It's hard to know how to rate this game. On the one hand, everything is more or less in place. It's a servicable RPG. It has characters, it has quests, it has a variety of environments, it has various shootin' and RPG systems to interact with. It tries. I wouldn't feel right giving it a 2, in light of this. But the only reason it's not a 2.5 is the system only allows me to give full stars. The graphics are...aggressively ugly. Just a riot of messy textures and garish colors. Rather than inspire awe at alien worlds, it just gives you a headache trying to make sense of the environment visually. There's no sense of mise-en-scene or environmental storytelling, they just gob assets into areas until they're overflowing with junk. Nothing seems to be placed with care, it feels rushed and thrown together. The voice acting is...it would be polite to call it pedestrian. Some standouts, but most is cringe inducing. The writing vacillates between bland and an extremely strained attempt at "zaniness" which might punch some folks' humor ticket but frequently left me rolling my eyes. The goofy corporate angle is fun for five minutes and then is driven into the ground over the running length of the game. The companions, outside of one, feel banal and derivative. The story is ramshackle and never has any sense of momentum or emotional investment. The shooting mechanics are flat, the weapons lack any sense of punch or power, the status effects are hugely annoying and visually hideous, the AI is one dimensional (stand around until one shot is fired, at which point they all throw caution to the wind and beeline the protagonist) , the bestiary is extraordinarily thin with the same 3-5 enemy types repeating on every planet, to be shot at with the same 5-10 weapon types. Shotgun becomes shotgun 2, assault rifle becomes assault rifle 2, etc. There are a selection of mods, but their effect in terms of gameplay is minimal. Obsidian feels like a studio in something of a slow, sad decline.
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.
