Review: Telling Lies, for Better and Worse, Lets You Choose Your Own Interpretation

Without a sense of feedback or progress, the rambling, leisurely narrative of Telling Lies comes across as unfocused.

Telling Lies
Photo: Annapurna Interactive

As a game, Telling Lies is an exercise in frustration, an objectiveless search through over 200 nonlinear full-motion videos that span a period of 15 months. But as an interactive narrative experience, a collection of intimate, slice-of-life moments in the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic, game designer Sam Barlow’s latest is an impressive and defiant act of literal storytelling, a sort of choose-your-own-interpretation.

At the heart of Telling Lies is a mock operating system that’s running a program called Castle, which operates a bit like the logic-based OS from Barlow’s previous game, Her Story: Type in a word or phrase, and in return you get the first five videos, chronologically speaking. After five or so hours, you unlock an option to have the mysterious protagonist you’re controlling, who you can see reflected in the monitor at all times, do a WikiLeaks-like upload of all the footage viewed to date, and doing so triggers the game’s anticlimactic ending.

Whereas you view short clips throughout Her Story, Telling Lies, which is more than four times as long, has you view entire scenes, some nearly 10 minutes. Moreover, given that these scenes are only ever from a single camera at a time, hearing both sides of a long-distance Skype-like conversation doubles the time spent with each scene, assuming that you listen closely enough for the context clues in one side of the conversation that will let you search for and access the other side. Putting together these moments provides short-term investigatory goals, stymied only slightly by the refusal to let a player jump to the start of a video clip, forcing you to manually, agonizingly slowly rewind the footage from their search term.

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More impressive in scope than Her Story, which played out over a few weeks and was driven by the format of a police interview, Telling Lies follows, over the course of 15 months, the various interactions that a man, David (Logan Marshall-Green), has with three women: Emma (Kerry Bishé), Max (Angela Sarafyan), and Ava (Alexandra Shipp). Players journey down a particular rabbit hole of search terms and videos depending on which moments interest them most. That may be the dramatic detailing of a murder, an espionage effort, or a planned act of eco-terrorism, or it could be video of a father bonding with his sleepy daughter over a loose tooth, a mother attempting to cope with her absent husband and overbearing momma, or a couple falling in love. The game doesn’t treat any of these moments—the majority of which are impeccably, naturally acted—as red herrings, and doesn’t judge you for how you take them in: as a voyeur, a family-drama junkie, or a political hacktivist looking for dirt on the government.

And yet, Telling Lies feels as if it’s missing a crucial element of gamification to unify these discrete threads, something of the way in which Tim Follin’s Contradiction or Rockstar Games’s L.A. Noire task players with carefully watching a person’s body language in order to suss out a lie and proceed through the game. Here, you can too easily accidentally stumble upon key bits of plot while searching single words as benign as, say, “deserve.” In the absence of goals, the post-game profile that summarizes what you found, how you found it, and what that says about your interests, almost comes across as the results of a BuzzFeed quiz.

Without a sense of feedback or progress, the rambling, leisurely narrative of Telling Lies comes across as unfocused. The game’s structure risks the most rewarding parallels between characters or connections between scenes being missed by players who simply never stumble upon them. Depending on your path through Telling Lies, the subtext of any given moment may lay fallow; for one, David’s two tellings of the story of Rumpelstiltskin to his daughter, eight months apart, could rightly be dismissed as 17 minutes’ worth of throwaway bedtime stories. Obfuscation is fine, up to a point, but when you don’t even know that you’re missing a needle, you’re just searching through a haystack for its own sake.

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This game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Sam Barlow, Furious Bee  Publisher: Annapurna Interactive  Platform: PC  Release Date: August 23, 2019  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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