Courtney and I did our anniversary donut thing and combined it with
Telling Lies, Sam Barlow's follow-up to
Her Story, since it's that rare game we can be pretty confident going in that we'll enjoy.
It was good; the mechanic is 90% the same as
Her Story, which is great; I feel like Barlow's kind of invented a new game genre with this and I hope he keeps putting out games in the same style. There's a little tweak to it that I liked, but actually misunderstood, which I won't describe in case anyone here is going to play it.
It's definitely more polished than
Her Story, but it's less a mystery than a "piece together what happened out of order" kind of puzzle. There are still surprises and revelations along the way, but I had the basic sketch of what was going on pretty early and from there, just had to discover a handful of specifics and revelations. It felt like we got to 80% of what there was to discover in just a couple of hours, whereas with
Her Story there were multiple "ohhhh!" realizations sprinkled throughout the 5-ish hours pretty consistently.
That might just be random, though, because the brilliance of these games is that it's totally open and you can technically discover anything at any time with the right search term, and if you proceed in roughly the way the creator expects then you'll feel you're getting a story doled out just so, with proper timing and build-up, but if you jump ahead here and there, it might not have that same rhythm. That's the cost of the game being so open, perhaps. Or the story this time really is just more straightforward (my guess: a bit of both).
It's good. It's not great. If you liked
Her Story, this is well worth your time, and there's a lot to like. I hope we keep seeing more. And it was cool to see some recognizable actors in something like this.
I also think that, if you never played
Her Story, you might even prefer this one, because the conceit in both is still so good that it's kind of like playing your first RPG, or your first open-world sandbox game: the mechanic itself is intoxicating when it's new. And that might be better, because you'll get to enjoy that mechanic with this (pretty good) game, and then move up to something more revelatory in
Her Story after, where the story itself will buttress whatever novelty is lost in using the same mechanic again.
Recommended, for sure.
given my super high expectations, but
or better in a vacuum, trying to parse out the fact that it had a really tough act to follow.