Her Story came out in 2015 and a lot of people still haven't processed it. Not because it's hard — it isn't — but because it did something almost no game had done before: it trusted you to find the story yourself, in whatever order you happened to find it.
The mechanic was deceptively simple. You have a database of police interview clips. You search a keyword. Clips surface. You watch them, pick up a word, search again. The narrative isn't told to you; it accumulates. By the end you've assembled something from fragments — testimony, evasion, partial truths — and the meaning you construct feels genuinely earned.
That feeling is hard to replicate. But a handful of games have gotten close.
Why Her Story worked
Before getting to recommendations, it's worth being specific about what made Her Story work, because "non-linear narrative" is too broad to be useful.
The key was the database metaphor. You weren't fast-forwarding through a timeline or unlocking chapters. You were excavating. Each search term was a probe. The game never told you whether you'd found everything relevant to a clip — you just had to trust your instincts and keep digging. That uncertainty is what gave the story texture. Sam Barlow also had Viva Serafino give a performance calibrated to that format: fragmented, present-tense, the kind of testimony that only coheres when you've heard enough of it.
Immortality
Sam Barlow's follow-up is bigger and stranger than Her Story. Three films, hundreds of clips, a mystery that unfolds well below the surface of what you're watching. The database mechanic returns but now you scrub through footage and match-cut between clips by clicking on objects and faces. It's more cinematic and more disorienting than Her Story, and the performances are extraordinary. If you liked Her Story and haven't played Immortality yet, that's the obvious next stop.
Telling Lies
Also from Barlow, positioned between Her Story and Immortality in terms of scale. You're watching recordings made by a surveillance tool — two-sided conversations where you only see one side at a time. The asymmetry creates its own kind of puzzle. It's slower than Her Story and not quite as focused, but the core loop of searching and excavating is intact.
Orwell
A different approach to the same underlying idea. In Orwell you're an intelligence analyst building a profile on a suspect by trawling through their digital life — social media, emails, documents. You select fragments and submit them to the system. The game is explicitly about surveillance and the ethics of that, which gives it a critical angle most mystery games avoid. Available on mobile.
Missing on Lost Island
A hidden-object mystery that earns a mention here because of how it handles narrative. The investigation unfolds through documents and found objects rather than FMV, and the pacing respects your intelligence. It's lighter than the other games on this list, but if you want something that fits in small sessions without sacrificing the sense of uncovering something, it holds up.
Detective Aloha
Full disclosure: this is my game, so take my endorsement with whatever salt seems appropriate.
The parallel to Her Story is real though. Detective Aloha is built around a missing-person case, and the way you work it is through fragmented testimony — except instead of video clips, you're reading text conversations. You interrogate suspects over iMessage-style threads. People answer partially, deflect, contradict themselves. You pin observations to a case file and try to assemble the truth from what they're willing to tell you.
It's not as cinematic as Her Story — there's no video, no FMV performance to watch. It's a native iPhone game built around interfaces you already know: Messages, a case file that feels like a real app. The intimacy works differently. Reading texts feels more personal than watching footage; the suspects feel like people who have your number, not people talking to a camera.
If you liked the excavation quality of Her Story — the sense that the story is there waiting and you're just finding your way to it — Detective Aloha is in that territory. It's shorter than Her Story and more constrained in scope, but the core mechanic of piecing together a disappearance from partial accounts is the same.
It's free on the App Store.