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.

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. Nevertheless, it is more for the completionists, and if you want to only play one Barlow game, I'll advise to try Immortality instead.

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.

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.

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

Telling Lies was a totally unique and immersive experience—my first time playing a game like this, and I really enjoyed it. The acting was phenomenal and the story was incredibly engaging. I loved piecing together the narrative through video clips, even though I wish the game had been a bit clearer about its objective from the start. The rewind and fast-forward mechanics felt a little clunky, especially how long it took to rewind. I also would’ve liked the option to view all three endings at the end instead of just one. Still, it was a compelling and memorable game that I’d definitely recommend to anyone who enjoys story-driven experiences.