Telling Lies Review
Not gonna lie – you need to play this.
Thanksgiving. Vampire. Cookies. Just three of the words I have hastily scribbled down and crossed off in a notebook. It’s been four years since I played Her Story but I effortlessly slipped back into the same rhythm while playing Sam Barlow’s latest, Telling Lies.
But whereas Her Story invented the keyword-searching, evidence footage genre, Telling Lies improves on it in almost every way. This astonishingly well written and acted story earns a spot amongst the very best of FMV games – not to mention detective games in general.
You play as a whistleblower who gains access to a database of video call surveillance related to a case. Working in the early hours of the morning, you uncover as much incriminating evidence as you can to upload to a WikiLeaks-like website and expose what really happened. The faint reflection of your face cast on your laptop screen forms a constant reminder of who you are and what you’re there to do. It adds an extra sense of agency to proceedings beyond just passively watching footage.
Telling Lies will be familiar to anyone who’s played Her Story. Search through video clips to try and piece together the narrative. Listen out for new words and topics to search for. This time, however, there’s an intuitive mechanic that lets you highlight words in the closed captions and search directly from there. I preferred to keep it old-school with pen and paper, mind.
In what is a major step up in scope and production values, this time the story revolves around four main characters played by ‘real’ actors and actresses: David, played by Logan Marshall-Green (24, The O.C.); Emma, played by Kerry Bishé (Argo, Scrubs); Ava, played by Alexandra Shipp (Straight Outta Compton); and Angela Sarafyan (Westworld) as a camgirl. No, I’m not going to tell you her name or the occupations of the other characters – even such seemingly trivial details would be spoilers.
The acting is fantastic. It really feels like you’re watching a proper TV show, just chopped up into bits. You’ll likely fall for some characters, sympathise with some and perhaps even detest others. As new information comes to light in your investigation, these opinions may well shift.
What’s paradoxically impactful about the scenes of Telling Lies is how mundane they are. Many of them take place inside the characters’ homes and places of work. Laptop webcams and smartphones give a view into their world from unflattering angles. Characters chat about their day, flirt, profess their love, argue, tell their children bedtime stories. It’s all so distinctly ordinary. You truly feel like a voyeur spying on the intimate moments of these people’s lives.
There are also a number of action-packed set pieces throughout, recorded via hidden cam, that sprinkle in drama and variety. There are enough events that depart from the ‘one person in front of a camera’ setup to stop the formula getting stale.
Telling Lies is deliberately disorienting at first. There are a lot of names and a web of relations between them to learn. A sizeable cast of supporting characters make appearances in addition to the main four. Most videos show just one side of the conversation, leaving the other open to interpretation unless you can figure out a hook that reveals the corresponding side.
It’s so satisfying to gradually make sense of the overall picture, like building a sort of mental video jigsaw. Sometimes you’ll deliberately dig deeper down a rabbit hole, a word or phrase in each video providing a vital clue to the next. Other times, you’ll stumble across a revelation by accident that shakes you to your core.
It works seamlessly from a mechanical perspective, too, letting you focus on just watching and interpreting the footage. Like Her Story, it smartly only shows the top five results per search term, which avoids you spamming common words and uncovering all of the clips straight away. My only complaint is that you can fast-forward and rewind but can’t just quickly skip to the beginning of a video.
It’s been several days since I finished playing Telling Lies and I’m still thinking about it. I uncovered a majority of the video clips but not all, pressed to submit by a deadline which I was concerned would result in a fail state if I didn’t. Its characters, their motivations and conflicts are still swimming around my head.
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.
[Reviewed on PC]