Telling Lies

I recently complained to a friend about investigative games. Open-world private investigative work from the safety of my couch sounds wonderful, but game designers couldn't possibly implement that. The structural limitations of a constrained action set undermine any real sense of freedom. Instead of being the PI, I'm just watching one.

Creator Sam Barlow has figured out if he not only limits the action set, but cripples it -- reduces it to a bare minimum -- somehow, ironically, the freedom is resurrected. That entire action set:
(1)Search a video database using keywords.
(2)Watch video.

That's it.

Like a proof of concept, I'd already enjoyed the smaller-scoped Her Story before I started this. Nonetheless the first hour was excruciating. Boring (albeit beautiful) people talking about boring things. With no "start at beginning of clip" function when searches dumped me into the middle of clips, forcing minutes wasted holding rewind buttons. And no way to combine the two videos containing opposite sides of a conversation, so I had to sit through each conversation twice.

Then *poof* it's three hours later, and I'm a full-fledged PI. Or a despicable voyeur. Take your pick. I've mastered predicting the unheard party's responses to unlock both sides of every story. I've carefully curated a list of keywords for tactical digging. I'm hooked.

None of this would work without great acting and writing. Both are top-notch. No big stars, but you might recognize the leads from underrated works like Halt and Catch Fire, Westworld, or tick, tick...Boom!. Aside from a mid-credits epilogue, the writing never strays into theatricality. The characters' reactions feel as candid (or appropriately coy) as you'd expect from found self-recorded video.

It's the closest I've ever come to the thrill of investigation. Well, outside of creepy and regrettable social media stalking, but that's a story for another day.

Nice & interesting, with a running time of your average feature film and way better than many A-movies.
HOWEVER, the idea of having to watch one side of a dialogue (with the actor reacting for 30s to the other side's responses you can't actually hear) is absurd. It should have been an obvious feature to enable "coupling" of two videos of identical length (once you track them down) and playing them simultaneously, to get the full back-and-forth between the actors.
I kind of 'finished' it, with a few gaps in the plot left, but I don't care enough to replay or dig deeper, mostly due to the problem I mention above.

Well, this game is exceptionally well-designed in terms of the acting, realism, and the very precise writing that's necessary to ensure the player uncovers the story gradually but reliably, but it's quite poorly designed in regard to the actual user experience. The worst part is that each clip is only one side of a conversation, so you have long stretches of time where the character is just staring silently at the camera. Some of the clips are pretty meaningless, as well. You can fast-forward through the videos, but if you try to grab your note app to write down a keyword, you lose your spot in the video, which is really annoying. Also, a keyword will take you to the precise part of the clip where that word is used, which necessitates rewinding through sometimes several minutes of footage to see the entire thing. So, I think LESS realism would have actually been optimal here.
But, well, it's an interesting experience, and the story is interesting.

Just as engaging as Her Story, Sam Barlow has basically created his own genre of interactive fiction.
The less you know about the games before going in the better.
Give it a shot, should only take about 4-6 hours to get through.

Amazing game, up there with Her Story and Immortality. If you like those you'll love this

Telling lies is a case file that you have to solve by finding all the videos within a few hours, by using keywords.

this game is very good and i do recommend this game.

7/10

After playing "Her Story", I decided to give this one a try and I'm glad I did. The production is miles better - I liked "Her Story", don't get me wrong, but the video and the general feel are much more professional in this one. The actors are good and the story is interesting.
It's a more complex and longer game, which does make it a bit more difficult to finish in one go, and I think this detracts from the experience, because I see this as kind of an interactive film. I think there should be a way to rewind videos to the beginning with a button - having to do it manually feels clunky. And I think that the game, in general, could have been more streamlined and the fragments should have been shorter. I get what the author is trying to do - having to search for the truth hidden in the middle of sometimes irrelevant material feels like being an actual detective. But still, a bit too much.
Despite these small shortcomings, I absolutely recommend this - especially to play with a friend or your significant other. It's fun to look for the pieces of the puzzle.