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Editor's note: Our review is very light on narrative details, but if you want to head into Her Story with completely fresh eyes be warned there are very mild spoilers below.During the summer of June 1994 Hannah Smith reported her husband, Simon, as missing. The missing person file was, shortly thereafter, stamped with murder. We don't know whether or not the case was solved at the time, but in Her Story, the latest game from Sam Barlow - designer of Aisle and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - you're given access to the historic interview tapes. The database, a mess buried inside the tape archive at Portsmouth police station's homicide department, holds close to three hundred individual clips, spliced from a series of interview sessions with detectives, held during the summer of 1994. You cannot access the clips in chronological sequence. Rather, you must use search terms to query the database. If your chosen term, such as "Robbery" or "Yes, I was there" appears in the transcript of one or more clips in the database, they are presented for viewing.
In this way you begin to dredge through the archive, gradually piecing together the bones of a story about what happened during those weeks. While the information you receive has no particular chronology, something of a meaningful arc emerges naturally, as you use scraps of detail from one clip to inform your next search term. Hannah might mention the name of a co-worker, or of a place that the couple liked to visit, and you hurriedly tap the term into the waiting box, in the hope that it'll fill in further, somehow related blanks.
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