And while all the writing credit goes to creator Sam Barlow, what seals the deal is a wide-ranging performance from Viva Seifert that funnels her character’s inner life into hundreds of intense vignettes. Which makes Her Story that most rare of beasts, a great narrative-focused videogame. It’s that you are the one assembling these fragments, and can go off in any direction your curiosity demands at any time. It’s not just that the story is fragmentary, and thus ambiguous, or that it contains well-hidden twists. Her Story has a great narrative at the core, but what seriously elevates the game is an ingenious method of unravelling that narrative through pure interactivity. The complexity is in the mental challenge, as you grasp at the threads of this tangled web and begin to unweave them without ever being quite sure what’s at the centre. Her Story’s possible interactions are few and simple – anyone who’s ever used a computer could play. The shop and glasses are illustrative red herrings, by the way, because the whole point of Her Story is finding out what you need to find out. Before I knew the name of the interviewee I’d exhaustively tracked down every reference to a local shop, made obsessive notes on her glasses, and come up with a (completely bogus) working theory of what happened and whodunnit.
This opening half hour is perhaps Her Story’s smartest trick, because it lets the player fool themselves into thinking they are Columbo. The interviews are timestamped, so it’s easy to keep the chronology straight, but working out how and why Seifert’s character answers in the way she does is the real challenge Photograph: Sam Barlow
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