The same detective work I really enjoyed from Her Story but for whatever reason I couldn't really get into the story or characters as much.

Perhaps the mystery of it all was spoiled a bit by knowing some of the real life events it is seemingly inspired by quite well and working a lot of things out after just a handful of clips. Or maybe it was the conceit of this being specifically hacked webcam and other video feeds rather than just a set of police interviews as per Barlow's last work that felt more forced and didn't sit as logically in my brain.

Still, I think it's well worth playing as there really aren't many other experiences like it out there, and I do love games where taking your own notes on pen and paper is a benefit.

Completed with 100% of achievements unlocked. Picking up on this as we approach the release of Immortality, as a follow-up to Her Story, Telling Lies once again has a strong concept at its core, casting the player in a detective role, presented with a database of short video clips from which to figure out the circumstances leading up to a crucial – but initially unknown – event. Each clip shows us one side of a video conversation primarily involving four core individuals, with the other side of the conversation also recorded. The challenge comes from the limited manner in which the database can be interrogated, with searches referring to the words spoken in each clip, but only ever returning a maximum of five results.

The underlying ‘mystery’ is an interesting one to figure out and the detective approach ensures a strong level of engagement (it’ll be hard to make progress if you’re not following the events/discussions) and the acting is of a good calibre. However, in practice overall it’s not as strong as might be hoped, as the one-sided view that we get of each discussion can become somewhat frustrating to try to follow (though I know that this is, at least to an extent, by design) and there are often long periods of silence as the other participant is speaking. There’s also a fair amount of ultimately fairly trivial videos, as well as unnecessary interface frustrations such as the inability to quickly start a clip from the beginning (by default, the clip starts playing from the queried words). The presentation here is more polished than Her Story and sees some quality-of-life improvements, but they’re not able to offset some of the negatives inherent in the concept – the ability, for example, to pair up conversations – only once you’ve located both within the database, to maintain the challenge – would be a great help, for example!

+ Active role in uncovering story
+ Compelling story and great actors
+ Little framing device touches (reflections, desktop, etc)

- Inability to watch clips from beginning is frustrating
- Watching half of conversations; too much dead air
- Doesn't push beyond what "Her Story" accomplished

I'm always interested by fmv games so I decided to download this when I got game pass. I think it's an interesting game with how it's structured but it didn't overly feel satisfying to play. I would at sometimes get intrigued during my 2 hour playtime but it would be hard to find out more from a specific plot point so I'd just click around randomly. I am happy though I never felt like there was nothing to do except from the start were I was completely lost. I'd recommend if you have game pass as it is around 2 hours but it didn't stand out as anything special to me.

If you enjoy FMV games then this is worth the play through - especially if you find it on sale or through game pass/ps plus premium/ etc.

this game really makes you think about your internet safety and areas of morally gray decisions. It takes time to get used to staring at someone talking like it’s at you. So you feel invasive and uncomfortable. Especially some of the conversations.

The controls are pretty simple. The cursor snaps around to fields you can click if you use a controller and it feels odd if your not used to the cursor snapping back to a spot or jumping to a new one.

Some helpful hints for someone trying to get all trophies/ achievements. If you bookmark every video you can track how many you watched easily and there are lists online you can match up dates to see what you missed. You can also use the info ( “i” icon) too. There are 170 videos I had 169 in my info icon based off what I read online but missed one and had to search through everything to find - confirmed it shows 170 in the info field and I got the trophy (you have to sit through the unskippable end credits to get it to count so if miss any you’ll keep having to watch the ending and credits again). The good thing is if you miss one you go back to right before you download the videos.

I had to use a list of keywords to find some of the videos there’s just so many to find.

Some challenges - when you find a video it plays at the moment of a keyword. If you are interested in the storyline you have to slowly rewind there’s no way to start at the beginning of videos. This is annoying since you search based on keywords and there are videos that the last seconds start and you have to go back and watch it all.

It’s hard to follow because you are watching videos as you find them. Even using obviously signals like David’s facial hair of understand the timeline, it doesn’t fully help. The whole telling lies felt missing - because you’re skipping around it’s hard to catch the deceit to the right extent. I read a guide after completing and missing some of the events that happened which made me annoyed spending so much time finding all the videos. And I may have missed watching all the videos in their entirety which made it easy of miss it.

The searching is tedious the first part it was interesting but I kept forgetting keywords. My play style was to watch all 5 videos in my keyword search but that meant having to jot down other words I wanted to search later. I most often used the keyboard search function instead of the selection in the video because I didn’t want to rewatch the same videos and track down the word in the subtitle.

It might be better to play a different way but you’ll have to make a note of searches to repeat.

It would have been nice once you searched a keyword top the five videos were grouped together in a folder. You can see your history but you have to click through them all over again. I also think the videos should auto tag your keywords as you searched and they came up in the 5 viewable. The tagging feature is too much work. I only used it for the trophy and it’s a lot of work to add new ones, and assign them. And go go that for even 100 videos would double / triple play time.

It also would have been cool to offer an option to play all videos in chronological order especially if you found all of them. I’d be interested in seeing that. Maybe it’s on YouTube.

Anyway - I’m giving it a generous 3.5 stars for the story / acting / using FMV technique.

(Reviewed after playing the entire "Sam Barlow Trilogy" as I call it: Her Story, Telling Lies, & Immortality)

Bigger in scope than Her Story and better for it. Telling Lies is another FMV game by Sam Barlow. This time we get more characters, a more complicated storyline and way more themes and undertones while still maintaining that signature Barlow style. Just like I said in my Her Story review (here) I found these games best enjoyed over Discord with friends, so that we could share our theories and react to the various discoveries together.

The main draw this time is that most video clips are of some sort of video call where you can only see one side at a time. This puts significantly heavier emphasis on the acting chops and character depth and luckily, Telling Lies triumphs in both these regards. David Smith is such a fascinating character; he's so hard to love yet somehow even harder to hate. The other characters here are memorable as well, but Logan Marshall-Green brings David to life in a way that only gets topped by certain actors and actresses in Immortality. Water is life.

My main problem with all of Barlow's games (though especially noticeable with this one, I feel) is how you end up running out of interesting clips to find and instead have to dredge through negligible search results until you find something juicy again. This always occurs in the final hours right before you hit the credits, and at that point you're already hooked into the story so it's not that big of a deal. Still, it does make me wonder if the self-paced nature of these games can be more detrimental than beneficial. Luckily Immortality was affected the least by this, from my experience.

Anyway, play this game. Play all of Sam Barlow's games, honestly. They're super unique and well-executed and I wish more people talked about them.

Backloggd decided to delete what I wrote when I took time to help a customer at work so I'm gonna make this short.

Telling Lies is an interactive story from Sam Barlow. It's nearly the same as his last work, Her Story, in that you piece together the story from various FMV clips you find through keywords.

Telling Lies is a little refined in interactive features offering QoL improvements like searching directly from highlighted words and phrases in the subtitles (great for console players). The game also lets you make custom tags which I found to be cumbersome with console controls and pretty useless overall AND it lets you bookmark clips so you can sort them by date but I also didn't utilize this much since I felt is was easy to determine what happened when.

Another little difference is that while both Telling Lies and Her Story have you as a character in first person staring at a computer screen with their faint reflection over everything, Her Story has you in front of an older monitor and warps the reflection to immerse you that much more being in front of an older rounded screen. Just a little extra charm I enjoyed in that game.

Overall the two games are played largely the same so what you want to judge is the story. The thing about stories though is the enjoyment of them is highly subjective. I personally enjoyed the plot of Her Story WAY MORE than Telling Lies but this game does have a competent enough story and I could see people liking it. It didn't help for me that I knew the main actors from other roles I couldn't separate them from which just made me laugh and take it all less seriously. That's just a risk that comes with featuring real actors looking like themselves though.

So yeah. It's a decent experience. If you never played a thing like it before it'll come across as a cool new way to experience a story. If you happen to be reading this and not played it or any Sam Barlow game I would INSIST on playing Her Story instead. At least the fake desktop in this game also had Solitaire. That was neat.

Telling Lies isn't a fun game. Whereas Barlow's previous title Her Story felt like simulated the work involved in the investigative process, his follow up just feels like work. Composed of hidden camera and webcam footage, each example of the latter category has another video to be found that shows the other side of the conversation. Combined with the beefed up length of clips, and a bountiful query in the early game could easily produce a couple dozen minutes of footage to scrub through to identify yet more query. Scrubbing is something you'll be doing a lot of, as most videos have a few solid minutes of dead air as you spy into these character's private lives. Your choice of research methodology is critical here, I filled up sixteen pages of pen and paper notes before I ditched them and started just following whatever leads I fancied. I recommend bookmarking each clip you find at a memorable line, which help you keep track of the timeline and easily reference clips, which may stave off the tedium.

Critically however, Telling Lies has another central quality, which is that it is fucking devastating. There aren't so many big reveals that excite in their elucidation of some grand mystery, but rather dozens of small revelations that add another emotional barb to uncovering where this powder keg of a setup is going to wind up. The aforementioned dead air is often palpable with the pain of this characters written on their faces as they reel from a development unseen by you. It is in those small details that this title flourishes, its plot spliced together from various high profile news stories but rendered captivating through their intimacy and specificity.

As such, the tediousness contributes to this in its own way, the work your character doing is grimy, arguably working towards a noble end but unarguably through unethical means, which makes for a fascinating foil to the game's main character, David, as he begins to question both the ends and means he has chosen and been assigned. Albeit, I can't blame anyone for finding the movie compilation videos on Youtube a more satisfying experience, and as when we reach the point when it is fully normalized that games can benefit from being things other than fun, I think I will sour more on the particular ways that Telling Lies accomplishes that through its tedium. Still, I expect that the story it weaves will stick with me for a good while longer than that.

Neat concept and I liked some of the artistic touches but I wasn't too interested in the "story" on offer.

With a slightly better execution and mystery this could have been something more memorable.

Fairly easy and fast Platinum Trophy for those who care.
Not worth a full price, get it dirt cheap if you are curious or give it a try if it's free.

As with Her Story, I had already watched a let's play of the game (both by Materwelonz, one of the best on YouTube), but my own playthrough did not lose any of the game's allure by this fact. Sam Barlow and co-writer Amelia Gray expand upon Barlow's prior game to flesh out the emergent narrative, which relies less on particular twists than the scope of its character development. Helpful are the performances, especially Logan Marshall-Green (and his myriad facial expressions), in expressing the mundanity of much of the online interactions, and in a post-COVID era, the game only feels more natural than it did in 2019. Without spoiling anything, the conceit of Telling Lies develops into a fascinating descent of one's psyche to provide a rationale to their being. The sheer craftsmanship involved here is a sight to behold. Although the requirement of a mod to allow easier playback of the videos is a bummer, Telling Lies really should not be played to as completionist a playthrough as Her Story as a result of its voyeuristic footage filled to the brim with silence, listening, and banal conversations (in terms of their in-world expression). Nevertheless, this is Barlow and co.'s masterpiece (until Immortality, perhaps).