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.
the ending clips are indeed bizarre and dumb.