A while back I took a class on game studies and game theory and had the curious pleasure of playing a relatively short indie game called Her Story. Set up like a true crime investigation, the game asks you to hunt down and watch various clips of a series of interviews to discover the truth about one woman’s involvement in the death of her husband. The game itself is simple. You just type in search terms and start watching clips. The more you watch, the more specific your search terms.
The twist is when you realize that the woman in the videos is not who she says she is. The goal is to figure out just who she is and what she’s done. And that, my friends, is a fascinating and complex task.
But what caught my attention wasn’t just that the game was handling a “true crime” narrative in fascinating ways (although that was interesting in itself). What caught my attention was that in the middle of the mystery, another story began to show its colors, cobbled together in hints and references from the interviewee herself. I eventually realized that the woman in the videos wasn’t just casually making mention of fairy tales she loved as a child…her story was a retelling of one.
Specifically, it’s a twisted retelling of Rapunzel.
There will be spoilers to the game below, so if you are interested in playing a fascinating investigative game for relatively cheap (you can find it on Steam, where it is often on sale, or part of bundles occasionally on other websites), go ahead and stop reading here. You’ve been warned!
So I can’t take full credit for coming to the conclusion that Her Story is a Rapunzel Retelling. Adrian Chmielarz has done an amazing, and frankly extensive, job deciphering meaning from Her Story, including a complicated theory that the woman, or two identical women known as Hannah and Eve, is actually one woman with a multiple-personality disorder, rather than identical twins. I’m not here to argue one way or another on the identity of Hannah/Eve, but Chmielarz makes a strong case in his article here that they are, in fact, one woman, while also tying the story intrinsically with Rapunzel.
I am more interested in examining the ways that Her Story is actually a retelling of Rapunzel, rather than just using it as another hint to the complicated nature of Hannah/Eve. We’ll start with Chmielarz’s connections to the appropriate characters: Eve, who sings in bars and wears a blonde wig to differentiate herself from Hannah, is Rapunzel. Simon, Hannah’s husband, is the prince. And Hannah, the seemingly purer and more unhinged of the two woman (or two personalities) is Mother Gothel.
But this requires a bit of a leap of deduction, especially as Chmielarz adheres to the idea of one woman with two personalities. So let’s go back a bit, to Eve’s recollection of her childhood, pieced together from the final interview video where she apparently tells the whole, dubiously true story.
If Eve is to be believed (and it’s entirely possible she is lying), she was born as the identical twin to Hannah, delivered in their parents’ home by a midwife named Florence who lived across the street. Florence told the mother that Eve was dead, and the mother allowed the midwife to take her “dead” baby away and leave her with the one that was alive. So Florence brought Eve home to where she lived, across the street, and raised her there. But Eve wasn’t allowed outside. Her only access to the outside world was a window, out of which she saw the street beyond and, eventually, her mirror image and twin sister, Hannah.
Eve eventually reads Florence’s diary and discovers the truth, and soon afterward Florence dies after a fall down the stairs (Or was it a push? That’s up to the player to figure out!). She burns Florence’s diary and runs to the house across the road where she’s seen her double, and Hannah hides her in the attic. There, Eve and Hannah plan out a way to live a double life, switching places frequently and hiding Eve from their parents. As Eve explains it, they would keep careful track of their days in diaries, so that they were never out of sync. Even their bodies synced up, with them either contracting illnesses at the same time or having to share injuries like bruises. Sometimes Eve would go to school while Hannah stayed behind. Sometimes Hannah went instead and left Eve in the attic. If the parents heard Eve and Hannah talking in the attic, they just assumed Hannah was talking with an imaginary friend. Eve even shares a couple of close calls where she was almost discovered.
It sounds fantastical, right? Chmielarz’ argument for the one-woman-two-personalities hinges precisely on the fact that hiding a child, and later a teen, in the attic of someone’s house for nearly a decade is impossible and impractical, as are many other details of Eve and Hannah’s double life. But we of the fairy tale variety are accustomed to strange tales and stranger characters, which is why I’m somewhat juggling the more practical theory that Hannah/Eve are split personalities with the more magical-realist view that they are actually twins leading a complex double life.
If they are really twins and Eve really lived with Florence for a time, it first it seems like Florence is Gothel, Eve is Rapunzel, and Hannah is the prince, as Hannah helps secure Eve’s “freedom” from her “tower.” Except that Eve exchanges one tower for another, and in a way, one Gothel for another.
As the girls grow up, Eve talks about how she would date the boys Hannah was too shy to talk to, even to the point where Eve was sleeping with boys before Hannah. Until Simon. Hannah fell head over heels for Simon, and soon she was pregnant with Simon’s baby while still in high school. Sounds like Hannah has become the Rapunzel, right? The girl escaping the tower, only to become pregnant, is reminiscent of such a moment in the Rapunzel story, depending on the version you’re reading–for example, the first version the Brothers Grimm published in 1812. But Hannah miscarries, and is infertile for some time afterward. Hannah’s brief life as Rapunzel has ended.
Eve, however, is not infertile. Years later, after Hannah and Simon have moved into their own place and Eve has been left in the attic of Hannah’s parents’ home, Eve takes to wearing a blonde wig and singing in bars. Until suddenly Hannah’s parents die, and Hannah and Simon decide to move back into the old house, where Eve still lives in the attic. But things have changed, and Eve wants to be her own person. She continues to don her wig and sing in bars. One day, Simon walks in to a bar she is currently playing at, and stays to talk to her. It seems the prince is enraptured by Rapunzel’s song (and fooled by her blonde wig). After a few days of Eve trying not to give in to Simon’s attention because she doesn’t want to anger Hannah, Eve gives in, and suddenly she’s pregnant with Simon’s baby…and Hannah doesn’t know.
This is where the retelling gets really twisted. With Eve as Rapunzel, pregnant and living under Hannah’s roof, Hannah permanently becomes Gothel, jealous, angry, and violent. In a confrontation, Hannah snatches Eve’s wig and Eve leaves. That night, Hannah pretends to be Eve, wearing the wig in a move harking back to Gothel lowering Rapunzel’s cut hair to lure the prince into the tower. But when Simon arrives and Hannah confronts him, she gets violent and kills him. Possibly accidentally, but again that’s up to the player to figure out.
Eve ties the events of her life with that of Rapunzel when the police ask her to look at Morgan Interview Theme Technique sketches, which are a way police can determine guilt based off psychological recreations of stories according to the sketches here is the first one Eve is given.
And her response?
OK. There’s a girl, and she’s staring out the window. She’s sad? She’s trapped. She’s here. She’s looking out the window because her mother won’t let her out. It’s Rapunzel. The story starts when she’s born. Mother Gothel, a witch, takes Rapunzel from her parents and keeps her locked up in this tower. Rapunzel gets pregnant by the Prince. Mother Gothel is furious, so she cuts off her hair and throws her — Actually her hair is already short here so that’s already happened. She throws her into the wilderness and Rapunzel is reunited with the prince who’s blind. But she cures him with her tears, and so it’s a happy ending. Is that too much?
Eve’s little story about Rapunzel succinctly sums up all the events in her own life as a Rapunzel–being taken, being trapped, getting pregnant, losing her blonde hair, and being thrown into the wilderness. Her quick summation of the prince’s cure is in contrast with Simon’s death. It’s probably an attempt to throw off the police by concocting a happy ending, something that according to the MITT could suggest a lack of guilt.
Interestingly, Hannah kills Simon with a shard of mirror. Simon, a glass glazier, made her a unique mirror as a gift for her birthday (and apparently made Eve another one that is the exact same). In her anger, she broke the mirror and cut his throat with some of the glass. Does this have anything to do with Rapunzel? Well, maybe not. A lot of the mirror images (palindromes, the mirror, reflections, etc) actually suggest other fairy tale tropes such as the magic mirror in Snow White stories, for example, or the evil mirror shards from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” But it does call to mind the end of Disney’s Tangled, where the mirror in which Gothel frequently checked her reflection is broken, allowing Flynn to use a shard to cut Rapunzel’s hair.
Regardless, after the murder, what follows are Hannah and Eve’s attempts to cover up the murder, and so the story of Rapunzel more or less ends. There is no happy ending for Rapunzel (Eve), who has lost the prince not only to blindness but to full-on death, and Mother Gothel (Hannah) seemingly gets away with her crimes. Eve, still pregnant, must raise her daughter alone while ensuring her sister (or other personality) gets away with murder.
It makes for a pretty dark Rapunzel retelling, regardless of if you believe Eve and Hannah are one and the same, or physical twins. What starts out as a weird contemporary Rapunzel story of a girl locked away, first in a midwife’s house and then in an attic, turns into a strange murder mystery where Rapunzel and Gothel may both be implicated in the crime of killing the prince, and it’s never 100% certain what the truth is throughout the interview videos. Is Eve lying? Are they twins? Are they one person who genuinely believes they are different people? Did Simon cheat on his wife with his wife’s twin, or was he trying to cautiously handle a marital relationship with his wife’s personalities? These questions and more circulate throughout the game.
But for the story of Rapunzel, a story of growing up and branching out, it does seem like Eve-as-Rapunzel comes out on top. She escapes from the attic, manages to escape Hannah-as-Gothel, who must physically hide from the police or bury herself in Eve’s pysche, and gets to live a life as herself, rather than as Hannah’s double.
The game “ends” when a little chat message pops up from an investigator on the case of Simon’s murder. In chatting with him, you realize that the person controlling the computer screen, the person you are controlling that is, whose face you occasionally see “reflected” back to you when the lights flicker in the game, is actually Sarah, Eve’s daughter. We don’t know what happened to Eve, or if she got a happily ever after or not, after years of the case being buried and supposedly re-opened. But at the very least we know her story lives on…if only in chopped up clips of police investigation interviews.
Like I said, it’s a strange, surreal, and mystifying game. And in terms of a Rapunzel retelling, it’s pretty dark and twisted.
There are tons of other games out there that retell fairy tales in various ways. I’ll occasionally do posts about them in the future (some of them are really fun!), but for now, what are some video games, mobile games, or even board games about fairy tales that you guys like or would recommend? Leave suggestions in the comments or message them to me!