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 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.