LogFAQs > #932387337

#68





Years of release: 2015 (Windows, mobile)
Beaten?: Yes

I think that people sometimes get the wrong idea about "experimental" or "avant-garde" art. To a lot of people it just looks like pretentious, hipstery wankery without any purpose or meaning, and to be fair, a lot of the time it kind of is, because nothing requires less work or creativity than throwing meaningless, random noise at the wall and hoping that you got lucky and created art by accident. But in most cases, creating something "experimental" is about trying brand new concepts, exploring unused design spaces, seeking to do something that's never been done before, even if it fails. I studied music for four years in college and it really gave me a lot of new perspectives on applications of the art that I would have considered frivolous before. I began to realize that there's nothing new under the sun, and brand new ideas, things that nobody has ever thought to try before, are worth their weight in gold, although an idea is still only a small fraction of the work and the larger part is talent, experience, and effort. Novelty is really worth something - that's not to say that music that sounds the same is all worthless, since there's a place for creating things of the same genre, and fine tuning and trying new *little* ideas within an already-existing framework - but when you've looked at a lot of different works that are all kind of the same or based on previous ideas, stumbling across something that really, truly is something you've never seen or heard before gets you really enthusiastic about the artform itself again. It doesn't happen every day, so every time it happens, it's something worth celebrating and cherishing.

Sorry, that got a little rambly - all of this is to say that I 100% completely understand why Her Story won Polygon's game of the year award for 2015, even if I don't personally agree with the honor (2015 was the most stacked year of the decade). It was an atypical choice, perhaps, but not a strange one. I can only imagine that when you review video games for a living, you end up playing a lot of stuff that is the same, or similar, to stuff you've seen before. Her Story, on the other hand, is probably the most unlike any other game I've played this decade - at least, it's probably the most unique game on this list, especially since most of the games I play are intentionally trying to recreate the 90's.

That's a bit of a funny thing to say about Her Story since it reminds me of FMV games in the 90's, but it doesn't play like them. Her Story is a game where you watch a bunch of video clips of police interviews, using an intentionally shitty search engine to type in keywords to find more clips in the database, until eventually you piece together the story for yourself. That's all there is to it, really, but as far as I can think of it's a brand new way for a game to tell a story, leaving it to you to decide how you want to investigate, what keywords you think would be a good idea to look up, what order you want to watch the clips, deciding for yourself how it all pieces together. There isn't a lot of gameplay to this, although I would say that finding the right keywords to use does take some meaningful strategy and creativity, but ultimately all that happens is that eventually the game tells you you know the story after you've seen a certain number of 'key' clips and that's about it. The game doesn't particularly care if you're paying attention and have taken anything from the story - it's entirely up to you and your own self-investment to get something out of this, and I think that's kind of great actually. It feels more like you're doing actual detective work than any other video game I can think of, including ones where you play as a detective. Your mileage might vary based on how much you felt like buying into the whole idea, but for me, I was completely, fully engrossed in this game for 3 hours. I played it and did not stop playing it until I was done.

I still think about this game a lot and how it changed my ideas of how stories could work or how games could work, and I probably spend more time reading someone's analysis of the game's story than I did actually playing through the game's story, haha. This game could have gone wrong if not for two things; an ingeniously clever script, which seems perfectly designed to guide you to new keywords to search and to dole out new information at a perfectly paced rate, and a fantastic acting performance by Viva Seifert, who I never would have guessed was not a professional actress based on how she had to carry the entire game on her shoulders. But it all came together and clicked perfectly, in my opinion. A brand new game idea, fully realized and executed with precision, is something that deserves all the accolades it gets.