Her Story is one of those games that I most likely will remember playing for a long time specifically for how it made me feel the whole time. Admittedly, I did this right before bed (poor choice) which added to the ambience and spooky music. But the lack of coherence in the stories of Eve and Hannah really made the story more interesting. Similar to how the chronological timeline of Momento is frankly boring (according to Dr. Sample), I think this story would be less interesting without the holes in the story and cohesiveness. Additionally, one thing that really made this game more interesting to me was the aspect of playing detective. There aren’t many games, or media, where the audience gets to play an almost active role in figuring out who, what, where, when, and why. The obvious connection of Her Story with other movies is Momento, but these twist endings remind me of a few other movies: The Usual Suspects and Inception.
(SPOILERS)
The ending of The Usual Suspects is, in my opinion, one the greatest twist endings. In short, a witness testimony of a ‘small’ character in a criminal group ends up telling a fabricated story based on images and words in the agents room. This twist ending was similar to how different pieces of Her Story unravelled for me. For example, when I initially heard the testimony of how she wanted to kill her sister was when I first started to have doubts of what I thought was going on. The aspect of flipping the plot on its head works so well in both works. Additionally, the ending of Inception still throws me through a loop, as I still wonder if Cobb is in a dream or not. These unanswered questions of what the truth is has led me to rewatch the movie over and over again, hoping to find a missed detail, similar to Her Story. Each video in the database presented more information that I wanted to look up. One thing that especially fascinated me was the use of Morse Code, which turned out to spell ‘loveu’ (from a quick Google Search. These little details make the game addicting and almost persuade you to keep playing to make sure you didn’t miss anything at all.