Telling Lies

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.