Telling Lies

4/10

Bottom line up front: The UI/navigation in this game can sour it for many people; it didn't for me. If you like other Sam Barlow/Half Mermaid games then give this a try (you can always refund it w/in Steam's restrictions). I let the negative reviews on account of the UI/navigation steer me away from this for a long time and I now regret that. It is phenomenal.

The review proper: 'Telling Lies' adopts a very similar gameplay experience as its predecessor, 'Her Story': type a word or phrase into a database search box, watch a clip, use info in that clip to inform future search queries, and unravel a mystery all while doing so. (If you have not played 'Her Story,' I strongly recommend doing so before purchasing this game; it is slightly simpler but will act as a good litmus test for whether 'Telling Lies' will jive with you.) The story is much stronger in 'Telling Lies,' if only because you engage with a greater number of characters (roughly four main ones). By the time one reaches the end of the game (having watched such-and-such many videos, including certain key ones) they are suffused with the narrative's themes, subtext, and irony. It is a slow burn, but one well worth enduring. Fortunately, Water is Life.

The black eye on this game, as most negative reviews single out, involves how one navigates the videos. Unlike 'Her Story,' most of 'Telling Lies' 's videos come from two-way FaceTime-style calls. That means some videos will have minutes-long breaks of silence from one party, indicating its complementary video to involve someone else talking for that time. The game allows for fast-forwarding and rewinding, but the maximum speed at which one can do so can still be painfully slow in many cases. When choosing a video to play it will start at the time during which the relevant word the player searched is tokened by its speaker. In a 9-minute video whose search term appears at the end, rewinding to the beginning at max speed can take minutes. Even if patience is a virtue, in gaming and in life, no virtuous person enjoys spending minutes at a time rewinding a video.

Some have suggested that it would have been useful to have a synchronization function that, once one has identified a correct video-pair, they can synchronize them in order to watch both simultaneously and experience the conversation in real-time, rather than trying to piece it together by going back and forth between the clips. I can't say I disagree, but I wouldn't say this would necessarily make for a better game, just a different one. The lack of such a function didn't bother me in my playthrough. And one can always watch YouTube videos of the completed video pairs afterwards.

Overall, I strongly recommend this game for fans of Barlow/Half Mermaid's other FMV titles. Do not let the negative reviews stop you from at least trying it.

I have to say no, because the core of gameplay goes to show the devs have NO talent. You need a mod to have decent control of the video player. Seeing as this is the core of gameplay...it fails.

Nothing else about the game matters. Scrolling through without a mod is painful. The story starts out interesting but becomes a lazy trope quickly. The ending is modern trash, about forgetting the part of your past that is inconvenient.

This game is forgettable trash, made by a team that has no concept of what makes good game play. After 44 years of playing games...this is a stinker.

A compelling premise ruined by a terrible control scheme.

The gimmick is that you're searching videos via words in their subtitles. The problem is, there is no button to go to the front of the clip. You have to manually rewind it at a maximum of 3x speed. But there's more! These are local copies of Skype calls, meaning you'll need to piece videos together based on their overlap to get the whole conversation. Which means you will spend roughly 50% of your in-game time watching videos rewind at 3x speed.

There is allegedly a mod that adds a few controls, but it's not on ModDB or NexusMods. After 45 minutes, I gave up.

Skip this one. Her Story and Immortality are both better.

An interesting and unique format for this game, however the mystery itself wasn't really that memorable.

This spiritual sequel to Her Story works well to build an immersive story that is well worth the klunky interface.

It is an FMV game, so there aren't really any video game graphics to talk about. Apart from the interface, it can only be judged in terms of purely cinematic criteria. Yet, everything works to create a voyeur modern spy movie atmosphere. You would not think those videocalls were shot using traditional cameras and not just screen capture software.

The music seems non-existent at first. There's a lot of tasty ambient silence with nothing but computer noises and muffled sounds from surrounding flats. Yet, the OST becomes more pronounced the further you go into the story. The main characters have their own motifs that greatly add to the emotional impact, from somewhat ironic and playfully tragic at the camgirl scenes to downright creepy.

The story and script are superb. There isn't much going on per se, the magic is in the details. The characters are extremely well-detailed and every storyline well-developed. This is mostly mature content, but not because of sex of violence - those are far and in-between - but because the story is built on adult fears. The fear of estrangement from your child and wife, the pain of having to betray the trust of your beloved, the anxiety of losing your way and identity and succumbing to madness. Not the stuff kids or even young adults could fully appreciate, not with so few action events going on.

The gameplay is the weakest point of this game that WILL scare some people away. It is hard to believe how klunky such an ingenious project can be on the mechanical level. I feel inclined to add a short guide for best experience: bookmark every new video near the beginning, they will automatically be sorted by date. Open every new available video, but watch them in order if possible. Use the in-game note pad for names, events and unused keywords. Most videos come in pairs best watched together. The main gameplay consists in trying to come up with keywords for the paired video. You will probably not find all 170 clips without a guide, but at least 160 are very doable, Do not hesitate to view the ending once before completing the search. One last thing: do not hurry. This game is roughly designed to be completed over a week, like season of a TV show. Rushing it may spoil the experience.

I was very hesitant about this game at first because of the interface, but in the end it sucked me in like few other media ever did. I felt like I was the one talking to all these characters and experiencing their fates. The climactic scenes for all the main characters (especially the camgirl and David) hit me like it was all real, leaving me staring at the screen blankly. True integration of Cinema Magic and video games. Unpopularily, I personally liked Telling Lies better than Her Story, though I have to lower the score for the poor interface. I highly recommend you give it a shot to see if it works for you as well.

Final score: 7,7

jst watch on youtube!

Definitely longer and more tedious than Her Story, but it is pretty interesting. It has some nice new quality of life features, which Her Story would have benefited from.

An interesting follow up, not too different from “Her Story”. The story here is a bit larger in scope and still attempts to be as twisty as possible - that part is still enjoyable. This time around you will get multiple characters interacting with each other, and as a result conversation videos are split into two: one conversation will have a video from each person’s perspective. This is neat and allows for a different way of narrowing down key words, however, it does result in videos having long stretches where a character is just staring at the screen, listening. Now you won’t hear the other conversation, you only get the one characters audio, and as a result it’s not uncommon to have a 2-5 minute stretch where the character in question may just be smiling and nodding, responding to one of the other characters videos which you will have to find and mentally sort of put the conversations together. The game does have a fast forward button but what it really needs is like a youtube time skip/select function that you can just click around on (maybe even with audio indicators to illustrate where the character is actually talking). It’s still a good time and the story is a wild ride to navigate!

I didn’t finish this game because it didn’t give me the same excitement as Her Story. There were too many paths to follow, which made it feel more like work than fun at times.

Really wanted to like this one, I loved Her Story and Immortality, but this is definitely the weakest of his games.

The story is pretty basic and not very compelling or interesting, everything centers around David a very unlikable and uninteresting character. I found myself doing other things while scenes played as they just weren't engaging like his other games.

Not having a button to skip to the start of clips is more annoying than I thought it would be, takes up so much time since these are much longer clips than Her Story had. Luckily, the creator seemed to learn from this and Immortality has that option, making it a much smoother experience.

If you played Her Story and Immortally and are wanting more, I would say skip this one it's not really worth it.

.

If you had to watch this much Logan Marshall-Green, you'd be as sick of him as these three women are.

If you claim to enjoy fast forwarding through minutes of people nodding to unheard conversations, then YOU'RE the one Telling Lies!

Great amount of movies, ending little disappointing. Missing the twist ending that her story had. Anyway worth playing thumbs up!

Okay so, the game did leave me a bit confused on what exactly was happening fully, but I got the gist of it. I think it's worth playing when you're bored with time and patience to watch videos. You can eat or snack while playing lol. It's definitely left me not wanting to play it again because I don't think there is any replay value. Getting it for cheap, like a few bucks isn't bad.

It’s easy to guess why Telling Lies gets such lukewarm reviews compared to the other FMV titles by the same developer. It certainly doesn’t make a very good first impression, with multiple core mechanics such as one-sided videos or slooow rewinding that make it seem like this game is not planning to respect your time. However, I’d wholeheartedly recommend giving it your full attention anyway, because what can be found on the other end is a unique, thought-provoking, emotionally charged and beautifully planned story.

The setup is very similar to Her Story, with the playable character showing off her google-fu by interrogating a database of recorded conversations, except this time the character has a face, and a partial reflection of that face will sometimes be visible on the screen, reminding that you’re "watching the watcher".

Most clips display only one side of a video call while the other side is muted, so if you want a full conversation, you’ll have to find both parts of a pair and watch them back-to-back. This pads the game to effectively twice of its "real" length, with a lot of downtime where characters just nod or change expressions based on what’s happening on the other end, but also creates a raw, immersive feel of peeking into people’s most personal and private moments.

As you can see, there’s obviously some commentary on mass surveillance here. There’s also commentary on FBI controversies, corporate greed, voyeurism, abusive relationships, double lives, naive dreams and a desperate longing for "realness". Unlike Her Story, which was strictly about one woman telling a story, this is a very ambitious, expansive narrative with multiple plotlines that may look independent at first. In the end, though, everything is tied together wonderfully, revealing one man’s tragic tale that leaves no questions unanswered yet also lets you draw your own conclusions about who were really in the wrong.

It's hard to overstate how well planned this story is, not just in a pure narrative way but also in terms of being tailored to such an atypical, fragmented presentation. There may be a bit of fat here and there (mostly due to some overly long videos), but 90% of the clips say something relevant, regardless of the order you watch them. Even if you stumble upon the critical scenes and see what happened early on, you still won’t know why exactly it happened, and discovering the "whys" here is just as rewarding, since the characters’ motivations matter as much as their actions.

What’s more, spoken lines are also carefully tailored to the gameplay of search queries, saying keywords only when they want you to find them while talking indirectly when they don’t. When I was playing Her Story, meaningful queries gave way to randomly trying common words relatively quickly, but here it didn’t happen until much later (though it still did happen, eventually, but that’s probably unavoidable for such a mechanic). The one-sided nature of most videos improves the process too, giving you an immediate goal of finding a pair and aligning them in your head instead of just watching clip after clip after clip.

Having said all that, this game is certainly not as laser-focused as its predecessor, featuring a decent number of flavor videos where the characters just fool around or chat about daily life, and it’s not as engaging as watching a traditional, precisely edited movie or TV series, so some patience is required. Then again, it’s clear that Sam Barlow is a very competent and knowledgeable writer who can saturate even trite dialogues with interesting trivia, whether it’s fairytales, rock music, action movies or American geography.

For increased effect, I recommend playing this when it’s dark outside in 30-60 min sessions, fully getting into the mood of late-night video calls with strangers. At times it might certainly feel boring and uneventful, just like watching other people’s lives, but at other times it will be unexpectedly meaningful and poignant, just like watching other people’s lives.

And while the endings are jarring enough to severely sour the final impression if taken at face value, I’m inclined to trust in the author’s capacity for more subtle storytelling and view them through the lens of the game’s title instead. Because indeed, the most dangerous thing isn’t even lying to others. The most dangerous thing is lying to yourself.

IMHO better than HER STORY
Still i wished i could start videos from the beginning instead of rewinding...

i told lies

👍

I'm so sorry for this game. It had the potential to be a great story but it's simply unplayable. The video player is so poor and doesn't have anything other than pause, go forward or backward, and it makes the gameplay so bad. I swear, if they only embedded an youtube video instead I'd recommend this game but if the game revolves around watching videos and that itself is done so poorly, you can't expect the rest to be good.

Telling Lies is tedious and trite. It's essentially a 2-hour movie, chopped into half-conversations to artificially stretch it out to 4 hours. The biggest and most wide-spread complaint is the inability to quickly rewind to the start of a video clip, and this complaint is completely valid.

The story is well-acted, but the characters are all insufferable. The storyline is extremely trite and bogged down with relentless progressive beats on race and feminism (which is odd, since the focus is supposed to be on greenie environmentalism).

Dull, preachy, and a chore to play.

Not as tight or interesting of a game as Her Story.

Yeah, no, it's not doing it for me. It's like Her Story, but clunkier

9/10
Telling Lies is not a detective game about a special event. It is a story that focus on life of four persons that somehow connected to each other. Even though the only way that we know about these persons are through some recorded video calls, but eventually all of these four characters are become important to us, because of their brilliant casting. So these acting beside the great direction, are the reasons that made Telling Lies a great interactive game.
+:
Brilliant acting of every character
Great direction
Interesting story
All the endings are very good
Good gameplay and user interface
-:
The user interface has many flaws that make the gameplay tedious

Weird Interface that makes the game really tedious and boring. Loved the first game (Her Story). Stopped playing this one after ten minutes, hoping to get my money back.

Another interesting story with some twists, but I personally enjoyed Her Story more.
Something many others have mentioned that I agree with is that the rewind is very slow. There is a mod someone made to quicken the rewind speed, but it would be nice if the rewind speed was quicker by default.

If you don't mind the rewind speed and think the story sounds intriguing, I'd say pick it up. As of my writing of this review, the game is currently on sale for 5 USD (75% off), which I think is justified.

Just give us a proper rewind button and stop wasting our time.

Đơn Giản Hóa Mọi Vấn Đề Qua Máy Vi Tính

Just watch the chronological cutscenes on youtube. 80% of your playtime is staring at people as they listen to someone else speak which you have to hunt to find the other side of, watching them sleep, and rewinding to the beginning of the clip.

Is it really a game? you're trying to figure out why you're going through videos and hoping that piecing the story together is good for something. It isn't.

Its quite nice detective game, not as good as Her Story, this one is much more straightforward one, but still as more as you getting into the story the more you invested

Playing this game after being mindblown by Her Story a few years before, Telling Lies was an immense deception. I hoped it'd be Sam Barlow's next masterpiece, but to be honest there's infortunatly not much to save here.

You can safely skip this one and buy Immortality instead.

Yes.

Before installing, go to game properties and opt into the windows 7 beta branch -- even if you're on windows 10. There's a bug in the main branch that makes it blackscreen on startup for some people, and the only fix is to opt into that beta. If you install first, get the bug, and then opt into the beta, you will have to re-download and reinstall the entire 7GB game, even though most of that amount is video files that shouldn't change between versions.

Aside from that, it's a spiritual sequel to Her Story, same gameplay, different story. You play a person going through government records, watching video clips taken from conversations between characters, that you navigate by typing keywords. You try to figure out what happened, who was involved, and why your character is interested. There is an in-game notes-keeping app, which is rather useful.

I wish some of the video clips ended earlier, or (in one case) if a single clip with a multi-minute silence in the middle had been cut into two clips with no wait time. Also not a fan of when a clip ends with a minute or more of silence, because the other part of the conversation - which I cannot watch simultaneously -- is presumably doing something.

Now comes the mild spoiler warning. Much of the game is about a man named David, various women in his life, and his career working undercover. Don't expect to cheer for David. I think he watches too many copaganda films where an official reprimand means the second act has started, rather than that something is wrong, and brings that mindset to his work.

My first play session was a little over an hour, and has left me with a good mess of clues to think about. Feeling positive, just mildly annoyed about reinstalling the game taking up time I'd planned to use actually playing. Later I'll probably check if this game shares the "search for blank" bug/feature that lets you view all clips in chronological order, but I'll give it another earnest session first.

Good story, definitely needs the mod to automatically rewind videos from the start and shortcut keys for skipping to dialogue. Not sure if this game is even playable without the mod.

Well written and acted narrative experience. 9 out of 10

Though a couple of interface issues could have made the game a smoother experience (let me rewind faster + start a video whenever I want PLEASE), I loved my time with the game.

I tried playing this game a while and didn't get into it. Just finished after retrying a couple of years later and finished in one sitting. Gripping story, a great cast of actors and a fair share of twists and turns that made the whole experience memorable.

Really enjoyed it, would recommend it to people looking for narrative, relationship driven stories. ACAB

The story itself is very interesting, but as a video game it does not work. I click a video and then I have to manually rewind it to get to the beginning of each video. That is a horrible decision. Just look up the story on Wikipedia and save yourself the time.