Telling Lies

Telling Lies is the followup to Her Story, but it ends up being a much worst experience. You still play as someone searching videos in a OS and trying to piece together the mystery of what happened. But this time around the game features 4 protagonists, although they only really interact with the male lead. The videos are recording of video calls, which means that a lot of the videos you will be looking at characters looking still, hearing what the others are saying. Its even worst than it sounds since you only have audio for the side with video. Thankfully you can skip forward dialogue right from the start.

The hiring of major actors really did very little, even if they showed effort. The writing is honestly just average, but feels worst given that the chronilogical way you find what happens will vary from playthrough to playthrough. It means that there are no climaxes or any of the sort when you finally piece together what happened, just an okay then moment.

Serious downgrade coming from Her Story, but I guess this was necessary for the creation of the masterpiece that is Immortality.

Telling Lies was a pretty disappointing experience for me. I really like Sam Barlow's Immortality and Her Story and this one shares some good qualities with them. But overall it's a little lacking in direction and acting (which is funny considering we have some notable Hollywood actors here, unlike Her Story or Immortality).
One of the game's design decisions is particularly odd because it both improves the storytelling and makes the game extremely boring. You see, throughout the game you watch recordings of video calls between characters. But you initially only see and hear one side of the call, and you need to find a video of the other side of the conversation to fully understand it. On the one hand, this becomes a way to introduce some intrigue into the story. However, watching characters react for long periods of time to something you can't see or hear gets old very quickly and becomes a source of boredom until the end credits. And although I was very excited at first, finishing the game was not as fun as I initially expected.

Telling Lies is Sam Barrow’s forgotten middle child. It lacks the novelty of its predecessor (Her Story) but feels less focused than its follow up (Immortality).

Playing it after Immortality, as I did, is especially rough, because you can see the skeleton of that game here. Instead of clicking on objects in the scene to link to new clips, as in Immortality, we can instead choose a word from the subtitles and see where it takes us. While the difference might seem slight, I feel it has a significant effect on the writing. Spotting a particular object or creature in multiple scenes – like a cat that snuck into the shot – is often amusing; hearing the same word or phrase forcibly inserted into multiple dialogues often comes across as ham-fisted by comparison.

It doesn’t help matters that many of the scenes in Telling Lies are one side of a video call. To hear the full call, you need to watch both sides, turning a 7-minute conversation into 14 minutes of video with long stretches of silence. It’s a clever gimmick in theory but in practice it proves too cumbersome and time-consuming.

Telling Lies also suffers from the lack of a clear goal. It hands you a hard drive full of unorganized video clips and expects you to figure out what to make of them. Even the best of stories – a mark that Telling Lies doesn’t reach – will fall apart without a proper supporting structure. I suspect Barlow also realized this, because in his next game he provided a compelling meta-narrative to sustain the player’s interest even when the sub-narratives falter.

But hey, it’s not all bad. At least now I know what happened to Ryan Atwood’s older brother Trey after he dipped out of Orange County.

Overshoots the mark to correct feedback from Her Story. Where that title offered a bizarre and vague plot that only featured tiny, featureless clips of a single character, Telling Lies features a too-conventional plot and long, long stretches of rewinding and listening to the silence of one-sided conversations that never reach voyeuristic thrill. Despite the higher production values, Telling Lies doesn't feel like an improvement on the formula, just one that's lengthier and more mainstream.

There's a happy middle ground between both games and I'd like to see their next effort as long as it includes a "start from beginning" button and some mitigation of lengthy one-sided conversations.

Her Story could very easily have been a complete one-off - and indeed, if you'd come to me before I'd played Telling Lies and you'd argued that it should have been a complete one-off, I may well have agreed with you. The format itself, its invention and newness, was a big part of the appeal; surely that wouldn't still hold true for a second game in the same style, when the gameplay was no longer new? And no, it doesn't - and it doesn't matter. Sam Barlow deserves great credit for the intelligence with which he's recognised that as a potential pitfall and circumnavigated it by making this a very different experience to Her Story, breathing new life into this idea of searching through a video database to figure things out.

The first way he's done that is apparent before you've even started the game: the promotional material makes it clear that you won't be seeing one woman's story this time, but will be hearing from four different people. That's actually all the information you get when you start the game, and that's another key difference from Her Story, which made it clear very quickly that a murder had happened, the women you were looking at was involved somehow, and you needed to figure out how and why. Telling Lies doesn't give you anything like as much, leaving you to figure out absolutely everything - who the characters are, how they know each other, what happened to them, when and where the events seen take place, who you are, why you're watching these videos. And as you dig into all of that, the two most crucial differences between the two games quickly become apparent. The first is that these videos are almost all conversations, and you're only getting one half of them in each clip - part of piecing together the story of Telling Lies is working out which two videos match up with each other so you can piece together both halves of the dialogue to work out what's going on and where this fits into the story's chronology. The second is the atmosphere.

Telling Lies is voyeuristic. Deeply, uncomfortably, creepily voyeuristic. At no point in Her Story did you feel like you were intruding, that you were listening in on something you shouldn't be - those were police interviews, recorded with the person's consent and clearly intended to be rewatched, so peeking in on those chats felt pretty normal. This game, these chats: they do not feel normal. These are private conversations that take you right into the heart of people's personal spaces, up to and including their beds, both literal and metaphorical. There's plenty of sex in this game, and none of it is actually sexy, because it always feels uncomfortable that you're even seeing it. It should be clear that this is not a failing - it's clearly deliberate, and Barlow was definitely aiming for that oppressive, tense mood while also seeking to make a statement on surveillance culture (and, I suspect, on the impact the internet has had on sex and intimacy; the title makes it clear that lying itself will be a major theme, and there's certainly a lot of time spent exploring why people lie and the lasting impact those lies can have, but it's these two themes of intimacy and surveillance that come through strongest). It's made absolutely clear at a couple of points that some of the parties weren't even aware they were being recorded (one key plot point revolves around this) and there's a couple of points where one of the protagonists asks for a recording to either be stopped or deleted, just to ramp up the creepiness. You will - or at least should - end up being horrified by some of the acts discussed and committed in this game, but the horror runs deeper, because it's quietly terrifying that we're even in a position to find out about it.

That's ultimately why this game isn't just bigger than its spiritual predecessor, but better, more haunting, and I suspect, more memorable in the long run. This isn't just a character sketch (though it certainly is that - I might even be tempted to argue that Barlow examines the main character's motivations for his actions as thoroughly as any game designer ever has for their protagonist), it's also a cluster of social statements and observations with a haunting, sinister atmosphere and a distinct, unusual, very dark tone to go with it. If that all sounds a bit Black Mirror then....yes, fair enough, but even if you don't like that show, you must at least concede that its most well-known episodes are very memorable. I feel confident in predicting that Telling Lies will have a similar lasting effect: that it will hang around with me long and strong enough for me to start recognising bits of it in news stories and in other horror fiction for years to come.