Do you hear the lights around you?

You’re a detective in 1994: A worn desk covered in files, mugs of cold coffee, and that clunky, yellow-gray computer that takes 5 minutes to boot. And those cheap, industrial fluorescent lights above you. Created to illuminate the unremarkable, they produce a dull, vibrating drone, which so readily fades from attention. Yet every so often, those lights produce a brief trill--like a mechanical cicada reminding you it has a few hours left to live. A slight variation that can snap you from a stupor and make you keenly aware--that feeling where you abruptly notice something that has always been there. For a detective, it’s moments like these that elevate the mundane into the meaningful. This pattern of monotony and punctuation underpins the writing and design of Her Story, a game that truly succeeds at teaching players how to be detectives.

The Basics

Before we get to the analysis, here’s a summary of Her Story:

At least 1-2 hours
FMV (Full Motion Video) Game, think Night Trap or one of those VHS board games
Game was conceived, written, and directed by Sam Barlow
Released by Annapurna Interactive, known for cinematic/story-rich games.
Originally PC, now almost all platforms
Story: The player watches 7 police interviews with a woman. Each interview is broken up into <30 second clips the player can search for. All the clips are of a live actress. The game begins with the player learning there’s been a murder and the woman is a suspect.
Interactions/Mechanics:
1. Type words or phrases into a search bar to bring up clips from the L.O.G.I.C. archival database
2. The player selects clips to watch
Game was an indie success, receiving rave reviews for the design, writing, and performance of its actress. Furthermore, it sparked renewed interest in the development and modernization of FMV games, as it seamlessly bridged the gap between film and games.

Becoming a Detective

A traditional or non-detective game usually has NPCs offer their whole life story and the player’s objective as quickly as possible: “Aye, this was me hut ‘til those Gargyles from the Castle of Fabrics burnt me hut to cinders. Revenge me hut!” There’s nothing wrong with this kind of simplicity--it is an elegant solution to guide and motivate players.

However, the fantasy of being a detective means going from zero understanding to cracking the case. In detective games stories must unfold over time and through player’s deliberate actions. It could mean exploring mysterious environments (Obra Dinn), finding/logging evidence (L.A. Noire), and/or putting their knowledge of a case to the test (Phoenix Wright). Her Story eschews nearly all of that: No physical evidence, no environments, and you don’t conduct interrogations. The entire focus is on the suspect’s testimony, which means Her Story emphasizes a key aspect of being a detective: Learning how to listen.

Using “L.O.G.I.C.”

The brevity of the game’s clips can feel evocative: Like overhearing your name at a party and wondering how you became the topic of conversation. The game leverages this tantalizingly incompleteness to drive searches with new words, creating a steady rhythm of research. There are no systems to help guide or keep track of information. There is no time limit. The onus is always on the player to make sense of everything. Get a pad of paper.

As the player goes, to make sense of the clips they encounter, the player may internalize clips as:

A Dead End clip: No relevant info to the case
A Lead clip: A clip that might not reveal any new info, but has a new word to search
A Context clip: A clip that deepens understanding of the characters or story
An Epiphany clip: That juicy revelation that answers a question for the player, opens up a path, and/or reshapes the narrative completely

EXAMPLE: SEARCH FOR “MURDER”

At the beginning of the game, the player is presented with the skeleton of the story in four clips (in less than a minute!) with the search term: “MURDER”:

Clip 1 (Epiphany): The woman is shocked that the death of Simon might be a murder; will help the police
Clip 2 (Lead): She looks at a photograph from February
Clip 3 (Epiphany/Lead): The woman: “I didn’t murder Simon. You’ve got the wrong person.”
Clip 4: She requests a lawyer [Context] and says everything being shared is just a story [Dead End]

Obviously, Epiphany, Lead, and Context clips offer tangible rewards (e.g., new information/understanding about the story) and a path forward for players… but what about Dead End clips? Well... information is only useless when it is deprived of context.

How do you take your coffee?

The naturalism of the dialogue in Her Story means that there are clips that can, on the surface, seem pointless--the kind of dialogue we’re taught to avoid as writers because it can lack immediacy and/or doesn’t carry a plot forward. I set out to search for some Dead End clips to illustrate this.

At first glance, “COFFEE” returns 5 clips that do indeed deliver dull:

EXAMPLE: SEARCH FOR “COFFEE”

Clip 1 (Dead End): The woman takes her coffee black.
Clip 2 (Lead): She got coffee while in Glasgow (Search: “Glasgow”)
Clip 3 (Lead/Context): She talks about getting a tattoo, doesn’t want coffee today (Search: “Tattoo”)
Clip 4 (Lead): She mentions drinking coffee won’t be good for the baby (Search: “Baby”)
Clip 5 (Dead End): She asks for coffee. Cream and sugar.

Sure, there are three ‘path’ clips that can lead in different directions, but none of these clips feel directly connected to the murder, nor do they seem particularly juicy. But taking things at face value is what could lead someone to think these are Dead Ends. A real detective knows that the most innocuous detail is the one you rewind the tape for.

Do you remember at the beginning of this analysis when I asked if you could hear the lights around you? Now, looking at the clips and summaries listed above--does anything seem strange? Is something off?

Have you been listening?

Here’s a hint: How many black coffee drinkers do you know that suddenly start taking cream and sugar? You’re far more likely to convince the Pope to renounce Catholicism.

In Clip 1, the woman is demure, with delicate gestures when asking for coffee. But it’s the first clip in the search and she rarely mentions anything about the murder--so, does it warrant more attention after you watch it once?

CLIP 1: “A black coffee thanks. No sugar.
I’m sweet enough as it is.”

In Clip 5, she’s wearing the same outfit, but something is… different. And not just her coffee order. Blink and you’ll miss it--but this clip is dated half a month later and her body language has completely changed. Once poised, she’s now more casual and loose--a little gruff? The clip is a direct mirror of Clip 1 in presentation, length, and placement. They’re designed to be bookends, begging you to read what’s there in between them.

CLIP 5: “Coffee I guess. Milk and sugar.”

So, what first appears as a Dead End becomes something more. Her Story is exceptional at taking narrative beats like these and using them with one another to get the player to question what they know. One reaches the end of “COFFEE” and gets that sensation: Something is off. This design & writing has a mild Metroidvania replayability--new information or theories encourage players to perceive the game differently. Revisit past clips with new information and you can find new paths forward. There are very few, actual Dead Ends in the game. It’s a perception players have of the game, that the game is aware of and later disproves.

In my case, the differences in the woman’s body language made me question whether something was off about her. Which led to paying closer attention to other details about her--like the tattoo that is only present in some interviews. Eventually, I entered a theory I was piecing together after watching and re-watching clips into the search bar and a core mystery at the heart of Her Story is revealed: “TWIN.” The woman at the center of the story may actually be two twins pretending to be the same woman. One of the twins is the murderer. The coffee orders, the body language differences, the tattoo, all the other discrepancies suddenly make sense. Something innocuous became something important.

One of these things is not like the other

Understand Her Story as circular narrative design, where repetitions eventually reveal something new and exciting so long as a player lets their curiosity guide them. The game is rich, taking on more meaning with every search--I only discovered “COFFEE” as I replayed the game again for this assignment... as if I was a detective revisiting an old case file and suddenly seeing a key detail where there was none before. An example I expected to illustrate the equivalent of white noise actually reveals one of the game’s key mysteries.

I began this analysis with that metaphor of the sound fluorescent lights make. When I rebooted the game, I noticed those sounds for the first time… but they had always been there. I only heard them once I began paying attention. Her Story’s writing and design is a testament to hiding in plain sight. The very first search of “MURDER” reveals the truth in a way that doesn’t make sense of until you know what to pay attention to. Like Keyser Soze, the story was in front of you the entire time--and you didn’t realize it.

**Why Her Story?**

I was a bit hesitant to write about Her Story. It’s so obviously good and renowned that I wondered if there was something new to say about it. However, revisiting the game for this assignment made me realize a few of the aspects that I was intuitively drawn to. It’s an excellent indie game because it doesn’t try to be AAA (a mistake I’ve currently made on my project Vessels). It embraces brevity, scoped down (i.e., Barlow chose to pursue FMV because 3D animation is very expensive/flawed at delivering the nuanced emotion and performance he wanted). Furthermore, it chooses a different way of approaching the detective genre (standing out in a crowded landscape filled with puzzles, 3D open worlds, and visual novels), while also understanding and subverting its genre, and it has something to say.

Restrictions can make you more creative/resourceful - The game works within a set of restrictions (no 3D art/animation, no open world) and thrives. While the game isn’t as traditionally accessible with GTA-style gameplay a la L.A. Noire, it means the game isn’t for everyone. However, the design has a novel mechanic/presentation to draw in users, with a story that keeps them around and is worth talking about years later.
Less is more - I loathe twitter as an ecosystem, but admire it as an experiment in learning how to be precise. The dialogue here does just that--each piece is designed to share just enough… any confusion you experience is a feature, not a bug. Once you get a sense of it all, suddenly you see the way Barlow has been designing/writing and how he’s displayed a mastery of guiding the player on how to ask questions.
A subversion of Noir - In noir, if the grizzled detective is Disney World, then the duplicitous dame is Cinderella’s castle--the central hub a detective’s insecurities, vices, and hopes all stem from and lead back to. You can think you’re in Tomorrowland, but Cinderella’s castle is always there in view. But here, the sort of overwhelmingly ‘masculine’ tradition of the detective/noir genre is merely an initial hook--the actual story is far closer to a fairytale. Two twins, torn apart by a midwife craving a child of her own. The two girls become enamored with one another and decide to lead parallel lives as the same person, but are torn apart because of the same man and the desire to have a baby. Though a reductive examination might stop there--the trappings of domesticity are the women’s undoing, a well explored motivation for numerous women in media--I do think there’s something redemptive and interesting here:
- The woman/en’s motivations are thoroughly explored, so while she can be a cipher--she’s isn’t exactly the noir stereotype... and she is always fascinating.
- When I discussed the ‘mundane’ throughout, there’s an element of that in the woman’s story: Finding something magical in ‘another you,’ but then both women losing themselves in the performance of trying to be the same person. There’s a sense that the man/baby is only a catalyst for the toxic relationship brewing between the two women--this ‘domestic bliss’ is an object both sisters use to try and free themselves from their arrangement and stifling identities.
- ...and even with all that, it could all just be a split personality performance of a woman wishing her own life was a fairy tale. She’s making it all up! (There is some content to support this interpretation, but like most things in Her Story, it’s fundamentally ambiguous.)

There are a lot of layers to Her Story, yet both elegance and depth. It’s truly exceptional storytelling.

Game Narrative Analysis: Her Story