Her Story by Sam Barlow is an interesting, enjoyable experiment. Its website describes it as “non-linear” storytelling, but I think a more accurate description would be “random-access” storytelling.
You find yourself in front of a computer screen in which you type in keywords to search for video clips from a series of police interviews with…well, part of your job is figuring out who.
Like Gone Home, you control the plotting but not the story (the syuzhet but not the fabula, for you formalists out there). Like CLOUDS, the database at the heart is exposed and central. Like PRY, you are given an indication of how much of the material you have uncovered. The mechanic feels a little like what I described in my Kuleshov 2.0 thought experiment, except the story itself doesn’t change depending on the order in which you watch the clips; it’s the draft in your head that is changing, mutating with each new piece of information to better align itself with the story slowly being uncovered.
Part of its charm is that in scale and quirkiness it feels like the work of one person, and it largely was. I had fun reading about the tools Sam Barlow used to put it together: a couple VCRs to degrade the video footage, a $100 audio recorder supplemented with a free sound effect library, a MacBook Air that I picture slowly but surely chugging through its Final Cut and Unity renders.
Barlow must have had help recording the actual video interviews, and the success of the whole thing hinges on the performance of the actor, Viva Seifert. Other than that, the development of this game is as close to a writerly experience as I have ever heard of for a visual (non-text) game.
William Comfort Anderson 
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