From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #326 (UK, January 2019).
Something I miss when I play digital games is the tactile side of play. It’s why videogames and board games coexist in my life so beautifully. One allows for complexity beyond what a pen-and-paper can track, and the other offers tokens to hold, boards to construct, people to physically turn to as you play. Somewhere in the middle are a wonderful selection of videogames where you feel compelled to take notes.
I’m not talking about games which demand you fetch a sheet of paper as part of the experience. These are games where my experience just happens to spill over into the real world as drawings and words. The ones where I decide to keep my thoughts straight by idly jotting down words, phrases, the location of a treasure to come back to or an area to investigate more thoroughly.
After a while the odd word or two becomes a page, perhaps even a map. Arrows allow paragraphs to put out little runners, setting down roots in blank spaces and fruiting whole new clusters of notes.
Playing detective
Her Story is one such game. The interface allows you to ...
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