Telling Lies

This spiritual sequel to Her Story works well to build an immersive story that is well worth the klunky interface.
It is an FMV game, so there aren't really any video game graphics to talk about. Apart from the interface, it can only be judged in terms of purely cinematic criteria. Yet, everything works to create a voyeur modern spy movie atmosphere. You would not think those videocalls were shot using traditional cameras and not just screen capture software.
The music seems non-existent at first. There's a lot of tasty ambient silence with nothing but computer noises and muffled sounds from surrounding flats. Yet, the OST becomes more pronounced the further you go into the story. The main characters have their own motifs that greatly add to the emotional impact, from somewhat ironic and playfully tragic at the camgirl scenes to downright creepy.
The story and script are superb. There isn't much going on per se, the magic is in the details. The characters are extremely well-detailed and every storyline well-developed. This is mostly mature content, but not because of sex of violence - those are far and in-between - but because the story is built on adult fears. The fear of estrangement from your child and wife, the pain of having to betray the trust of your beloved, the anxiety of losing your way and identity and succumbing to madness. Not the stuff kids or even young adults could fully appreciate, not with so few action events going on.
The gameplay is the weakest point of this game that WILL scare some people away. It is hard to believe how klunky such an ingenious project can be on the mechanical level. I feel inclined to add a short guide for best experience: bookmark every new video near the beginning, they will automatically be sorted by date. Open every new available video, but watch them in order if possible. Use the in-game note pad for names, events and unused keywords. Most videos come in pairs best watched together. The main gameplay consists in trying to come up with keywords for the paired video. You will probably not find all 170 clips without a guide, but at least 160 are very doable, Do not hesitate to view the ending once before completing the search. One last thing: do not hurry. This game is roughly designed to be completed over a week, like season of a TV show. Rushing it may spoil the experience.
I was very hesitant about this game at first because of the interface, but in the end it sucked me in like few other media ever did. I felt like I was the one talking to all these characters and experiencing their fates. The climactic scenes for all the main characters (especially the camgirl and David) hit me like it was all real, leaving me staring at the screen blankly. True integration of Cinema Magic and video games. Unpopularily, I personally liked Telling Lies better than Her Story, though I have to lower the score for the poor interface. I highly recommend you give it a shot to see if it works for you as well.
Final score: 7,7

Okay so, the game did leave me a bit confused on what exactly was happening fully, but I got the gist of it. I think it's worth playing when you're bored with time and patience to watch videos. You can eat or snack while playing lol. It's definitely left me not wanting to play it again because I don't think there is any replay value. Getting it for cheap, like a few bucks isn't bad.

Definitely longer and more tedious than Her Story, but it is pretty interesting. It has some nice new quality of life features, which Her Story would have benefited from.

Telling Lies definitely represents an upwards trajectory for Sam Barlow from the Her Story days in terms of scope and ambition. I suppose that comparisons between this game and both its predecessor and successor (Immortality) are unavoidable, both because of Barlow's unique style and also because there aren't that many decent FMVs out there.
The reviews are very mixed, and I think I can get why: the story itself is less riveting than either Her Story's or Immortality's (it's also possible that I was just unlucky to get very important videos in my first two hours of play and connected the dots together quickly), and the gameplay suffers from endless mandatory manual rewinding which in the end probably accounts for a couple wasted hours.
Personally, I was able to make abstraction of that problem to focus on the interpersonal drama that's the heart of Telling Lies. I do think the game does a very good job of showing the complexity of the relationships between the characters: Barlow writes women in particular, in a way that is consistently engaging, and I really loved all three actresses here.
Basically, this is not a Must Play game, but if you have tried other FMVs and enjoyed them, I think Telling Lies is one of the stronger games of the genre. Although it is more for the completionists, and if you want to only play one Barlow game, I'll advise to try Immortality instead.

Great amount of movies, ending little disappointing. Missing the twist ending that her story had. Anyway worth playing thumbs up!

Telling lies was a great time!
I understand the faults with the games mechanics. Especially with the
notepad feature. The acting is yoga tits, so really good.
You could find the ending pretty easily at one point, but for me, it came gradually and I enjoyed
it immensely for it! I think it's totally to worth the current special promotion price of $4.99. Definitely play it!
P.S: No PEEN

Bottom line up front: The UI/navigation in this game can sour it for many people; it didn't for me. If you like other Sam Barlow/Half Mermaid games then give this a try (you can always refund it w/in Steam's restrictions). I let the negative reviews on account of the UI/navigation steer me away from this for a long time and I now regret that. It is phenomenal.
The review proper: 'Telling Lies' adopts a very similar gameplay experience as its predecessor, 'Her Story': type a word or phrase into a database search box, watch a clip, use info in that clip to inform future search queries, and unravel a mystery all while doing so. (If you have not played 'Her Story,' I strongly recommend doing so before purchasing this game; it is slightly simpler but will act as a good litmus test for whether 'Telling Lies' will jive with you.) The story is much stronger in 'Telling Lies,' if only because you engage with a greater number of characters (roughly four main ones). By the time one reaches the end of the game (having watched such-and-such many videos, including certain key ones) they are suffused with the narrative's themes, subtext, and irony. It is a slow burn, but one well worth enduring. Fortunately, Water is Life.
The black eye on this game, as most negative reviews single out, involves how one navigates the videos. Unlike 'Her Story,' most of 'Telling Lies' 's videos come from two-way FaceTime-style calls. That means some videos will have minutes-long breaks of silence from one party, indicating its complementary video to involve someone else talking for that time. The game allows for fast-forwarding and rewinding, but the maximum speed at which one can do so can still be painfully slow in many cases. When choosing a video to play it will start at the time during which the relevant word the player searched is tokened by its speaker. In a 9-minute video whose search term appears at the end, rewinding to the beginning at max speed can take minutes. Even if patience is a virtue, in gaming and in life, no virtuous person enjoys spending minutes at a time rewinding a video.
Some have suggested that it would have been useful to have a synchronization function that, once one has identified a correct video-pair, they can synchronize them in order to watch both simultaneously and experience the conversation in real-time, rather than trying to piece it together by going back and forth between the clips. I can't say I disagree, but I wouldn't say this would necessarily make for a better game, just a different one. The lack of such a function didn't bother me in my playthrough. And one can always watch YouTube videos of the completed video pairs afterwards.
Overall, I strongly recommend this game for fans of Barlow/Half Mermaid's other FMV titles. Do not let the negative reviews stop you from at least trying it.