Quarantine Gaming – Telling Lies Impressions

Telling Lies is a narrative video game developed by Sam Barlow and Furious Bee and published by Annapurna Interactive. As with Barlow’s previous title, Her Story, the game uses live action full-motion video of four people (played by Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé, and Angela Sarafyan) as part of video calls made between them, and the player will need to use tools provided from the game to piece together events and what statements may be lies to determine the overall mystery.

Telling Lies is a tough game to describe, while similar to the interactive movies I’ve reviewed recently, this one is uniquely different. Instead of experiencing the story from beginning to end, it is chopped up and you have to uncover and piece together the events that unfold over two years during this game.

The game begins with your character booting up a hard drive to a computer. That hard drive contains a database of video calls and hidden camera films. As expected all of the calls are one sided, providing you with limited information unless you can find the other portion and get the whole conversation. By default the game boots up with five clips to watch. As you watch these clips you can rewind, fast forward, bookmark in place, whenever you want. But the objective of the game is to decided on other keywords from the conversation to find more to the story. For instance if someone mentions a company name, you can search that up and any conversation including that keyword would come up. The more videos you watch the further the game progresses and hopefully the more you understand as to whats going on.

The story, once you are able to understand the players and what’s going on, if pretty enjoyable. There are many twists and turns and I continually got the feeling I knew where the story was going, but it would then throw me a curveball. While it took me awhile to get my bearings as to how to progress and navigate, it was very enjoyable. The game probably could have used a little more hand holding, but it made for a fun play-through. It’s a modern day mystery that keeps you engaged and interested, including sometimes getting that dirty feeling you are watching something you probably shouldn’t be. Telling Lies is definitely the next generation of games like it’s predecessor Her Story, this definitely had quality of life improvements and I have yet to play anything else like it.