Her Story
Review
2026-03-15
While I can see why Sam Barlow got BAFTA'd out the ass for Her Story, it's not a very fun game. The diegetic CRT with halogen glare, Viva Seifert's deliciously subtle dual performance, the thrill of bouncing between clips by typing in keywords--it's all great. Genius, even, in many ways.
But its greatest strength--the fact that you can potentially jump to any point in the story--is also its biggest weakness. Maybe 10 minutes in, my partner and I stumbled onto a clip near the end and figured out the core mystery. Through luck or brilliance, couldn't tell ya. After that, clip-surfing was still interesting for filling in the gaps, but most of it was just confirming what we'd already hypothesized. That's partly by design--the non-linear structure means they have to seed breadcrumbs everywhere, so no matter which direction you go you'll eventually stumble onto important clues. But it also means you're listening to the same things reiterated over and over in different ways.
At the start I felt like a very clever boy figuring out the magician's trick. By the end I felt like a tired boy, because the magician just kept pulling rabbit after rabbit out of the hat till there was a giant writhing mass of furry white limbs covering the floor, smothering the screams of the audience as they drowned in lagomorphs.
That exhaustion wouldn't matter as much if the mystery had more to give, but the story ain't that good. What you think happens at the start is what happens. There's some character development for Seifert's character that gets teased out over the hour or two you play, but that's it. No deeper revelation waiting beneath the one you already figured out. At the end of the day I'm playing "YouTube Search: The Game", and I think I need a little more meat on the bones--otherwise I might as well type "Charlie Kirk headshot video" into Google like it's any other Monday morning.
PS: The search is wonky as fuck. If you search "no" you get one set of results and if you search "'no'" you get a different set of results. That doesn't make any fucking sense. The quotes mean it's an exact match. So "shit myself" could match "I shit myself" but also "Shit, I hate myself for pooping my pants". But "'shit myself'" would only match the first one. Given that's the case then "no" and "'no'" would be the exact same thing. Only they aren't. Well, go "'fuck yourself'", Her Story.