Game review: Her Story - reviving a forgotten technology
Full-motion video, once touted as gaming's future, is the ideal medium for this absorbing miniature game.
It's been a while since we've encountered a game that used live-action footage.
Once dubbed as a possible future for the industry, full-motion video games (FMVs) were popular in the 1990s: both the Wing Commander and Command & Conquer series featured plentiful live-action sequences, while innovative but ultimately disappointing games such as Phantasmagoria and The 11th Hour based their concepts around the gimmick.
That's largely what it was - a short-lived gimmick - so it's surprising to see Her Story use the idea more than 20 years after its heyday. A large part of that is built on nostalgia, the game only available for the computer systems (OS and Windows) and its gameplay set during the peak of FMV's popularity (mid-'90s).
The set-up is simple: gamers are tasked with searching archived videos to solve a mystery, True Detective-style. You're presented with a retro-desktop operating system and a simple search engine. By searching for various words - "murder", "death", "missing" - a number of police interrogation videos will be presented, all of a woman being interviewed at various points through 1994.
