Reviews from

in the past


Após ter jogado Her Story é claro que eu viria com grandes expectativas para Telling Lies. Felizmente as minhas expectativas não passaram longe de serem atendidas e me vi aqui experienciando uma obra tão bem trabalhada quanto o jogo anterior de seu autor, com apenas alguns pequenos tropeços, mas que acredito não arruinarem a obra como um todo.

Seguindo a mesma lógica que Her Story, temos aqui um sistema que resgata vídeos de um banco de dados através de palavras chaves pesquisadas pelo próprio jogador. É através dele que vamos mergulhando mais e mais nos diversos vídeos que parecem ter sido tirados em sua maioria das webcams dos personagens, geralmente durante suas “calls”. Não consumimos esses clipes em ordem cronológica mas como já era de se esperar, além dessa maneira render boas teorias, também nos confere uma série de descobertas e indagações imprevisíveis e que clamam por mais contexto, principalmente se levarmos em consideração que, por serem clipes tirados de ligações, existem mais de um verso daquela conversa. Isso adiciona ao jogo uma dinâmica de caçar o outro lado daquele diálogo.

Telling Lies conta uma história maior em escopo e que aborda assuntos grandes em escala, e ao começar a entender a trama é impossível não enxergar as semelhanças com a nossa realidade, com o caso de Edward Snowden, o ex-contratado da NSA responsável de por volta de 2013 ter vazado informações sobre os vários programas de vigilância global usados pela Agência de Segurança Nacional dos Estados Unidos, só com essas informações, já dá para entender (sem muitos spoilers) os artifícios usados pelo enredo para o desenvolver de sua narrativa.

No fim, o único ponto que acho não ter casado tão bem assim foram as atuações de dois dos quatro personagens principais. De um lado temos Logan Marshall-Green que exagera em suas reações, com expressões faciais um tanto forçadas, e do outro temos a Angela Sarafyan que parece não entregar tanta vida e verdade em sua atuação, honestamente não sei até isso culpa dela ou da escrita. Em contrapartida vale mencionar o quão sensacional é a atuação das atrizes Alexandra Shipp e Kerry Bishé que brilham e cativam com as outras duas personagens de destaque.

Foi muito agradável acompanhar toda a trama e, ao seu fim, me vi ainda interessado ao ponto de voltar e procurar por mais algumas informações que pudessem saciar o meu eu investigador (ou fofoqueiro).

meio atravancado de jogar mas o Assunto da história é fortíssimo

Such an intriguing story, well acted and made me so invested.

I just feel like it was lacking more in choices for the ending? dunno, just felt like it.

Still, it is an amazing game and I really recommend it :)

(Game Pass) A FMV game by Annapurna that follows an undercover FBI agent on assignment with an activist group trying to stop the construction of a pipeline in Michigan. The gameplay has you finding the footage of the story via the NSA by searching for keywords and organizing the videos.

I didn't know that this existed until very recently. But I got it anyway cause I saw it was made by the same folks that made Her Story and I remembered loving that when I played it as a teen. This game, probably unnecessarily so, had me going into full detective mode. Probably didn't help that I didn't know what I was getting into when it came to the story, but I enjoyed the experience overall. I do think that it was a little bloated and in the grand scheme of things there could've been a couple things that were left out and be better for it.
TLDR: Enjoyed playing through it, but not as good as Her Story.


Doesn't have the charm of focusing on a single performance, but I was really captures by the story.

Great acting by all the characters, interesting gameplay concept but the story told just falls flat on its face. I kept waiting for the turn, some big moment, but the story just seemed to meander. I played it less than 6 months ago and I couldn't even really tell you what happened.

Not as good as Her Story but still interesting experience.

Messier in narrative and gameplay but also way more ambitious and interesting than Her Story.

they made a game about todd howard

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.

Quirky interesting mechanic but you are prone to hit bumps in the way you can't get out of and may turn tedious and boring. Also the story wasn't that compelling, if there is a story at all.

i still have to get back to her story and "finish" it, but for the couple of hours i spent with that game i can say that it looked way more interesting.

the presentation of telling lies is a lot less eerie, less mysterious. every video footage you watch is a conversation between two characters, the interface is very slick and modern compared to the vintage looks of her story's old computer, and your character is present at all times on screen, giving a certain sense of confort (sometimes she even interacts with her cat, for example).

the performances are really good and the writing is on point as expected, but i simply wasnt hooked enough even though i spent six to seven hours reviewing aproximately three quarters of footage. played kind of rushing before it leaves game pass, i dont really know if there's a true ending or various endings depending on what you find, but i just don't felt it being something very satisfying to be honest.

There isn't much of a challenge to it, you search through video clips just to understand what is happening in the story. You can't start videos from the beginning on PC and the game's ending doesn't really land well as it ignores any trauma the characters would have faced.

Long story short IGN was telling lies when they gave this game a 9/10

Done in one shot, excellent gameplay!

you bet your ass i got that solitaire trophy before actually starting the game properly

Short three hour game, where you discover the plot at your own pace, is confusing to start but gets really good towards the end. Can be difficult to interpret sometimes and the game mechanics are questionable but if you have a chance to play it you should.

Tried it straight after the Her Story game. Was excited for this. Looked as if it was more interesting than the first one. I like this detective stuff. Although I shelved it for now. There were other games which took my interest so maybe I'll come back to it eventually.

This review contains spoilers

Logan Marshall-Green hams it up in the best way possible. I watch clips of his acting from this game at least once a year to just have a good belly laugh. Don't we all need a good belly laugh every now and again?

Fun and sad bit by bit movie game. The gameplay was tedious and irritating when certain videos were very hard to find. Got stale by the end. Thought David’s actor was pretty bad with the exception of one scene where he seemed to show genuine restrained, holding-back-tears sadness. Ava’s actor was okay, Emma was pretty good, Cam girl Max was pretty good as well. Sucks the main guy was the worst acting-wise. Interesting story if a bit cliche. I’ll always think the gameplay of these type of games is not very good. The story is what keeps me coming back.

like her story, the frame used to uncover the story is unique and engaging. unlike her story, the narrative you uncover is not nearly as gripping.

Awkward to watch. Awkward to play. I've watched these actors be great in other things, but this format did them no favors. An absolutely tedious game that innately works against a rewarding payoff.

Buscamos uma palavra no computador e surgem cinco vídeos contendo essa palavra-chave, cabendo a nós desvendamos todo o desenrolar dos acontecimentos. O fator investigação é imersivo e funciona bem, um prato cheio pra Maria Fifi que em mim habita.

Eu sla o que a Annapurna queria com isso, saber que os finais são determinados pelos vídeos que tu viu em geral é meio meh
É interessante ainda sim o jeito que é contado seja lá o que tu quer saber
O jogo tem trama de tudo, é só caçar o vídeo na RETINA, gostei muito do plot da Michelle
Presumo que a ideia não era necessariamente contar uma história, mas mostrar a obsessão do jogador em caçar informações pífias e mínimas a custo da própria liberdade e tempo, uma vez que tu tem acesso a privacidade alheia e pode descobrir os segredos mais obscuros e sujos das pessoas, mesmo que seja algo normal como outra filha ou até mesmo a morte de um espião que foi calar o bico de uma prostituta
A trilha sonora é pika, uma pena que eles meio que fizeram ela dinâmica então quando tu não acessa um novo vídeo fica um baita silêncio no jogo
É interessante como isso consumiu muito do meu tempo quando eu tava jogando de boas, e foi tranquilo quando eu só fui miletar

Played on PS5 via PS Plus
Also Available on PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S and PC
Playtime: 6 Hours
Completion Date: August 5, 2022
No Spoilers

Telling Lies is a narrative focused adventure game developed by Sam Barlow and Furious Bee and it's published by Annapurna Interactive. It's a very interesting, new concept. It was first used on Her Story, the previous game of Sam Barlow and this game is the continuation of it in terms of gameplay. Stories are not connected.

I normally talk about the story and characters of a game first, but in order to talk about them, i have to tell you about the gameplay so we are doing gameplay first. In Telling Lies, you are playing a mysterious character. You have a PC and on it, there is a system called Retina.

This system has 170 videos about a case. But you can't see these videos at first. In order to see them, you need to search a word. When you search that word, the system will find all of the videos that includes that word. It will then put them in a chronological order and will show you the first 5 videos.

And let's say the word you searched for is in the last sentence spoken in the video. You will start there and watch until the video ends. In order to see the earlier parts of the video, you need to search for a word that is used in those earlier parts.

The purpose of the game is to find as many videos as possible and solve the case. In your head. The game automatically ends after watching 30-40 videos but you can and you should get back to it to get at least most of the videos if not all of them.

You will watch videos, take key words from them and you will search them to find more videos or find earlier parts of the same videos. This is the only gameplay style of the game. In the first 2 hours, i was in love with it. But after that, it became repetitive.

This gameplay idea is great and it works good as well. But this shouldn't be the only gameplay style. They should add a little bit more to it. Maybe some dialogue options? QTE's? Not sure. Her Story was much shorter than Telling Lies. This being the only gameplay maybe made sense for that game. But it doesn't make sense for a 6 hours game. 6 hours to 100%. Understanding the main plot points will take 3-4 hours average.

I liked the gameplay, but it's repetitive. What about the story. I really really liked it. Except the ending. I did not liked the ending. I can't tell much about the story. Because the game is about finding key words and i would give you those key words if i talk about the story but as the title suggests, there is a lie in the game.

There are actually multiple lies. And we watch different lives getting destroyed because of the lies and love of a man. Let's get to characters. Again, i can't tell you the names of the characters because every name you hear in the game is worth the search. But I can say this.

There is a man and 3 women. These 4 are the main characters of the game. They are also the 3 main stories of the game. They are all connected in some ways but for the majority of those stories, they are 3 disconnected stories. I loved one of these. I liked the other one. And i hated the third one. The third story is so weird. It's like unfinished. If there is a cut content in this game, i am sure it's about that storyline.

Everything happened too fast and that story came to an end very quickly. We were talking about the characters right? Let's not forget that. Our main character, the man is played by Logan Marshall-Green. He carries the game. Developers asks a lot from him and he does all of it beautifully. Very deep character, very three dimensional, it was fantastic to learn about him.

Alexandra Shipp plays in the story i loved. Her chemistry with Marshall-Green was fantastic. And she did a great job playing her character. She was also very three dimensional. Not as much as Marshall-Green's character but that's understandable. He has 3 times the screen time of Shipp's character.

Kerry Bishé plays in the story i liked. Her role was hard to play. Maybe the hardest after Marshall-Green and i thought she did a good job. Some scenes could have been better, yes. But this is also very good.

Angela Sarafyan plays in the story i hated. I don't think it's her fault that i hated the story. It's because the emptiness of the character. I really think this storyline might have been added just to distract and confuse people about the other two storylines. It's so different, so disconnected. Even when it connects to the others, it doesn't work. I don't know, i really hated this storyline.

In the end, Telling Lies is a good beta for this new gameplay formula. If Her Story was alpha, this is beta. It's bigger and bolder. Now i hope that the next game that uses this gameplay, will be the full thing. Gameplay is repetitive and the ending is not good. But the story, characters and the performances are solid. Especially Logan Marshall-Green. Wow. Just wow.

He was snubbed at The Game Awards 2019. Not even a nomination for best performance. I think he should have win it. And yes i know, Mads Mikkelsen. Mads had like an hour of screen time. And he did nothing just like every movie or show he stars in. Not his fault but people really love to cast him and not use him. This review is going to different places, ok.

Play it, it's good. But not great. Available on PS Plus Extra. Have a great day.


Just played Solitaire the whole time ngl

The game is just alright ¯\(ツ)/¯. I loved Her Story and got a sudden urge to play Immortality but I decided that I should play this one first.

The story is okay but the way it was presented and the "gameplay" was annoying as hell. Watching clips of one side of a video call is cool and unique but then you have an 8-minute video to watch which is half-filled with silence as the other person is speaking, and then you have the 8-minute video of the other side of the call. As opposed to Her Story which I think had more digestible clips that were usually around 2 minutes. Telling Lies starts playing clips from the search term that you put in, which would be fine if there was a button to rewind to the very start of the video but there isn't. So a large portion of the game is spent rewinding clips slowly.

The surprisingly big cast with really good acting probably kept me engaged enough to keep playing through this game. Didn't expect to recognize anyone but seeing Alexandra Shipp and James Scully surprised me lol.

There are also these big moments that end up not feeling big at all and you don't get to see the aftermath of what actually happens to the characters so you get left with a sense of nonclosure and you're not really sure if you've seen all the videos that you need to see or not.

Excited to play Immortality soon though.

Bounced off this pretty fast after really enjoying Immortality. The controls are bafflingly lacking; simple functions like “skip to the beginning of the current clip” are entirely absent.

It was also distracting that the central contrivance of “one sided conversations” doesn’t make any sense. None of them (that I saw) are wearing headphones. Why didn’t the recording capture whatever they’re hearing and responding to?

This review contains spoilers

feels like a less fleshed out attempt at what would come with Sam Barlow's next effort. i enjoyed the cast and characters but i found myself wishing this was a mini-series or something whereas Immortality felt like the gameplay was essential to the experience?

Logan Marshall-Green singing Under Your Spell probably would've killed me if this was in context of his character not being like he was.