Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
An intrinsic curiosity draws us to look into the private lives of others. This burgeoning, guilty draw pulls humans to tell stories, gossip, and spy on one another. The psychology of that feeling is central to Telling Lies. This game isn’t about much more than watching other people’s close, private conversations, sometimes very intimate ones. The game leverages a human desire to pry into others’ lives. That feeling that we’re doing something wrong helps to make the draw even more powerful.
A Game That Barely Feels Like a Game
That feeling is how Telling Lies gets away with being a video game that doesn’t really contain much of a “game,” per se. As with its predecessor, Her Story, director, and writer Sam Barlow, uncovering the sordid details of someone else’s life will lead you through the experience.
Her Story was an experiment that used the concept of skimming through a database of unordered full-motion video clips that slowly expose a mystery concerning a woman questioned by police. There are more characters, more videos, and more details to uncover. The question of how much you’ll enjoy Telling Lies is linked to how far your curiosity will carry you.
The Mysterious Database and Its Secrets
To that end, there’s no good way to explain what Telling Lies is about without ruining it. The game starts with a clip of a woman returning to her apartment and plugging a hard drive into a computer, which gives her access to a secret National Security Agency database of videos snaked from the Internet; essentially, a series of Skype or FaceTime calls made or received by a man named David.
As with Her Story Game, the reason those videos are worth perusing and why the privacy of these people is worth invading is something you have to glean for yourself. As the title suggests, not everybody is fully honest with each other, and much of the game is a meditation on the deceptions humans employ every day in all their interactions. The face we show one person is different from the one we wear for another–and even what we tell ourselves is potentially suspect.
Exploring Truths Through Conversations
Uncovering the lies and their reasoning will likely keep you well-enraptured through the game’s eight hours of video, especially in the early and middle portions when plenty of revelations await you to unearth them. Nuanced performances also help in that regard, even though the actors are mostly just staring into cameras and emoting. You’ll probably recognize the members of the strong cast, led by Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus), Alexandra Shipp (Dark Phoenix), Kerry Bishé (Narcos), and Angela Sarafyan (American Horror Story). It’s not hard to imagine Telling Lies as a Netflix show if it were presented a little differently. The game part of watching all those videos, and there are a lot of them, upwards of 160, usually is found in figuring out what you’re not seeing or hearing in each one.
The Power of Performance and Storytelling
All of Telling Lies takes place on a computer screen, where you can dig around on the stolen hard drive for additional context (or even play Solitaire), and poking around a bit gives some handy facts about what you’re viewing. The videos can’t be watched chronologically to ensure this particular NSA Big Brother program passes Constitutional muster. You can only search for a clip using keywords, and when you uncover a conversation, you can only see one side of it at a time. Watching each clip is a chance to learn more about the people in it. Still, you’ll also need to pay close enough attention to figure out what words to try next that will help you uncover more of the Story or what words the other person might be using so you can track down their side of the interaction.
Navigating the Search for Hidden Meanings
That system is nearly identical to the one in Her Story Game, with a few improvements. In Telling Lies, you can scrub through videos at various speeds by dragging your mouse to the sides of the screen. You’ll start each video with the keyword you found, so discovering context requires you to dig further into every video. Each selection also includes subtitles, and you can click any subtitled word while watching to use it as a keyword, making searching around easier or allowing you to chase down a thread as soon as you see it.
A Spiritual Successor to Her Way
As noted, Telling Lies expands the ideas inherent to Her Story, which includes many of the same high points and drawbacks. It’s a title in which you need to make your own fun. Uncovering interesting information about the characters or finally drawing a connection between one event and another is satisfying, but that also means that the “game” part of Telling Lies primarily exists in your mind. There’s little to push you forward other than your desire to know more, and you’ll essentially create your own objectives and climaxes in the form of “Aha!” moments along the way.
The Challenge of Creating Your Own Story
The disjointed nature of the Story also means that it’s up to you to impose your own structure on it. Telling Lies doesn’t have easy-to-follow traditional storytelling elements like a rising or climax. It’s possible (although really unlikely) to spot the final video in the sequence immediately after watching the first. Filling in the gaps is part of solving the mystery, but at the same time, Telling Lies ends when you get bored of searching or hit a wall and can’t come up with any fresh keywords.
A Timed Investigation Without Real Pressure
A timer on the screen lets you know how much of the in-game night you’ve wiled away with your inquiries. The game implies you’ve only got until dawn to find everything you can before you’re inevitably snapped up by the authorities for stealing the database.
But come 5:45 a.m., the timer stalls (or at least, it did after I hit the button ending the Story once and then loaded an earlier save to dig around some more). That allows you infinite opportunities to keep searching. Still, the ticking clock is more a contrivance than an actual system, so again, you’re not working toward anything other than your satisfaction.
The Ending – A Question Left Unanswered
That’s never more true than when you trigger Telling Lies’ ending by clicking an “I’m done” button as dawn approaches. Though you’ve dug through what is an illegal NSA database. Your arrest is likely imminent; you get only a vague sense of what the information is for and what you’re doing with it now that you have it.
A final report that gives you a sense of how much of the game you completed and what most often drew your interest gives some suggestions of your character’s final actions. Still, you’re not compiling the raw data into a straightforward story, nor are you leveraging it against the powers hunting you.
Conclusion
The mechanics, writing, and performances create a real feeling of peering into someone else’s private world all the way through. Still, the game doesn’t give you much in the way of agency. Telling Lies allows you to delve into the intimate connections between people, to uncover who they are, possibly to a deeper extent than even they realize.
The production values and performances, in particular, make Telling Lies feel accurate and immediate, elevating the game’s conceit that you’re taking part in something forbidden and possibly sinister, even as you work as a digital detective.
About the Game
Title: Telling Lies
Developer: Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid, Furious Bee Limited
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Released: August 23, 2019
Platforms Available: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac, iOS
Platform Reviewed: PlayStation 5
Where to Buy Telling Lies
- Steam (PC, Mac): Available for $19.99 (currently on sale for $4.99). You can purchase the game directly from the Steam Store)
- GOG (PC, Mac): The game is priced at $19.99 (currently on sale for $4.99). Purchase it from GOG.com
- Epic Games Store (PC): Available for $19.99. You can buy it from the Epic Games Store
- PlayStation Store (PS4): The game is priced at $19.99. Check it out on the PlayStation Store
- Xbox Store (Xbox One): The game is available for $19.99. You can find it on the Xbox.com
- Apple App Store (iOS): Available for $6.99. Purchase it from the App Store
