you’d call an airtight case but I’m happy that it was Eve who drove to Glasgow and Hannah who killed Simon.

My game ended when I searched for ‘Hannah killed.’

That's a nice game club you have here

It'd be a shame if I...

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Living this club like the CRPG club: with an absolute last second buzzer beater!

The wife and I sat down and played through this as our New Year's Eve entertainment. We managed to hit the 75% achievement on our own before we turned to some hints to let us clear the board.

I loved the narrative style. My wife enjoyed it but expressed deep unsatisfaction at not having a clear resolution, which I knew about halfway through was where this was going and how that was going to be her reaction.

Well I knew it was only a matter a matter before you showed up, *Legion*. Glad you and your wife enjoyed it! I can totally relate to your wife's reaction, I'm also like that. But it's part of the beauty of it, ultimately.