Telling Lies

The variety of ways for a player to interact with a single narrative is breathtaking, and the way Barlow has paralleled how we shape our own view of a story in the digital era - clicking back and forth across an exploded timeline - truly incisive. [Issue#337, p.104]

Some may argue that Telling Lies is less of a game and more of a form of loosely interactive media. If that’s the case, well, it’s the most engrossing ‘non-game’ game I’ve played in recent memory.

Telling Lies not only confirms Sam Barlow's quality in writing and game design, but exalts even further the expressive potential of the videogame medium

Telling Lies is especially interesting in how its themes connect to real-world politics and ethics surrounding privacy when in the hands of a government bureau.

Barlow creates an aura of intimacy around the scenes which makes watching any number of them feel like an invasive act. Telling Lies’ crafted voyeurism should inspire the creep in you.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Telling Lies expands the concept seen in Her Story, and it does a great job. We think its predecessor did a better job overall, but if you like to feel like a detective, take notes and uncover the truth, make sure you give it a try.

An atmospheric, brilliantly written and acted detective thriller that tells a compelling story in a unique way.

One thing is for sure: My laptop camera will remain taped for the time being.

In sum, Telling Lies represents a niche genre that explores interactive storytelling in a very unique way. The game’s director, Sam Barlow, evolved the Her Story formula, but at a cost. After all, what makes the game so good also reveals its flaws. The ending, for example, can feel very anticlimactic depending on how you uncover specific videos. Still, as the saying goes, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” And Telling Lies is quite a journey — hopefully, one that will inspire many more story-driven games to come. Now go, awaken the sleuth inside you.

Telling Lies feels more like a jigsaw puzzle, with you hunting among scattered pieces. But while it can have its moments of exasperation, there are few things as satisfying as revealing the full picture.

I’d love for Sam Barlow to add some kind of “movie” mode to Telling Lies, allowing us to see conversations happen in real time, with videos playing out in chronological order. It’s unlikely that’ll ever happen, though. As it is, Telling Lies’ compelling narrative and phenomenal acting will be enough to spur you on. Searching and scrubbing through videos can be a chore, but it’s worth it, if just for that one tiny piece of information you’ve been waiting to find.

Telling Lies is a great investigation game that shines from its atmosphere and scenario, thanks to a really good acting performance. The player is constantly invited to rethink the plot, and discover new elements, but, on a more gameplay side, we're a bit disappointed by the user interfaces, not as cleaver as in Her Story.

Telling Lies is an incredibly more complex project than Her Story, and this has brought with it benefits and some flaws.

A perfect cast, strong performances and a thoughtful script offer an intimate, almost voyeuristic insight into the personal lifes of these characters, who really grew on me the longer I played. In terms of gameplay, there are ups and downs, some of which could have been avoided. I understand the directors intention behind some decisions, but I wished the game had more options in terms of video control or perhaps even a post-credit-mode that lets me combine two videos into one cohesive dialogue. But as long as you know what you are getting into, this movie-in-a-game-hybrid can be a fascinating experience, even when the overarching storyline turns out to be a surprisingly simple affair.

Telling Lies may borrow its core mechanic from Her Story, but shifting from monologues to two-sided conversations brilliantly expands the investigative gameplay, and a pivot from murder mystery to political thriller gives director Sam Barlow a much richer set of ideas to explore. A few storytelling hiccups and awkward edges do little to detract from a thought-provoking look at the modern surveillance state—delivered not through soapbox lecture but by forcing you, unsettlingly, to participate.

Barlow is single-handedly creating a genre out of the movie-video game combination. This story is more complicated than Her Story, which revolved around a single actress. Four more people are relevant in this tale, but the game has more than 30 characters altogether.

The Telling Lies video game - from developers Sam Barlow and Furious Bee, and publisher Annapurna Interactive - is an engaging, interactive film.

As a successor of Her Story, Telling Lies succeeds in delivering a deep and varied story with what is essentially the same system. However, whether that story is full of surprises or not, depends hugely on the player’s reasoning powers.

Whether you call it an interactive movie game or desktop thriller, Telling Lies is a gratifying and authentic-feeling fly-on-the-wall experience. For the most part. Exceptional performances and an intriguing, topical story are undercut by a jarring gameplay choice that forces you out of the game when you least want it.

Telling Lies is a desktop thriller that takes a bit too much to be in gear and suffers from avoidable technical intricacy, but if taken with the right amount of patience,it gifts us with a story of love and violence, fear and lies, with credible and admirably interpreted characters.

Telling Lies makes great innovative tweaks to its gameplay formula, and offers a high-quality live-action adventure, but it completely fumbles merging these two elements together. A word of advice would be to try your hand at the puzzle and discovery for a while, and then eventually just watch the clips outside the game to enjoy the narrative.

A grander take on Her Story‘s FMV database search idea, Telling Lies proves Sam Barlow is still the master of the carefully crafted reveal, even if at times this particular web of deceit unravels a little too slowly.

Telling Lies expands on the concept Sam Barlow created with Her Story, with a web of intriguing characters and mysteries, but the more overblown aspects of its plot detract from the personal drama.

As a further expansion of Barlow's ideas about what games can be, Telling Lies is a success. It's unfortunate that, in the end, it doesn't further embrace its interactive possibilities.

Without a sense of feedback or progress, the rambling, leisurely narrative of Telling Lies comes across as unfocused.