kaputt

Her Story

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Also in general I feel like people are too precious about spoiler tags, but in this case they are absolutely warranted!

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I played through this with my wife in two sittings. We loved the experience of piecing together the puzzle but were as down on the plot as most people. Also the existence of a 100% experience without a non-tedious way to actually get all the clips was a big sting in the tail.

 

My biggest complaint about the writing was just how, well, masculine it was. The way it talks about the girl's burgeoning sexuality, and sex in general...it's just so far removed from what I've read from women writers, or heard in discussions with women. That alone killed any idea I might have had about realism, and the twins bit which we twigged on pretty early just put the ludicrousness over the top.

 

We hated the acting at first, but later on we figured that she was acting poorly on purpose because she's portraying someone who's trying to act poorly during most of the sessions. Once we started getting clips from the last session that became clear (or at least we got that from it). As a side effect Eve became a much more sympathetic character to us because she's the only one we get to see being honest.

 

I greatly hope that this concept is done again, but with a better writer.

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Good article, but I think the perceived issues with the game that Hudson notes come back to our earlier discussion.

 

Namely, the negative connotations surrounding disassociative identity disorder are only negative connotations if that theory is true. If instead the Hannah and Eve actually are two separate people, the mistake of portraying a person with DID as having two separate, complete, competing identities washes away. As I've mentioned before, I never even thought to consider that they were one person once I encountered the "twist", in part because I know that DID gets wildly exaggerated in pop culture. There's a bit of confirmation bias going on here, I think. Used to seeing insensitive portrayals of DID, the player jumps to that conclusion immediately, rather than taking the clear distinction betwen Eve and Hannah as an clue that something else is going on. Hudson gestures to this, but says "the most persuasive evidence points to Disassociative Identity Disorder," while I think exactly the opposite is true.

 

That said, the comments about the harmful stereotype of the "crazy killer woman" are well made, because even if Hannah and Eve are twins, they're still depicted as being pretty unhinged.

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Yeah, I guess I just disagree that it's ambiguous. Or at least, that it's intentionally so.

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Yeah, I guess I just disagree that it's ambiguous. Or at least, that it's intentionally so.

 

I thought it was unambiguous also, but I thought it was unambiguously the other explanation than you.

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It's ludicrous either way but I'm in camp tberton here. Things like

the tattoo, the Glasgow trip, the pregnancy and the timing of some of the videos made me not even seriously consider the DID explanation.

 

I think what also factored into my immediate acceptance of that branch of ludicrousness is that is a lot easier for me to accept a Video game plot being ridiculous, and that I'm aware that DID doesn't work like this and I was inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt to the author that he knew about what DID is and isn't. It's easier for me to accept that he's bad at writing regular people in weird circumstances than to bring a willful ignorance of mental health symptoms into it.

 

It's very interesting to me that there's a lot of people thinking it's meant to be DID but I don't really follow that interpretation.

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The game does nothing in particular to support this, but one way in which the concerns about the portrayal of mental illness might be handwaved away while having it still be one person is if it is a non mentally ill but devious person with a poor understanding of DID attempting to create the impression of DID to set up a defence on grounds of insanity

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I really liked this thing! I was also quite surprised to find out that there's a credits roll. It also seems like I played it for much less time than a lot of people, so maybe it's based on percentage of the videos that have been watched?

 

I spent just over 1 hour, 40 minutes on it, and I have a pretty good idea of what (I think) happened, but from the look of that DB Checker thing, I've only seen around 80 of 270 clips (just under 30%).

 

Oh, and for those wanting to watch all the videos, they're all just .avi files in one of the game's directories (on Windows, at least). All nice and numbered in order and everything.

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Oh, and for those wanting to watch all the videos, they're all just .avi files in one of the game's directories (on Windows, at least). All nice and numbered in order and everything.

 

B)

 

Also, for those saying the acting in Her Story was bad:

 

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In case anyone is interested, here are the notes I made while playing. Some of the stuff is from after I had mostly figured everything out and was just filling in the details, but most of them are from while I was being a detective. Spoilers obviously:

http://i.imgur.com/Fl80JjA.jpg

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B)

Also, for those saying the acting in Her Story was bad:

Vinny replied to someone on Twitter this morning talking about how they wanted a version of Her Story where Jenks is added as the detective asking her questions, and now I can't get that idea out of my head.

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The game does nothing in particular to support this, but one way in which the concerns about the portrayal of mental illness might be handwaved away while having it still be one person is if it is a non mentally ill but devious person with a poor understanding of DID attempting to create the impression of DID to set up a defence on grounds of insanity

I'm admittedly utterly ignorant of identity disorders, and perhaps that plays a part. However, from my perspective if it is really two separate human beings, the story becomes this really convoluted, far-fetched mystery about how it all could have happened. Where as if it is a single human, it becomes about crafting this really convoluted, far-fetched character. The latter is inherently more interesting to me, whether it's a person faking it or one body two minds type of setup. Which is how I've chosen to interpret it.

I'm very much looking forwards to hearing the Thumbs talk about Her Story.

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I guess it comes down to the hospital trip, pregnancy, and the tattoo for me. Either the police checked the alibi, hospital records, and the Tattoo when they got suspicious, or they didn't. With no detective side of things, we are only left to wonder. Personally, I assume that the police had to have checked these things, because if they've gone to the trouble to bring her in 5 separate times, I'd expect them to cross-check the facts. If you believe the police are incompetent, then I guess it could go either way.

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For me, it comes down to the hostpital in Glasgow. If the police were at all competent, they would have checked that. If they had checked, they could have confirmed whether Eve had been there. And if Eve was there, she couldn't be the murderer.

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For me it comes down to two people working two separate jobs for a good period of time. If she's lying about that, it's going to be pretty blatant.

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The wife and I have played this for over 2 hours now and have come to the point of long stretches of not finding anything new. There are more videos to find (we are ~80% through) but am unsure there is anything else "important" left. I want to listen to all these discussion podcasts about the game!  :)
 
I'm going to spoiler what I've figured out and someone tell me if I have anything big left?

 

They are twins separated at birth. Miscarriage. Eve is sexy and Hannah is shy. Eve has a wig that she uses to have a life as a musician. Simon started sleeping with Eve without knowing her relation to Hannah just being fascinated by the resemblance. Hannah finds out, goes crazy about the duplicate antique mirror gift. fights, breaks mirror, "accidentally" slits his throat. They hide the body in the cellar and off to Glasgow they go.

 

Playing this game is the #2 gaming experience this year, bonus that I got to experience it with my wife. Playing it solo wouldn't be the same.

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The wife and I have played this for over 2 hours now and have come to the point of long stretches of not finding anything new. There are more videos to find (we are ~80% through) but am unsure there is anything else "important" left. I want to listen to all these discussion podcasts about the game!  :)

 

I'm going to spoiler what I've figured out and someone tell me if I have anything big left?

 

They are twins separated at birth. Miscarriage. Eve is sexy and Hannah is shy. Eve has a wig that she uses to have a life as a musician. Simon started sleeping with Eve without knowing her relation to Hannah just being fascinated by the resemblance. Hannah finds out, goes crazy about the duplicate antique mirror gift. fights, breaks mirror, "accidentally" slits his throat. They hide the body in the cellar and off to Glasgow they go.

 

Playing this game is the #2 gaming experience this year, bonus that I got to experience it with my wife. Playing it solo wouldn't be the same.

You've either missed or ignored all the stuff about the people who raised them.

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There are several cheat functions that you unlock after saying yes to the IM conversation. They are pretty much necessary to get 100%, as several of the clips are single common word responses.

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You've either missed or ignored all the stuff about the people who raised them.

 

Ack, yea I figured that out, except I never

figured out if Eve poisoned her parents with the mushrooms.

 

I was mainly wondering if I'd missed anything after my most recent discovered event.

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I used the after credits cheats and saw all the videos. I hadn't missed anything big!

This game and thread was very fun to read through. Listening to the thumbs and VG hot dogs talk about it tomorrow, stoked.

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There are several cheat functions that you unlock after saying yes to the IM conversation. They are pretty much necessary to get 100%, as several of the clips are single common word responses.

 

Not really. There's a single very easy trick that can be used to 100% things without ever knowing about the cheats. The cheats just make it a bit less tedious. Obviously I wouldn't recommend doing either before you've explored as much as you feel capable/interested in doing on your own.

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I bought Her Story during the Steam Sale.  You all know more about it than I do!

 

I thought I basically completed the game because nearly all of the story had been revealed.  I couldn't imagine any more twists to come.  So I stopped playing and started listening to the Spoilercast.  Then Steve revealed a mid-game event that I had not experienced.

 

An IM message.

 

So I guess I need to keep playing!

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I'd try and seek out more of the last day's interview; it's not clear what triggers the IM message, but I was in a similar situation and got it by stumbling across the first video of the last day.

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