Telling Lies

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.

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.

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.

after starting it and having no clue shortly followed by finishing the game i would say i enjoyed it. it sucks you in and the progress is subtle but enough to make you want to keep digging.

This game suffers from a few design issues that really drag the experience down. The absence of a progress bar to more effectively scrub through videos was a massive mistake, sometimes achievements had a hard time firing, and overall the format made the gameplay drag.
I can't give this game a bad review though. The acting was great across the board, the characters were compelling, and the story was interesting and engaging. It was worth suffering through the poorly designed UI and long, awkward silences to experience it.

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.

I loved this. It's making some small mechanic changes from Her Story to build on those mechanics and hit on what this game is doing differently: where that game was focused on diving into one person's story, this one is interested in how one person's story entangles with the stories of others.
Thoughts on mechanics for this and Her Story that aren't exactly spoilers since you find them out early, but I think the discovery of those mechanics is worth experiencing fresh: With Her Story, if a text string was found in a video and it was one of the first 5 videos with that text match, that unlocked the video and put you in at the start of it. The videos themselves were mostly very short (usually under 45s) and in series, based on a premise that someone had already sliced up the larger videos into meaningful small segments, so the challenge was in figuring out terms that would be repeated or emergent later in the story, and finding your way into less common text strings to dig later. The mechanics push you to find out what happens next, and to find the details in between what you know.
With Telling Lies the text string search and first 5 video cutoff is still present, but the videos are whole segments in the form of one side of two-sided calls, and intentional recordings (usually 3-5 minutes, some nearing 10 minutes); searching for a particular piece of text jumps you to that part of the video where it is present, allowing you to backtrack and fast forward within that video for context (something I missed at first, oops). What's new is that you're usually looking at one side of a call, getting the hints on how to find the other side. The mechanics best equip you to find out other people's perspectives; finding out what happens next and in between is also there, happening along the way. The way you think about likely useful search terms has to be changed a bit.
A non-spoilered mechanics note for this game, because I started this assuming the mechanics were identical to Her Story: in this game you can rewind a video to before your start point, and fast-forward through the points where no one is talking. Yes, it would be nice to one-click jump to the start of the video, but I think the absence of such a feature highlights that the point here isn't to unlock a series of videos like in Her Story; it's to sift through those videos for the important parts, and not all of what you'll see is important.
As with many sequels, if you're looking for exactly the same game but more, this isn't it. It's definitely doing different things. If you liked the mechanics of the first and are flexible to those different things then I think this is rewarding, and the rest comes down to how much the story and characters compel you to learn more.