Who is Alba? Who’s on the other end of the cam girl’s conversations? Why is David away from his wife? Why are these particular small windows important?Īnd so you dig, deeper and deeper, getting to peer into these people’s lives and private conversations. The journey of discovery begins with whatever catches your attention. There’s a tapestry of a story at play here, and the player gets to choose which threads to tug at. The whole idea of Telling Lies is to paint the full picture, piece together the puzzle, but you don’t even know what the pieces look like, let alone how they fit together. There’s a decidedly voyeuristic theme as you get a window into these individuals’ personal lives entirely out of context.
One video can take on a whole different meaning once your perspective gets shifted with a different context. These seemingly disparate videos must have a connection of some sort, right? So I began really listening to each individual side of the conversations, trying to uncover the context and find the other side of the screen. Using the analog stick, I was able to scrub back and forth through the videos, but what was it I was looking for? Pausing during dialog let me select words to search, which brought up a new set of videos. I rooted around the desktop for a bit, checked out what was in the trash, and wasted more time than I want to admit playing a frustratingly rigged game of solitaire. I clicked on the next video, and the next, still slightly confused about what my goal was. Actor Logan Marshall-Green’s David was talking to the camera, clearly one side of a conversation, but I was missing the context. She enters one search term to get you started: “LOVE.” At this point, control of the cursor was handed over to me with absolutely no context or instruction, so I clicked on one of the videos. The image then becomes her screen, with her reflection faintly superimposed over the desktop. The game opens with a woman getting home and sitting down at a computer. This review does include some very mild foundational spoilers to touch on themes, but these were still elements I was happy to put together myself rather than know ahead of time. Telling Lies is a journey of investigation and discovery, and not having much of an initial foundation to know what you are looking for helps elevate each moment you connect the dots. All I knew is that Telling Lies was an FMV game featuring real videos of live actors, but different from the typical “choose your own adventure” style choice-based affairs like Late Shift or The Complex. Let me say now that if you’re curious about the game, dive into it unknown. I’d never played Sam Barlow’s previous game, Her Story, and missed Telling Lies when it was released on PC and iOS last year. I had the benefit of going into Telling Lies almost completely blind.
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