| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Mobile | 6.00 |
| Overall | 6.00 |
|
There has been a ton of buzz around Her Story during GOTY season, enough so for me to buy it and watch it. Is it good? Absolutely, this is a very intriguing story that will hook you in and leave you split on what really happened. Now this is really not a video game, it is interactive so that automatically puts it into the video game category cause that is what we do now. Everything is a video game. If I go to a movie theater, pay money to see "the book", and on the screen all that plays are words scrolling up for two hours then I read a book! That is not a movie, it is just a book projected on a screen; but that is basically what we are doing with video games now, if I can push a button and it changes anything on a screen BOOM video game. So i'll just go with the flow and review it as such. Her Story is a search engine simulator, really the best search engine simulator ever made. It should absolutely win awards for best search engine simulator of the year. You can search one word, you can search for multiple words together, the variety is impressive. I was most impressed by the comma, yeah you can use a comma to search a word against a term, but that is only for advanced players. I think the sequel could maybe add capital letter distinctions, or maybe quotation marks for really advanced searches. Alright I am done having fun, Her Story is an interactive experience where you are searching a police database for records of a woman. Why you are doing this is part of the story so to say anything about it would be to spoil it. All you do is move around a fake desktop of which the main thing to interact with is the police search engine where you search for terms and if that term is part of the recorded videos transcript you will get a up to five video clips of that term. This is a totally non linear way to present the story and that in itself is the hook. You get to sort of navigate your way through these clips and have to put together what you are seeing. Some clips will drop names, some locations, some emotions, all these are new terms you can use to find more videos and so on. None of that is important unless the story is compelling and thankfully it is. Who doesn't love a crime mystery, especially one with an attractive female (see the Jodi Arias case). This is something a couple can watch together, it makes for a great shards experience because there is tons of mystery to it and its open ended enough to have a debate. Without a doubt Her Story is a very compelling movie where a woman is interviewed by police and she recounts her life and the incident, even when you watch every clip it leaves you with no true answer. This is where most of the praise comes from because it leads people to wrote massive essays on what they believed happened. That is something most games will never have, no one is going to analyze subtleties of Nathan Drake's life and write an essay; but because this is a video presented in an interactive manner it captures that aspect of humanity that games don't usually never touch. Now there are issues with the interactive side of it, is it beneficial to tell a story this way. Yes the random way the videos are presented absolutely adds to the compelling nature of the narrative. Each new name or life event revealed is juicy not only from a narrative point of view but now you are excited cause you can use that term to find more, you feel involved even if ever so slightly. The problem is it is possible to reach the revelation clips well before you even piece together what happened. This is the equivalent of randomly seeing the ending to the sixth sense in the first ten minutes and the movie randomly jumping from scene to scene. Once I grasped the sort of truth all the gaps I had left were really not needed. A few hours in you know the whole story but there is this database keeping track of every video you have seen or not seen so completionists will probably want to view them all. This leads to totally random word searching in a desperate attempt to find any new clips that will most likely add absolutely nothing to the story. What I am saying is that after a while it becomes a boring frustrating search engine simulator. There is an ending, after enough clips are watched there is a way to properly "end" the experience but that adds partially nothing but a credits screen. So this is a review, did I enjoy this movie, yeah for sure. I don't regret paying for it. I was hooked the first few hours when my word searching mattered and I was trying to piece together the narrative. I tried a lot more than I had too, silly me thinking I would have more input than just searching for words. I organized clips, i added tags to them for future reference thinking that I may have to solve the mystery or something. Nope nothing is really required of the player, you are just there to move the movie forward, you can remove the search engine part and still have a great story to watch. If say this was a detective simulator and I had to use my computer screen to piece together evidence and use my mind for anything other than word recognition then I would classify this as a game but in this experience the player is merely the device by which the movie moves forward. I must mention the female actress who is the one and only star of the story, she does a fantastic job of showcasing a wide range of emotions. This isn't some sob story, its all subtle behaviors. She makes it easy to feel safe with her, to empathize with her and yet question everything she says. Great performance and without it the story fails. I fully understand why this is getting so much attention, this medium of interactive entertainment rarely offers something this deep in a narrative sense. The premise is so unique and the fake desktop is a really cool way to tell a story. I love that we are getting experiences like this, interactive stories have loads of potential. Even thought the input is minimal it adds that little extra sense of participation that brings people closer to whatever they are doing. That is where the power lies in telling stories this way and it is why people get so enthusiastic about it. I enjoyed the experience, that is basically what I am reviewing. Its still a pretty simple story, one lady in a room for two hours, but I feel I got my moneys worth. It is not a video game for me though. Man I have done nothing today but watch this movie and write this review, you know what I need, a video game. So if you'll excuse me I am going to go play one right now. |
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Posted by Dvader Sat, 02 Jan 2016 19:37:29
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phantom_leo (9m)
The only reason anyone cares about this game is cause the story of the woman. If it was a man this game would never be talked about.