Her Story makes game narratives personal - and that feels like the future

[Administrator]

Fabula and syuzhet are two words that won't net you any sweet esults if you type them into Her Story's antiquated database, but together they're the smoking gun regardless, and a big part of the reason that this audacious caper works as well as it does. They're entertaining words in their own right, of course, fun to say and fun to deploy in text, but when paired they unlock a lot of the magical potential of narrative itself - magic that Her Story relies upon to construct its wayward tale.
They're literary terms, fabula meaning the narrative events when laid out in strict chronological order, while syuzhet refers to the arrangement in which those events are actually delivered to the audience, once they've been artfully chopped around to provide optimal impact. Crucially, for a piece of storytelling to really sing, both fabula and syuzhet need to be perfectly constructed - and these days, that can even come down to knowing when a tale has that strange straight-ahead power that means the fabula should be left as it is. F*** you, Soderbergh.
It is the handling of this delicate relationship that makes Her Story such an exhilarating experience, as it essentially passes control of the syuzhet over to the player - or a second layer of syuzhet, anyway, since the pieces you're putting together are already one step removed from the original flow of events by the time you get to them. Even before you start to explore the fascinating, and rather devastating theme of the piece - which I won't spoil here - Her Story's already a riot of beloved literary ideas, in other words, all brought to fresh life as a video game. To work its tricks, the game drops you in front of the desktop of a mid-90s computer terminal and allows you to poke through the scrambled remains of a series of interviews that took place over 20 years ago - but it does not grant access to the chronological timeline of the original interviews. Instead, you can search for keywords that will call forth specific clips, and these will assert their own non-linear order to the story. Depending on the keywords you choose, you will get the truth - which is particularly problematic here in the first place - delivered in any number of ways.
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