Basically "Her Story", but with more than one characters: you sit in front of a computer, search some keywords, watch videos, until you figure out the plot.
The problem is, this is worse than Her Story: while that game was a murder mistery and each clip was short and to the point, in this game the clips show only 1 side of a 2 party videochat, except you'll only get the audio of the person in the frame.
This format gets interesting only if you manage to immediatly find the othe side of a chat you just watched, but when you don't you'll find yourself stating at 1 person say nothing for seconds, if not minutes.
long story short... I liked her story... I thought it would be like her story but it is just like a bad copy of this game. telling lies feels like a shallow tv series cut into pieces and stretched to the limit. There is almost no crime, no thriller no suspense... nothing. You´re sitting infront of your pc watching videos starting in the middle of the clip... and watch how they talk about all their problems... life... relationships and so on. You have to rewind to the beginning of each video manually... sometimes you have to rewind 80% of the video. there is no ´´skip to the beginning of the video´´ - button... no YOU have to click the mouse and draw it yourself.
It´s like a drama tv series and it´s absolutely disappointing. There is no depth, there is nothing worth sitting in front of your pc and punish yourself with this ´´game´´
At all it is NO Game... it is a collection of short clips and you are just watching them, then the next video and so on. Most of the time, you just see one side... one person talking. if the other person says something you can´t hear or see this, you just see the character of the clip listening to the other person but YOU hear and see nothing. then you have to type in all possible keywords to find the clip with the other person.
At the end it is not just absolutely shallow and unlogic, it is boring, disappointing and you really ask yourself ´´why did I waste my time for this?´´
do yourself a favour and DO NOT BUY this ... whatever it is.. it is not a game.
oh and the acting... yeah they are all professional actors... surely they know how to act but it is nothing special. some people praise the acting like some devs acted themselve but sam barlow and his crew hired professional actors. In some scenes it is an absolute pain to watch the clips. The female actors try to act kinky or naughty and it is just ashaming. I´m not prude but this was a torture to watch.
The gameplay loop is almost unchanged from "Her Story": You have a database of video files which you can query with a search string that is matched against the spoken dialogue within the videos. These videos tell a story, and the player is tasked with puzzling this story together. The difficulty comes twofold: The number of search results is limited to five and ordered by date, so the later videos that contain most of the dramatic plot developments tend to be excluded, just as it was in “Her Story”. Also, almost all these videos are recordings of one side of conversations over the web, so to get the full picture, you need to find the recording of the other side. This leads to the immersive gameplay loop known from “Her Story” and provides quite a bit of fun for a while. But then things started to drag.
I think this is inherent to the story “Telling Lies” wants to tell. It is an engaging yarn with quite a few plot twists and some very clever and important things on its mind, but it is a bit too long. The game contains almost 10 hours of video content, and not all of it is engaging. Also, the plot of “Telling Lies” is not as well matched to its medium as the plot of “Her Story” was. That game has a few twists that work uniquely well in the interactive medium of computer games, and “Telling Lies” struggles to provide similar peaks of engagement.
It is not a problem of the production values: The images and sound are crisp, the performances are all at least adequate.
In the end I think this might be a case of diminishing returns. Barlow’s unique style of game wowed me the first time, but the second time around, the wow factor was gone and what engagement remained wasn’t enough to overcome the bloat of the story.
TLDR: If this is your first Sam Barlow Interactive Video Detective game, you should have a lot of fun: “Telling Lies” is the superior product. But if you’ve played “Her Story” or “Immortality”, “Telling Lies” might lose you before it reaches its conclusion.
I picked up this game fresh off the heels of finishing The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker as it seemed like something similar and in a way it is, in some ways it's not.
What you can expect from playing, or, I suppose experiencing this story, is a vastly interesting narrative with a case of well rounded characters. The acting was overall pretty damn good give or take a scene or two where things are a little wooden but, that's to be expected from time to time.
Without wishing to spoil anything, the game is what you make of it. You could finish this in a couple of hours or you could spend days pouring over everything that there is to find and I feel the game rewards you well for exploring every angle, which is far from a chore.
My only critique that I had going into the game was there isn't an immediate sense of what to do but I get the sense that was very much intentional. If you're up for really working to put pieces together without hints or tips popping up, I highly reccomend giving this game a try. It's one of those rare times where if you're new to this kind of thing you can adapt quickly to it and if you are used to it you may still find it interesting and a tad puzzling.
I can see why some reviews say there's not much gameplay to Telling Lies but just speaking from personal taste, I think this game isn't meant for you to present a case or 'win' particularly, more, this game is here for you to put together all the pieces of a story and find satisfaction in every new blank that gets filled in.
First of all, I like games that are a bit like interactive movies so I do not criticise the genre in general. I played for more than 7 hours (spend about 1 hour on solitaire only and got no reward of any kind, in fact I noticed the king that has just been there in the final staple, suddenly disappeared - disturbing) and completed about 73% of the game.
The videos that give you the hints can be very lengthy, especially when you are forced to watch people sleep or only smile/nod for 2 min as they are apparently listening. The background story itself is not too bad.
And then all of a sudden it's over. I have nothing but open ties, no answers why all my relations are suddenly fucked up and Davids final action is just absurd. I assumed there was a time lapse and I was missing out on too many videos to understand. I searched the real internet a bit watching the possible endings and was nothing but disappointed. Really? Three stars for the making, the original idea and some of the acting but it is unlikely I'll give a second go. When the king is missing, the king is missing.
