Telling Lies

Hard to recommend. I really liked Her Story. If you liked that, you will probably like this as well. I think the overall story was more immersive, more engrossing. There is something really interesting about learning to know characters through their most mundane activities. It makes the twists hit harder, hurt more. I really enjoyed the way I got to experience the story, and I think the overall story was just generally more interesting, at all points of progress. There most boring part was perhaps the first half hour but after that I found some interesting videos and then it had me. It was also quickly very clear that a lot of work went into this to make the world make sense, and I feel like it did. It's all coherent and VERY consistent. It felt like watching a 2000s movie with an ok plot. The acting is ok, slightly cringe at worst, and really good at best. But because of the the way you experience, this interactive medium, the way you get to know these characters through and through, I enjoyed the whole thing soo much. The people in the story start to feel like real people, and you feel like you really understand them. The result is greather than the sum of its parts. However, I…

This game suffers from a few design issues that really drag the experience down. The absence of a progress bar to more effectively scrub through videos was a massive mistake, sometimes achievements had a hard time firing, and overall the format made the gameplay drag. I can't give this game a bad review though. The acting was great across the board, the characters were compelling, and the story was interesting and engaging. It was worth suffering through the poorly designed UI and long, awkward silences to experience it.

It's a pain in the ass to get to run on linux! Almost to the point, for me, that it's not worth it. Honestly it's very frustrating. And I gave it a really hard effort to get it to work. I had issues with audio artifacts. Video wouldn't play sometimes. And I'm saying all this even after getting it on sale. I didn't have running issues with Her Story. I've not played Immortality yet. I really enjoyed Her Story.

After the brilliant Her Story, Sam Barlow went and made an even stronger follow-up game, solidly confirming himself as the GOAT of the FMV genre and continuing to prove that creativity and FMV are compatible. Strongly recommended, even if his masterpiece of a third game, Immortality, is the true must play out of them - honestly, just play all three in any order.

Telling Lies is a narrative-driven investigative experience that turns something as ordinary as searching a computer database into the foundation of an absorbing mystery. Instead of exploring physical environments, fighting enemies, or solving traditional puzzles, the player sits in front of a computer containing a collection of secretly recorded video conversations. The objective is deliberately open-ended: search through these recordings, discover connections between four central characters, and gradually reconstruct the events surrounding their complicated relationships. Developed by Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid, and Furious Bee Limited and published by Annapurna Interactive, it is an unusual FMV adventure that places observation and deduction above conventional gameplay. The main mechanic revolves around entering keywords into a search system. When a word or phrase is entered, the database identifies recordings containing that dialogue. Every discovered clip can provide another clue, such as a person's name, a location, an organization, or a seemingly insignificant phrase. That information can then inspire another search. This creates an engaging investigative loop where progress …

I loved this. It's making some small mechanic changes from Her Story to build on those mechanics and hit on what this game is doing differently: where that game was focused on diving into one person's story, this one is interested in how one person's story entangles with the stories of others. Thoughts on mechanics for this and Her Story that aren't exactly spoilers since you find them out early, but I think the discovery of those mechanics is worth experiencing fresh: [spoiler] With Her Story, if a text string was found in a video and it was one of the first 5 videos with that text match, that unlocked the video and put you in at the start of it. The videos themselves were mostly very short (usually under 45s) and in series, based on a premise that someone had already sliced up the larger videos into meaningful small segments, so the challenge was in figuring out terms that would be repeated or emergent later in the story, and finding your way into less common text strings to dig later. The mechanics push you to find out what happens next, and to find the details in between what you know. With Telling Lies the text string search and first 5 video cutoff is still present, but the…