Telling Lies

« Telling Lies requires a deliberateness from its players that turns us from viewers to active plot participants. It’s a game that doesn’t hold your hand, and ultimately it’s down to you to decide the truth – another secret of a good mystery done well. »

« For everyone else, especially avid followers of character-driven art forms, these are performances you can really sink your teeth into. »

« Telling Lies feels like it's about four times as big as Sam Barlow's previous game Her Story, and it shows. You feel it not just in the four characters you're sifting through footage of, but in the variety of its videos too: from FaceTime calls to hidden cameras capturing secretive meetings. In Her Story, it was famously easy to go down a rabbit hole of sorts on your own intuition; in Telling Lies, that tendency is mechanized in smart, intuitive ways. When it comes to good interactive mysteries, Telling Lies is among the best you can get. »

« Telling Lies is a paragon for storytelling, for character arcs that surprise you and linger on long after the credits – and videos – have ended. »

« Sharp writing, believable acting and a twisting plot make Telling Lies an essential detective game. »

« I won’t tell any lies here, Telling Lies is another excellent piece of narrative game design from Sam Barlow and I sincerely hope there’s more to come. »

« Telling Lies is like the best parts of an adventure game, a mystery novel, and an art nouveau movie all rolled up into one. It tells an exciting story uniquely and shows that Sam Barlow’s success with Her Story wasn’t just a fluke. Besides a few frustrating moments, Telling Lies was one of the most compelling gaming experience I’ve had yet in 2019. »

« Telling Lies is an absolute masterpiece. It offers some brilliant writing and acting that drive us to passionately discover all of its secrets through its very simple but effective mechanics. »

« definitivamente uma **** jogasse sozinho acho que largaria e/ou faria um final de merda talvez. ainda bem que joguei com meus camaradas. »

« A miserable game, but an interesting and well-acted story kept me hooked until the end. »

« Is it really a game? you're trying to figure out why you're going through videos and hoping that piecing the story together is good for something. It isn't. »

« 1 point pour le platine gratos en 1h30 1 point pour le solitaire qui m'a rappelé windows 98. Pour le reste j'ai juste passé les dialogues mais merci pour le plat. »

« More accomplished than “Her story”, but with an identical concept: type key words to see video sequences. The story is broader than that of its predecessor and there are more actors. We discover the story of David, a man with many faces through computer webcams. It's original, but very quick to see the end. And it's still so frustrating not to have a goal. I kept wondering why I was watching this footage. »

« Me ha gustado el juego, se lo recomiendo a la gente que le gusta el misterio, investigar que ocurrió.. »

« Mr. Hitchcock famously said that drama is just life with the dull parts cut out. Mr. Barlow apparently disagrees. His idea of drama is 5 hours of unedited skype calls. That is, "how was your day?", "how is the weather?", and lots and lots and lots of flirting. »

« Telling Lies tries to bottle lighting a second time “Telling Lies” is the second game in the genre that Sam Barlow seems to have established as his own playground, and it hews pretty close to the trail blazed by “Her Story”. Since I am a big fan of “Her Story”, I was looking forward to “Telling Lies” quite a bit. The gameplay loop is almost unchanged: You have a database of video files which you can query with a search string that is matched against the spoken dialogue within the videos. These videos tell a story, and the player is tasked with puzzling this story together. The difficulty comes twofold: The number of search results is limited to five and ordered by date, so the later videos that contain most of the dramatic plot developments tend to be excluded, just as it was in “Her Story”. Also, almost all these videos are recordings of one side of conversations over the web, so to get the full picture, you need to find the recording of the other side. This actually is a meaningful step forward from “Her Story”, where only one side of the conversation was recorded. The game provides you with a few tools to help you keep track of the developments you uncovered: A notes tool, which is bare bones but absolutely sufficient, a search term history, the ability to set bookmarks and to mark and search for terms from the current dialogue. This leads to the immersive gameplay loop known from “Her Story” and provides quite a bit of fun. For a while. But then things started to drag a bit for me. I think this is not inherent to the gameplay systems, but to the story “Telling Lies” wants to tell. It is an engaging yarn with quite a few plot twists and some very clever and important things on its mind, but it is a bit too long. The game contains almost 10 hours of video content, and not all of it is engaging. Also, the plot of “Telling Lies” is not as well matched to its medium as the plot of “Her Story” was. That game has a few twists that work uniquely well in the interactive medium of computer games, and “Telling Lies” struggles to provide similar peaks of engagement. It is not a problem of the production values: The images and sound are crips, the performances are all at least adequate. In the end I think this might be a case of diminishing returns. Barlow’s unique style of game wowed me the first time, but the second time around, the wow factor was gone and what engagement remained wasn’t enough to overcome the bloat of the story. TLDR: If this is your first Sam Barlow Interactive Video Detective game, you should have a lot of fun: “Telling Lies” is the superior product. But if you’ve played “Her Story” or “Immortality”, “Telling Lies” might lose you before it reaches its conclusion. »