Quien mucho abarca poco aprieta, y aquí la mecánica de Her Story no funciona tan bien al querer hacerlo todo más grande (más personajes, más localizaciones, más tramas...).
No está mal, sobre todo gracias a un buen reparto, pero resulta más agotador que su predecesor y para los completistas como yo resulta algo frustrante lo inabarcable que es todo (yo tenía intención de completarlo al 100% pero me acabé rindiendo).
No está mal, sobre todo gracias a un buen reparto, pero resulta más agotador que su predecesor y para los completistas como yo resulta algo frustrante lo inabarcable que es todo (yo tenía intención de completarlo al 100% pero me acabé rindiendo).
Everyone in the Telling Lies universe sleeps with the lights on.
Genuinely have no clue why the ratings are all over the place for this game, I get the feeling many people jumped in, didn't "get it" immediately and then shelved it.
Telling Lies is Sam Barlow's second big venture into his crusade to keep FMV alive in the 21st century, the first being mystery game Her Story. Telling Lies is a much, much bigger game than Her Story that retains the same basic structure: A search engine that brings up segmented video clips of a singular subject speaking directly to camera, limited to the top five results.
Her Story centered on one woman, one mystery, and one throughline, while Telling Lies claims to juggle four characters, though it's a bit more complex than that. It centers on one man, and his descent into this dark pit of lie after lie after lie as he tries to maintain several different relationships between a startlingly strong ensemble of actors.
While a bit unfocused and bloated at times, Telling Lies still supplies suspense, thrills, heartbreak, and great performances in heavy, heavy supply.
I only hope that Sam Barlow's next project can continue this momentum he's built up to this point.
8/10, would waste another hour on a rigged game of Solitaire
Telling Lies is Sam Barlow's second big venture into his crusade to keep FMV alive in the 21st century, the first being mystery game Her Story. Telling Lies is a much, much bigger game than Her Story that retains the same basic structure: A search engine that brings up segmented video clips of a singular subject speaking directly to camera, limited to the top five results.
Her Story centered on one woman, one mystery, and one throughline, while Telling Lies claims to juggle four characters, though it's a bit more complex than that. It centers on one man, and his descent into this dark pit of lie after lie after lie as he tries to maintain several different relationships between a startlingly strong ensemble of actors.
While a bit unfocused and bloated at times, Telling Lies still supplies suspense, thrills, heartbreak, and great performances in heavy, heavy supply.
I only hope that Sam Barlow's next project can continue this momentum he's built up to this point.
8/10, would waste another hour on a rigged game of Solitaire
Enjoyed Her Story plenty when I played it on Steam a few years back. Enjoyed this spiritual sequel a little less, and it's easily the weakest game in the Annapurna collection so far. That's a bummer, because the scope and idea here are fairly ambitious! Like in Her Story, gameplay consists of entering search queries into a database and watching video clips that contain certain words or phrases. So in one sense you're just watching little fragments of a six-hour movie out of order. The problem is twofold. One, most of the clips are just one side of a two-way Skype or Facetime conversation, which means every time you find a five-minute clip, about two and a half minutes of it are silent reaction shots. I'd have appreciated the option to merge the two sides of any given conversation together upon finding a pair! Alas. And two, the entire point of the game is just to unravel what exactly is going on and how the various characters interact. Once you get the gist of the story, the entire rest of the game is just fleshing out details and filling in gaps, many of which aren't particularly compelling. It's cool that games like this exist and they make for interesting experiences, but the well already feels somewhat dry for this particular Sam Barlow game type.
The plot was too easy to figure out which made the game too easy
Blown away by the gameplay and way in which this story is revealed. We had a blast working our way through it and growing close to the characters. Despite an explosive ending, though, we felt a little letdown and wanting for more resolution of the drama. Eventually, we went back and watched all of the clips and this filled in the gaps in a very powerful way. Overall the game is a phenomenal experience with some of the finest acting I've ever seen (and I'm a film critic).
Did not manage to catch my interest whatsoever.
Although this is essentially a high budget Her Story -- multiple characters, big name actors, full sets and a more beautiful interface -- I miss the simplicity of the original, and don't feel the budget, length, and additional complications elevate it above the brilliance of the original.
i liked the mechanics of it, but the plot hit so many of my yuck buttons that it made me question every ounce of enjoyment i got out of it, and then made me retroactively question how much i actually enjoyed Her Story.
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.
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.
This some ass lmao
This review contains spoilers
the solitaire is a lie
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
the absolute iron balls on this guy to make a game that is fully 50% watching people silently react to things you can't see
NO PAPA
Cuando uno entiende qué hizo bueno a su antecesor y quiere expandirlo, hace Spelunky 2. Cuando uno no...
A game that really shows off how versatile video games can be.
This game is really just you snooping on someone's computer yet the developer manages to make a really interesting non-linear story out of it.
This game is really just you snooping on someone's computer yet the developer manages to make a really interesting non-linear story out of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was expecting a more improved version of Her Story but this game removed a key feature that makes Her Story more enjoyable to play, and so I couldn't get through it with as much fun.
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.
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.
Stars equal to how much of the footage contains dialogue.
A proposta do game é bem interessante, mas achei tudo muito confuso (ou eu que sou um péssimo detetive mesmo rs). O início foi bem divertido, mas chega uma hora que começa a ficar frustrante, você assiste, assiste, assiste e nunca consegue entender 100% o que está acontecendo.
Un nuevo episodio vouyeur de Sam Barlow que, si bien no es tan rompedor como su anterior juego, Her Story, sí que parece una evolución con más recursos que este.
Goddamnit Sam, why does playing a video go directly to the searched word in that video and not the start? All that does it make it more awkward to watch everything. And it's already awkward enough to watch everything.
Still, it's got a solitaire minigame, so that's nice.
Still, it's got a solitaire minigame, so that's nice.
Até agora a maior bomba que eu joguei no ano. Controles terríveis e algumas atuações forçadíssimas. Enredo enrola e enrola, mas não é nada demais. Fujam.
Tomando como base Her Story Sam Barlow va más allá con este sucesor espiritual. Sigue siendo una historia a la que se entra sin saber nada y que el jugador tiene que descubrir buscando vídeos con palabras clave, esta vez más accesible para bien y para mal.