Telling Lies Reviews
There are two things in Telling Lies encouraging you to continue searching and watching all videos: great performance of actors and finding the truth. However, some weird gameplay mechanisms and story's plot holes keep annoying you from start to finish. And when the game finally ends, you probably start asking some serious questions about the whole story and the logic behind it
Review in Persian | Read full review
Telling Lies makes great innovative tweaks to its gameplay formula, and offers a high-quality live-action adventure, but it completely fumbles merging these two elements together. A word of advice would be to try your hand at the puzzle and discovery for a while, and then eventually just watch the clips outside the game to enjoy the narrative.
Overall, the title is definitely a unique and interesting experience. While this genre can be of an acquired taste due to the lack of proper gaming, it’s definitely a unique experience to sit through and it’s gets us as close as we can to interactive movie. Sure, this one comes off a bit odd mostly because of the one sided conversations you experience by watching videos, but as any great mystery movie or books, this is riveting.
An excellent follow up to Her Story if a bit flawed. Telling Lies tries to tackle a larger and more intricate story than the predecessor, and accomplishes quite a bit. However a critical missing feature, and a story that feels like a closed loops is a noticeable step back for Sam Barlow.
You’re going to want a pen and a pad nearby to keep track of your characters, the threads and the keywords you’ll want to search for, and some questionable design decisions hold the game back from being an all-out classic of the genre – with the shocks and twists of Her Story towering over Telling Lies’ endgame – but it’s still well worth exploring if you’re looking for an interactive mystery to untangle.
At the end of the day, Telling Lies is good concept that stumbles a bit in its execution. It would have worked better if there was an actual mystery to solve like in Her Story. Instead of piecing together an elaborate puzzle, we’re left sifting through the drama of a few people.
Thankfully, the in-depth and engrossing story, the strong execution of the actors, and the sheer uniqueness outweigh these negatives. It appears that the genre has much more to offer, and Telling Lies exemplifies it greatly.
A good story, told in a way that makes us think we're doing the heavy lifting --when in reality it's designer Sam Barlow who's doing all the work behind the scenes.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Telling Lies won’t be for everyone and you get out of the game what you are willing to put into it. Having said that, it may just be the most original game you’ll play this year and the performances alone are worth sticking around for.
Telling Lies feels like it's about four times as big as Sam Barlow's previous game Her Story, and it shows. You feel it not just in the four characters you're sifting through footage of, but in the variety of its videos too: from FaceTime calls to hidden cameras capturing secretive meetings. In Her Story, it was famously easy to go down a rabbit hole of sorts on your own intuition; in Telling Lies, that tendency is mechanized in smart, intuitive ways. When it comes to good interactive mysteries, Telling Lies is among the best you can get.