Skeuomorphs and the Uncanny in Her Story’s Mirror Game

Some minigames don’t announce their presence. They’re not centre stage, they don’t help you advance in the main game. Yet, the developers spent time and effort creating them ‒ for a reason. The best example I’ve come across of this kind of deceptively unassuming minigame is in the crime fiction title, Her Story.

Her Story was originally released in 2015, written and directed by Sam Barlow. Gameplay involves you searching through a database of video clips from a police investigation into a missing man. The main game mechanic is simple: search through transcribed interviews with his wife using keywords. That’s it. It’s a delightfully elegant puzzle, and its critical acclaim would lead Barlow to create other full motion video mysteries Telling Lies and Immortality.

Her Story is also a skeuomorph. Skeuomorphism traditionally refers to the practice of imitating the design of an object made in a different material to evoke its function or associations, such as the save icon resembling a floppy disc. In the case of Her Story, the humble computer desktop is imitated, complete with the half-reflection of the dingy office “you” are working in.

As any detective or archaeologist worth their salt will tell you, you always find interesting clues in the stuff that people throw away, and the rubbish bin on the desktop computer in Her Story is no exception. Inside is another skeuomorph, a digital version of the board game Reversi, here renamed as the ‘Mirror Game,’ and it's Her Story’s hidden minigame.