Telling Lies

So, for context...I don't mind "low gameplay" games. I liked Gone Home. I thought it was sweet. I thought To the Moon was brilliant. I had a great time with many of Telltale's offerings, and I thought Detroit: Become Human was engaging. I do not pray at the altar of Gameplay First, and I find the moans of "it's not even a real game" as tiresome as anyone. I have absolutely no idea where the "game" is here. Polygon calls it "a triumph", and gushes over the "free form gameplay"...which consists of...collecting nouns. You type in nouns. There is no detective work going on. No clues to assemble. No case to present. You will type in nouns, watch (pieces of) videos out of chronological order, roughly piece together a story outline, and the game will end...with one of three extraordinarily saccharine endings. The story itself is...profoundly mundane. It's...fine? Like a low budget, made for TV movie? There was no great twist, no emergent theme, no intricate clockwork plot. There are some character reveals that range from minor to moderate, but most are thoroughly signposted and fairly evident from the word go. I didn't feel particularly rewarded in the way I teased story elements out, or that the interactivity brought any special resonance to the proceedings. It was occasionally involving to try and piece together who is talking to whom in which video, but often it's quite clear. The acting is fine, all the performers do a more or less competent job with a fairly plonky script. A few scenes are stiff but some are nice and natural. The interface is largely clean, but the notepad they give you to take notes on was glitchy, and did not actually transcribe text where the cursor rested but rather several lines down. I don't know what to tell you. I don't know who this game is for, really. If you're into lightweight, pedestrian stories about tangled human relationships that are chopped up and delivered non-linearally, Telling Lies is going to thrill you.

I stayed up way too late playing this game the first night I got it. And then the next day I spent a couple of hours on it. And since then... I keep meaning to go back to it, and kind of going, "why"? For me, at least, the actual subject of "Her Story", "Telling Lies"'s mechanical (though not storyline) predecessor, was only part of the focus of the game. The driving force was finding out who "I"- that is, the in-game person searching these video files and trying to piece together the story- was. The way the game spurred you on with cues on that front, signs that you were going the right direction in your searches, was masterful. "Telling Lies" doesn't seem to cue the player in quite the same way. There have been a couple of short scenes shown in the reflection on the in-game computer screen, but they don't seem especially revelatory, and in the absence of that lure... I'm ceasing to care. I've followed two of the main characters closely enough to understand quite well how their respective narrative arcs went, and it's given me enough background on the others to be able to infer where theirs went, whether the game recognizes that fact or not. I feel like I'm at a point where I'm not actually looking for more information; I'm just searching to try to make the game understand, "Okay, I get it... Now where's my denouement, damn it?" "Her Story" had a similar sort of sense of "You can keep playing until YOU feel you're done", but by the time I was done with it, it felt like the game and I were in accord. Props to the actors and director; all the performances are good, even in moments where characters are unlikable. I feel the interface could be better- an ability to skip to the beginning or end of clips isn't apparent, and a way to match two clips and hear opposite sides of the same dialogue would be really welcome. Perhaps if the mechanic becomes a trilogy... Long and short, I admire the art of the game. It just, perhaps, needed a touch more game-craft.

In Short: Telling Lies is a fascinating example on how clever game mechanics & storytelling can elevate a regular thriller story into something special. If you are looking for the next unique game experience then play this game! In Long: I think it's best to know very little of the story before going into the game so I'll mostly talk about everything else. But to quickly mention the story - it's good. The acting is great (at least from the main 4 characters), the cast pretty huge, and it offers enough to keep you guessing on what's going to happen next, or if you already found out, how it all went down. This leads me to the gameplay. You are essentially going to watch the entire story out of sequence with you trying to piece together everything yourself. This essentially makes it a puzzle game more than anything else and even though it doesn't offer much in terms of gameplay, what's there is absolutely crucial to the game and its story! You are given very little information with each clip with a few lies, secrets & red herrings to keep the story twisting & turning. This is also due to each clip only having the audio input and is therefore often missing the other side of the conversation. This is genius! Sometimes you will find the other side of a dialogue way later and it will re-contextualise the situation & relationships. It also makes for an interesting treasure hunt in the dialogue by trying to search for a question or response to find the opposite clip of the conversation. Reading the characters & the environment can also help you spot important information & expose lies. This game is very much testing your observation skills but is also purely fuelled by your own curiosity since the game lacks any real objectives. Some tips before jumping in: Pay attention to the date & time of each clip, make notes, write down planned & used search terms & don't rewind clips to the beginning if you start at anything past minute 3 (Rewind is intentionally slow)

Since telling anything about would be a spoiler I keep it with this: I really enjoyed, I got through over 75% of the material and I am pretty sure I found the most important information leading through those 2 years. Successfully puzzling the story together, finding out specific events after journeys through information gave me a damn good feeling. The actors were really great, it helped digging in fast. Thanks for that game, I hope we will get to see more like this.