I make no secret in other reviews of how highly I think of knowledge-based investigation games, with Her Story being one of the early examples that really kicked off the popularity of this interesting little genre. Not only is this game another work from the very same director, but conceptually it blows the original out of the water with a massively expanded scope - you've got the plots of three movies, the fates of several actors, and a little something extra special all to keep track of. The amount of work it must have taken to put this all together is staggering.

Unfortunately, on the gameplay side of things, I do have a couple of qualms. While the mysteries are compelling once you've got more context, at the start before you really know what you're looking for, things can feel very aimless, making it hard to figure out what amongst the information overload is important to note. Conversely, while jumping between clips with shared objects is a novel idea that helps broaden your search early on, later when you're trying to find the last few new clips, the lack of control and inability to try specific things, as with Her Story's keywords, can be really frustrating, especially when trying to hunt down the secrets. By the end of the game I was pretty frustrated with the pace of progress, and when the credits rolled I felt a sense of relief more than anything, which isn't a great sign. Maybe this was just a skill issue on my end? But that took me out of the experience and made it harder to emotionally connect to the themes the game wanted to explore. It also left me missing some crucial scenes that I only found about later, despite the game declaring itself to be over.

As a friend of a friend of the author, and the writer of the first review for the game on this site, I feel some responsibility to try particular hard to sell it well. Unfortunately for me, the core appeal is naturally in the quality of the writing, and I don't have the vocabulary to compliment that in a way that doesn't sound generic. Fortunately for us all, it is in fact, very good - emotionally touching, thematically resonant, deeply intriguing, and with highly appealing, distinct and memorable characters.

Given the restrictions placed upon the game by the scope of its budget, the presentation is fairly impressive as well, making the most of the tools available to include good-looking character designs, and employing the game's music effectively - in particular, I can't stop thinking about the game's haunting main theme, and that's in large part due to finding the right music with the right tone and deploying it at the right moments.