Her Story has no guns or finish line, just a search for meaning in an uncertain world

A murder mystery with a difference, Sam Barlow's new game is as much about who's playing it as it is whodunnit

There's a mechanism for finding out about the world that we've all become experts in, perhaps without realising it. Maybe we learned at school how to use libraries, maybe our parents or the Girl Guides taught us how to listen for birdsong. But no one ever taught us how to Google - yet we're all so good at it. We decide precisely which words to type to get the information we need. Defining search terms is how we touch the world.

"Defining search terms" is the mechanism used to fascinating effect by the excellent game Her Story, released this month for PC, Mac and iOS. The setup is simple. For reasons that become (somewhat) clear, you're sitting at a mid-1990s computer with a database of police interviews to search through. The interviews are all with the same woman - played by Viva Seifert. Someone's already typed the first term in for you and there are five results. The search term is "MURDER". Her husband's been murdered, and if you search long enough, and watch enough of the clips, you'll learn who murdered him, and how, and why, and what hall-of-mirrors events led to the killing.