Yesssss I love Her Story - that "curiosity as game mechanic" was really well done, and I wish there were more games in the 'genre'.
I did play the later game "Immortality" which is a bit similar in gameplay - you can click on something in one scene to find other scenes with the same character / object in them. I enjoyed that, though it didn't have the same exploration-narrative magic of Her Story. I definitely found it harder to get engaged with at first.
It must be really difficult to craft a story that reveals itself well in that clip/connection format. It's not a simple linear narrative, and avoiding sequence breaks (where you get a clip that reveals things you shouldn't yet know) is so important. Though I think Her Story handles that well by keeping clips short enough that you don't have the context with just a single clip.
Oof, haven't thought about them in years and now I want more.
I should take another look at Telling Lies. When it came out there were a lot of complaints about what you said, it drops you into the middle of a scene and I think you had to slowly rewind to the start of the clip? I read later that (?) they added a feature to skip back to the start with a single button press (or maybe that was a steam mod?). Anyways, I never ended up playing it.
I was watching the other game: "#wargames" for a while but it stopped being sold and vanished from the internet.
I would think a more sophisticated canvas randomizer should be able to keep the same randomized canvas per tab/domain/etc, I would think. But still block fingerprinting between sites (or even the same site a bit later).