Her Story

Show only five results in story order so late reveals stay hidden. Seven interviews with Hannah Smith are cut into 271 single-answer clips in a database called LOGIC, and a search shows only the first five matches, listed chronologically. The confession clips come very late, so earlier harmless clips with the same words push them out of view.

Searching mirror, wig, body or baby returns early benign clips, not the confession about the cellar; the murder clip surfaces instead through oddly general words like clothes, present or crazy. Other analyses put the count at about 300 or about 800 unlabelled clips, with the detectives' questions removed.

Design the fiction to enable deduction, not to simulate detective work. Recorded testimony searched through a deliberately bad database means there is no witness to question and nowhere to travel, and input stays as simple as typing search terms. Mark Brown compares it to Return of the Obra Dinn's similarly contrived setup.

Brown calls it the best detective game he has played: "No game comes as close to that "eureka" moment as this funny little game about searching for videos." On the premise: "It's silly, and like Obra Dinn: it's contrived."

Show only five results in story order so late reveals stay hidden. Seven interviews with Hannah Smith are cut into 271 single-answer clips in a database called LOGIC, and a search shows only the first five matches, listed chronologically. The confession clips come very late, so earlier harmless clips with the same words push them out of view.

Searching mirror, wig, body or baby returns early benign clips, not the confession about the cellar; the murder clip surfaces instead through oddly general words like clothes, present or crazy. Other analyses put the count at about 300 or about 800 unlabelled clips, with the detectives' questions removed.

Design the fiction to enable deduction, not to simulate detective work. Recorded testimony searched through a deliberately bad database means there is no witness to question and nowhere to travel, and input stays as simple as typing search terms. Mark Brown compares it to Return of the Obra Dinn's similarly contrived setup.

Brown calls it the best detective game he has played: "No game comes as close to that "eureka" moment as this funny little game about searching for videos." On the premise: "It's silly, and like Obra Dinn: it's contrived."

Let the player listen to answers instead of asking the questions. Sam Barlow wanted to capture the drama of the interview room, which games had never managed. Hours of real interview footage, such as the Jodi Arias case, pushed him toward a game where the player listens rather than asks.

LA Noire limits Cole Phelps to a handful of questions and three responses, which cheapens the thrill of nailing a killer. Barlow's 1999 game Aisle let you try anything but gave you only one command, showing that unlimited freedom to say anything is impossible to deliver. The jumbled clip structure came from J.G. Ballard's non-linear book The Atrocity Exhibition.

A prototype with real transcripts replaced gates with clues in the text. Barlow first planned to lock testimony until players saw certain clips or typed exact keywords. Loading real police interview transcripts from the Christopher Porco case into a prototype database, he saw almost every answer came back to money, and searching cash terms surfaced the life insurance motive.

That test convinced him that following themes embedded in the testimony worked better than unlocking gates, and he dropped the gating plan. Quote: "by following clues embedded in the text, rather than by unlocking gates."

Show only five results in story order so late reveals stay hidden. Seven interviews with Hannah Smith are cut into 271 single-answer clips in a database called LOGIC, and a search shows only the first five matches, listed chronologically. The confession clips come very late, so earlier harmless clips with the same words push them out of view.

Searching mirror, wig, body or baby returns early benign clips, not the confession about the cellar; the murder clip surfaces instead through oddly general words like clothes, present or crazy. Other analyses put the count at about 300 or about 800 unlabelled clips, with the detectives' questions removed.

Keep every clip reachable and bias the likely path instead. No clip is ever locked, so Barlow never breaks his own rule, but he shapes what comes back so the order of discovery stays gratifying.

Quote: "There's an art to letting go of the player's hand. It's not just about letting them do whatever they want, and simply hoping they have a good time."

Write clips to be enigmatic so early reveals do no harm. Eve's murder clips use only "she" and "her", so they mean little until the player knows who she is. A tangled plot, with two women dating the same man at different times, keeps more clips from making the story trivially clear.

An earlier clip even hides the word "mirror" in a palindrome joke: "It doesn't work if you mirror it though."

Seed an opening chain of linked clips, then let players branch. The search box starts with "murder", and shared words chain the clips: Simon's murder, The Rock, Eric, Diane, Glasgow, then Eve saying she told him she was pregnant. Within a few clips the player has a solid base of knowledge.

Each clip offers other terms too, so the trail never feels like the only route.

Pay off sharp observations richly and wild guesses with nothing. Spotting Eve's tattoo, often hidden behind a glass or guitar, and searching it returns several clips; learning Simon guessed her name from it leads to five more for "Eve". Guessing a knife returns only a pointless clip about cutting hair with a bread knife.

The contrast makes good observations feel earned and stops players believing the game says yes to everything. Quote: "It makes you feel clever, emphasising the feeling of being a cop chasing down a hot lead."

Predict players' theories and sometimes answer them back. A player who suspects Hannah has an identical twin finds a clip where she snaps, "Twins? Really? Are you really asking me that question?"

Barlow predicts hunches, rewards the good ones with strong clips and uses some to disarm the player.

With no built-in guidance, players build their own investigation tools. Players listen for names, places and repeated motifs, keep notes, draw timelines and jot down discrepancies, following red herrings and useful leads alike.

Because the story is assembled by the player's own intuition, it feels personal.

End on understanding the crime, not catching the culprit. Her Story ends with no arrest and no line-up; finding the culprit is the easy part, and grasping why takes many clips. Hannah's delivery leaves her trustworthiness uncertain, so readings differ and online discussion is feverish.

Quote: "Not the whodunnit. The whydunnit."