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).

Full Review + Trophy Review and Tips Below (Easy Platinum)

Telling Lies concept is simple. You are a detective and you are watching clips of videos to piece together the puzzle before the night runs out. The story and twists are engaging enough but the mechanics of typing in key words and watching a couple minutes of video can get tiring very quick.

This one requires a lot of note taking to help you string together the conspiracy and relationships. I personally got frustrated and bored but I appreciate what it attempted to do.

Gets a boost in score because you can play solitaire on the laptop.

Trophies
Difficulty: 1/10
Time: 3 Hours
Trophy Guide: Recommended
Trophy List Score: 6/10

Using a guide while absolutely ruin this game for you but it is the fastest way to obtain the Platinum. With that in mind I would recommend you first beat the game yourself and then do a second playthrough to get the Platinum. It should take you about 3 hours from beginning to end to do.

Start off by getting some of the misc. trophies like using the password "password" to connect to another network, playing solitaire, deleting a file, etc.

After that, you need to make sure you watch EVERY video and the list of keywords to look up should be easily available online. That's it!

Happy Trophy Hunting!

Telling Lies is a "detective game at heart." Telling Lies is a game where the story isn't told in a linear fashion. The story is told via the player watching pre recorded video clips of conversations between various characters. The player has to uncover the video clips by typing keywords into a search engine on a simulated computer. It's up to the player to piece the story together and the game definitely doesn't hold the players hand in that process.

Personally I felt like the game was carried by the casts strong acting performances. The acting wasn't over the top, and I was captivated by the mystery of uncovering exactly what happened to each character and their ultimate fate.

I played Telling Lies via Xbox Gamepass on my Series X and I think my only gripe with the game was that l probably would have enjoyed it more if I used a keyboard instead of my controller to type in the keywords I was searching. If you enjoy games that require you to think and put your detective skills to use this is probably a game I would recommend to you. It's on Gamepass so you really don't have anything to lose. I enjoyed my time with it. If you're familiar with the game "Her Story" this game is its successor.

If I could turn the page
The time that I'd be arranged
Is today to
(Close my, close my, close my eyes)
But I couldn't find a way
So I'll settle for one day
To believe in you
(Tell me, tell me, tell me lies)

(Chorus)
Tell Me Lies, tell me sweet little lies
(Tell Me Lies, Tell me tell me lies)
Oh no no, you can't disguise
(You can't disguise, no you can't disguise)
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

And though I'm not making plans
I hope that you understand
There's a reason why
(Close your, close your eyes)
No more broken hearts
We're better off apart
Let's give it a try
(Tell me, tell me lies)

(Repeat Chorus)

If I could turn the page
The time that I'd be arranged
Is today to
(Close my, close my, close my eyes)
But I couldn't find a way
So I'll settle for one day
To believe in you
(Tell me, tell me, tell me lies)




























































































Johny Johny yes papa
Eating sugar no papa
Telling lies no papa
Open your mouth
Ha!
Ha!
Ha!

Her Story is a masterpiece, a game that explored an uncommon, fascinating approach for video game storytelling. That's why I anxiously awaited the release of Telling Lies, the spiritual successor by Her Story's creator Sam Barlow. Telling Lies had a lot to live up to, and on its release, I pushed the backlog aside and dove in headfirst. And did I regret it.

If you played its predecessor, you pretty much know what to expect from Telling Lies, as it uses the exact same mechanical framework with only a few new interface quirks. If you haven't played HS -- well, play that instead, but -- this is how it goes: you, the player, are given access to a video database with over one hundred clips that happened over a given period of time.

The catch is that, to actually view any one video, you have to query the database with words that are said in the video, so you have to know what questions to ask before you can get any answers. Additionally, if your query happens to be too generic and results in more than five videos, it'll only show five, and only those that happened earlier in the chronology.

Instead of a murder interrogation like in Her Story, in Telling Lies, you find yourself perusing a database containing recordings of video calls between a man named David and several other individuals, from his family, to his friends, to his boss, and so on. As the game starts, you don't even know what you're supposed to be looking for in the footage.

It's the first of Telling Lies's mistakes: the game doesn't have any kind of hook to engage its player as it opens. Her Story began the game with an ominous "MURDER" query, which is bound to draw a player in not only by instigating a morbid curiosity, but also by beckoning them to don their detective hats and solve the mystery of whodunnit.

In contrast, Telling Lies opens with a rather empty "LOVE" query, which results in a set of disconnected videos that I guess are meant to introduce its main set of characters, but really only manages to instill confusion as to why these people spend so much of these videos without saying a word.

You see, Telling Lies’s pretense is that you’re supposed to be accessing a database containing recordings of video calls between David and the other characters. Except, each video isn’t the whole call, it's the audio and video feed from one side of the conversation, complete with awkward silence whenever the other side is speaking. You often won’t find both sides of a given conversation at the same time.

While, mechanically, this does create situations where you’re trying to catch on to keywords that the other side might be saying so you can search for them, it has the unfortunate consequence of having the recordings being silent at least half the time. With the lack of good you UI or a reliable fast forward feature, this is an annoying waste of time.

But if that was the full extent of Telling Lies’s issues, it would still have been a great game. Its greatest flaws lie in its storytelling, both in regards to the "story" and the "telling". It’s astounding how this is supposed to be the successor to a game that excelled in that area, and yet, it seems to wholly misunderstand what made its predecessor so great.

A key element of Her Story’s storytelling is how much of a complete mess it is. Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s actually the point: you’re listening to a woman retelling the circumstances around a crime she is being suspected of. We don't even know if she's mentally sound, and even if she is, she has every reason to lie. It’s the textbook example of an unreliable narrator.

Combine that with a confusing, completely unthinkable chain of events, and the more you dig into the game, the more questions you have. By the end, even after seeing every video there is, it’s still impossible to be sure of what’s true and what’s not. The last video on the chronology actually alludes to this fact, with the woman stating that “all we’ve been telling each other here are just stories“. This lingering uncertainty is a huge part of what made the original game so memorable.

Contrast with Telling Lies and, from the format alone, we already have a far different beast on our hands. This isn’t an interrogation, they’re conversations; not a retelling, but the facts unfolding as you go, and because of that, there is far less uncertainty to the events of the game.

The game is very much about David, a man who, through some questionable decisions, ends up in a very bad situation. I won't spoil anything as it’s sort of the point of the game to find out who David is and what happened to him, but I will say this: the story is as boring and predictable as it seems to be, and any twists you might want to happen are simply not coming — again, in stark contrast to its predecessor. If I was to be generous, I'd call this "cheap Hollywood drama".

It's even more disappointing when you take into account the outright deceitful pre-release material. When Telling Lies was announced, with a trailer showing recordings of multiple characters and suggesting multiple perspectives, I figured that was the direction it was going to go. Early reviews from the pre-release period seemed to indicate that as well, claiming that the game contained multiple perspectives about different story threads.

That's an interesting narrative framework that's been successfully used in many stories. Very famously, there is In a Grove, a short story, more known from its film adaptation Rashomon, that uses the perspectives of different characters to present contradictory accounts of the same incident. Since each of those characters presents a limited, sometimes deceitful or self-serving version of the facts, it's impossible to tell what the absolute truth from the accounts alone.

To my shock, in Telling Lies, this never happens, and all those reviews I saw turned out to be flat-out lies taken straight from PR releases. I thought I was crazy at first, having played the game on the weekend it released, but a few weeks later, the Steam rating dipped to a Mixed level, a lot of other people pointing out this exact contradiction.

The story in Telling Lies is simple and is told pretty straightforwardly by the videos. The additional characters are just window dressing to David's narrative, and present they present no conflicting or questionable accounts. This is the ultimate irony about the game: it's called Telling Lies, and yet, nobody actually lies in it.

So much for having high expectations placed upon you, and so much for thinking that a bigger budget means a higher quality. Telling Lies is a boorish attempt to build upon Her Story whose existence is hard to justify. It's a game I'm legitimately confused as to how it turned out this poorly.

As a side note: I get that it's meant to emphasize the voyeurism angle the storytelling is supposed to have, but god, was it infuriating to have to sit through minutes of people being awkwardly horny at each other. I hope to never go through such a thing again.

I think I'd play these things forever, even if it is functionally mostly the same as Her Story. It's not a novel story except for the way it's presented, but putting all the pieces together in your head is especially satisfying knowing that you're probably the only player who's going to view those clips in that order. It's unique for everyone. Mechanically, "Click here when you're done to win" has evolved into "Click here when you're done to get a procedurally generated blurb about your win." My playthrough might have bugged out a little, too, because I got all the "skits" in a row just near the end.

There should be a DVD bonus feature where it just plays all the conversations in order and synced with each other. I was surprised there wasn't a way to link the two halves of a conversation. I guess you could use bookmark tags but bookmarks were so clumsy to manage I never bothered.

Just a boring and annoying game.

This may not be by any fault of the game itself, but I never felt invested in the story of this game. And so, this felt like a slog to get through.

Not to mention that some videos are longer than 6 minutes, and seem to go on forever. And to add insult to injury, the rewind is painfully slow, and adds more boredom to this already boring game, since the videos often start at the middle or rather towards the end.

Telling lies is a game that hates its players. It's an expensive version of Her Story with a basic ass plot zero catharsis finale.

Players leave Her Story after an arc, you get your answers but there are still a few questions that remain open to interpretation, it's fun storytelling done well using a very minimal and limited technique.

Telling Lies forgoes the interrogation setting for two sided (but seperate) video calls between David and the rest of the cast. There are a lot of silence in these calls, a lot of them are barely relevant fluff.

The acting is generally pretty good, the main guy is annoying and seem fake the entire time. It kinds fits the character so maybe they're actually brilliant.

The game keeps the backwards search system but it makes less sense on a modern 2019 laptop than it did on an 80s PC.

The scrubbing system is horrendous. Playing videos starts from when the searched term is first said and not from the start. There is no official way to play them from the start and the scrubbing, with its three speeds l, is painfully slow.
I was about 20 videos in before I realised this. And around a 100 before I found out there's a perhaps a bug perhaps hidden feature to skip to the start. You need to hold rewind as soon as you hit play and after the soundclip ends it will play the clip from the start.

These clips amount to hours upon hours of blinks and silence. The constarct is flimsy and despite the plot being simple and straight forward its so broken and drowned in noise and silence that makes it hard to follow. It's a hollow detached experience.

Did I mention this game has multiple endings? That don't contradict each other and are very short and could easily just be a part of an epilogue? They're determined by the character you spend most time with, what significance does this have in a game like this?

None of them are very good, they're just a couple bland blurbs about the main characters' fate

There are three women in the game, one is a sex worker, one was is a victim of harassment and abuse and the other was sexualy assaulted.
All of them perform a striptease at some point.

Every aspect of this game feels like trolling.
The game has a solitaire mini game that's missing a card. Why? Because fuck you

The time I spent playing Telling Lies I could play Her Story like three times, and it was time better spent.

Interessante modo di raccontare una (in realtà molteplici) storie, in cui la scelta del percorso da seguire è totalmente in mano allo spirito investigativo del giocatore. Il gameplay loop è semplicissimo: cerca un termine nel motore di ricerca, ottieni i video che hanno quel termine nel dialogo dei protagonisti, vedi il video e ripeti da capo.

Peccato per la mancanza di un sacco di feature che avrebbero reso più godibile l'esperienza:
Un pulsante per far partire il video dall'inizio invece che dal punto in cui dicono la parola cercata. Un modo per visionare entrambi i lati di una conversazione in contemporanea una volta che vengono scoperti entrambi).

Al netto di ciò la trama funziona, proprio in virtù del fatto che venga scoperta dal giocatore in maniera autonoma. Allo stesso tempo ho il sospetto che chi non riesca a scoprire il "finale" entro il tempo limite rimarrà deluso da una storia che sembra non andare da nessuna parte.

I'm not sure what I can say about this one.

This felt much more than Her Story, there's multiple sets, many more characters and more story threads to chase down.

And as it's set more recently than Her Story (which just uses a fixed camera in an interview room), there are different types of camera being used liked mobile phones, webcams. It makes the game feel more lively and more real. My wife wanted to know if they game had just come out as it seemed weird to her that the characters were video chatting this much (are they all in quarantine?).

The interface is more modern too, though beyond the astethics there's not too much different. You can bookmark and now tag clips. Probably the biggest difference is that you get very long clips, sometimes 8-10 minutes long versus the very quick chunks in the previous game. But weirdly you only get that person's side of the conversation (if it's a web chat) and need to find the other person's side of the conversation to understand the full clip. There's no option to play two clips at the same time, which would have been handy when you find the matching clips. Instead if one of the characters goes on a bit of a monologue you'll need to fast forward through the other character nodding and eyebrowing.


It took me a while to realise this though. I'd often hit keywords at the end of a clip and not understand that I could rewind it. It's a shamne that there's not a "Play from start" option.

I think the mystery and aha moment in Her Story was much more impactful than here. I feel like there's supposed to be a couple of twists in this one but the first one I got to maybe far to early, so it wasn't so much an "Aha" moment as "oh right, so".

But while the story isn't as clever, it feels more relevant to things that are happening now... so...

One part was quite shocking (I suppose two parts are), but the way at least that I moved through the clips I always could follow the story, so that's good right?

I dunno, I'm a sucker for these and so your mileage may vary, but if you liked Her Story, then I can't see why you wouldn't like this one too.

Amazing game, however

holy shit

the rewind is so slow with no additional speed options... just one... really... really... slow speed...

but it is definitely a really neat followup to "Her Story" which I truly loved a lot as well.

Annapurna already convinced me with 'Her Story'. The new story, with the old game principle, is wonderfully well written. The plot can be reconstructed well and the video search system is unique. However, it was rather agonising to fast-forward the video clips because the keyword appears in the middle of the video. This was time consuming - time I could have spent elsewhere. However, I was aware of the risk and only immersed myself in the game to explore the story. And that's what makes this game great! The story writers have done a great job and with small changes like a timeline, the game experience would not suffer from the brilliant storytelling.