1. I whole heatedly recommend playing this game even though there are an
absolute ton of issues w/ it. Watching the trailers kind of gave me
flashbacks to Night Trap and other horrible full motion video games back in the 90s but this is much more than just a novelty.
2.
The reason for number 1 is Viva Seifert's acting, very strictly. It was
a performance that required a heroic amount of subtlety to even be
decent and she made it great.
3. Honestly, the rave reviews for Her Story's
writing are more indicative of how low the writing bar is set in gaming
than it is of the writing actually being good. This is really about
made for TV level. Sure there are some interesting bits but it's nothing
fans of the mystery genre don't see a hundred times a year.
4. I only realized number 3 after thinking about the game quite a bit after playing. The reason for this is number 2.
5. It is worth emphasizing that this is the kind of game you will think about quite a bit after playing.
6.
Though the gameplay is not at all the same, I feel like this fits in
the with the walking sim genre in terms of feel. The difference is
instead of wandering around and discovering little bits and bobs about
the story in the manner of, say, Dear Esther, you input searches into a database program and the story is revealed to you through the videos that come up.
7.
This was way more engaging than any walking sim I've ever played. To
explain this, I will simply point you once again to number 2.
8.
As a story telling medium, this type of game really works but I think it
could have been done a lot better. It only took me an hour or maybe an
hour and a half to figure out essentially everything important but it
took me four hours to finish the game.
9. Number 8 brings us to
the essential problem with this style of story telling, which is that it
kind of inherently can't have a planned climactic moment. Maybe it's
your hundredth search that gives you the big reveal, maybe it's the
second. Her Story seemed to try to get around this by having many
small reveals but the problem remains that you may find all the good
stuff early on and then find yourself watching unimportant garbage for
the next hour or two.
10. This game doesn't really end. After a
while, you basically get an option to say you don't want to play anymore
and then when you quit, the credits roll. This is again kinda the same
problem as 8 and 9.
11. This does not wrap up everything in a
neat little package for you when it's done. The ending such as it is is
intentionally ambiguous. If that bothers you, grow up.
12. I went
and rewatched the videos in order after playing and I do think the
story works better as it was presented than it would have been in a more
traditional manner. I don't think this is quite so ground breaking as
some of its little marketing blurbs would have you believe but, you know, almost.
13. It is worth emphasizing that Her Story is good enough that I wanted to go back and rewatch everything immediately after playing. See again: number 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment