Queers in Love at the End of the World is a timed hypertext game in which the player must decide what to do or say to their romantic partner in the span of ten seconds. Her Story is a database game in which the player must piece together a coherent narrative from hundreds of police interview clips. Even though their narratives and mechanics couldn’t be any more different, these two games do share one crucial similarity: keywords.
You could say that keywords are present in every hypertext game, as there are almost always words in a given passage that, when clicked or otherwise interacted with, progress the narrative. However, the time constraint of Queers in Love lends such words a heavier significance than usual. Ten seconds is hardly enough time to read even a single passage. If the player wants to get further in the game, they must make snap decisions about what paths they want to take and click through them almost nonstop. The player may feel as though they are clicking at random, but I would argue that they are in fact likely to gravitate towards the words that compel them the most, whether they’re sensual like “kiss” or expressive like “tell.”
The appeal of Her Story rests on this very same premise. The game begins with a word already typed into the database, waiting to be searched—”murder.” The several videos with this word in it produce other terms of interest, which in turn produce other terms of interest, and on and on without an end in sight. Much like in Queers in Love, the player latches onto whatever words pique their interest the most, from Simon to fennel to twin, and uses them to push the narrative. The five-video limitation on each keyword especially encourages players to search for the words that will help fill in all the blank spaces.