It's alright, but not that interesting overall. Some good performances, but the story isn't that compelling and the presentation style is just awkward.
Would have probably been better served as a movie. Angela Sarafyan is my one true love.
Would have probably been better served as a movie. Angela Sarafyan is my one true love.
"I love unorthodox and nonlinear methods of telling a story, I love video games that play with the medium" I say to myself with gritted teeth as I watch another six minute Skype video where an actor spends half of it silently staring and blinking at the camera. Despite every digitally recorded video taking place in the late 2010's, the laptop controls like a VHS where I have to manually rewind the entire video frame by frame to see the beginning. Tears well up in my eyes. I cry.
I was a huge fan of Immortality, Sam Barlow's most recent game and decided to go back and play the rest. This game delivered another really gripping story, but this felt like the worst way to tell it.
Most of the videos are one side of a video call, and while it is cool to discover the other half, and to try and infer the conversation, it does lessen the emotional impact some scenes can have.
Furthermore, most videos will start in the middle or near the end, and you have to manually rewind them every single time, which is just tedious. These are digital files in universe, so I should be able to click a single button to restart the video.
Going back to platinum this game also revealed to me just how much of the story I missed when I beat the game. There were characters I did not see, plot threads I did not follow, and moments that could have been shocking to discover if I found them earlier were somewhat spoiled now.
There's apparently a 5 hour movie on YouTube someone made putting everything together in order, and I think that might be a more enjoyable way to view this story. I think this format does have some merit, but its implementation here ends up spoiling the story a bit. If this had a real timeline like Immortality did, it could have worked better.
Most of the videos are one side of a video call, and while it is cool to discover the other half, and to try and infer the conversation, it does lessen the emotional impact some scenes can have.
Furthermore, most videos will start in the middle or near the end, and you have to manually rewind them every single time, which is just tedious. These are digital files in universe, so I should be able to click a single button to restart the video.
Going back to platinum this game also revealed to me just how much of the story I missed when I beat the game. There were characters I did not see, plot threads I did not follow, and moments that could have been shocking to discover if I found them earlier were somewhat spoiled now.
There's apparently a 5 hour movie on YouTube someone made putting everything together in order, and I think that might be a more enjoyable way to view this story. I think this format does have some merit, but its implementation here ends up spoiling the story a bit. If this had a real timeline like Immortality did, it could have worked better.
Hated the acting all around, and its really the central part of this game
Frustrating. Riveting. Boring. Inventive. So many conflicting adjectives jumbling around, but by the end I was captivated by a premise that attempts to do something different in application. Not perfect by any stretch, but makes you think. I had a notebook next to me, for crying out loud!
Doesn't matter what time of I day I played it, this shit had me DOZING, not in a "this is boring" way but literally falling asleep to the muted color palette, the long stretches of silence, the anonymous music... Sam Barlow pioneering some exciting new innovations in the hypnagogia-core field...
It's a decent enough depiction of the surveillance state, a subject which games have never handled with much grace. The main visual metaphor, your character's reflection looming just barely visibly over everything she watches, got old quick. Who are they telling the lies to? Ah, me, of course. Nice that they could spring for some decent actors with that Annapurna money - I like Kerry Bishe a lot, and they're all fairly convincing in spite of what must have been an awkward shooting strategy (Logan Marshall-Green seems a bit embarrassed from time to time).
The ecoterrorism plot was rote... I was much more interested in unpacking this dude's psychosexual baggage. Cop can't suspend his violent, possessive, misogynistic impulses even when he's cosplaying as a treehugging lefty? Sounds about right!
It's a decent enough depiction of the surveillance state, a subject which games have never handled with much grace. The main visual metaphor, your character's reflection looming just barely visibly over everything she watches, got old quick. Who are they telling the lies to? Ah, me, of course. Nice that they could spring for some decent actors with that Annapurna money - I like Kerry Bishe a lot, and they're all fairly convincing in spite of what must have been an awkward shooting strategy (Logan Marshall-Green seems a bit embarrassed from time to time).
The ecoterrorism plot was rote... I was much more interested in unpacking this dude's psychosexual baggage. Cop can't suspend his violent, possessive, misogynistic impulses even when he's cosplaying as a treehugging lefty? Sounds about right!
decided to give this game a shot and it really hooked me in. I think the most addictive part was finding the second half of each conversation. You would only watch one side of a video call at a time and it was great to hear the second side later. I was a bit dissatisfied with the ending. I was hoping that I would have to use my collected clips for something so that fell flat for me.
Sam Barlow has a type of game he wants to make and he's going to make them. SImilar to Her Story, Telling Lies has you checking through live action footage in a database using keywords to piece together what's happening. All the clips are usually a part of a two way conversation but you are only watching one side at a time. This can be interesting and it can give you a nice eureka moment when you realise you've seen the other side of another clip already but in practice, it results in long clips of an actor listening to dialogue you can't hear. This gets tedious pretty quickly. Once I pieced together the clips, I didn't really connect with the story or characters. The acting was good at least.
The story was quite interesting and intrigued me more than Sam Barlow's last game. The presentation of the narrative is also a cool concept and keeps the mystery going throughout the story. It was also nice that the clips were labelled with a date this time around so afterwards it made sense which clip came before the other. However, there are still just way too many filler clips and some are just awfully long with no dialogue at all. I think that most of the clips would have been better if they were formatted into shorter 1-minute clips. It was also sometimes annoying that you had basically the same clip but from a different perspective, so you were basically just watching the same scene twice at times. Overall, I would still say that it was an enjoyable experience but this format should be adjusted to make it better and more concise.