Her Story is actually a fairly simple intertwining of gameplay and live action video that together form a hugely effective experience. On their own, each component would not be as compelling. Sitting at a virtual computer from the 90's typing search keywords into a database might recall school research trips to the library. The videos themselves, the meat of this game, would lose some of their sense of mystery and nearly all of our personal investment in them if we were allowed to view them all at once in sequence. However, in pairing these two, this game created something new; something that made me feel more like a detective than any game, show or book has before.
Unlike the game's structure, the story told within the videos is far from simple. Without spoilers, the things this woman talked about in these police interviews kept me interested and engaged. Who was this woman and how did she view the events that led her to where she was? As I pieced things together, sometimes new information would come to light that made me rethink what I thought I knew. Enough care and detail was put into these videos to make them seem real, like I was getting a peek into one woman's life.
None of this would have worked without good writing, acting and production of these videos. Various industry publications have nominated and given awards to Her Story for these aspects. How the interviews are divided also deserves credit. You never learn too much from a single video, but usually you get enough to trigger new ideas for keyword searches. Some of these divisions do get frustratingly short, though, making them difficult to discover and not very informative. They're realistic from a police interview perspective, but this realism comes at a cost to the gameplay that I don't think is worth it.
Toward the end of the game the pace begins to sputter as the number of unwatched videos grows small. No longer did I feel like a skillful detective picking up on details and then using them to uncover new information. Instead, I eventually felt like I was grasping at straws, hoping to get lucky. This may very well only be a problem for completionists like me that don't like to use guides if they can help it. I strongly suggest that you play the game until the pace at which you are finding new footage begins to bother you and then go find a guide for 100% completion. There are some videos that only have one spoken word in them that I'm fairly confident I NEVER would have found without help.