Telling Lies Reviews
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.
Sam Barlow's BAFTA-snaffling Her Story was a fabulously tight and taut whodunwhat as you pieced together the tale of a mysterious young woman from a jumbled collection of police interview clips.
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.
Quotation Forthcoming
Review in Italian | Read full review
Telling Lies is a rich drama told in an inventive and fun way, enabling the player to learn what happened in a personal and unique way.
As it is, Telling Lies’ compelling narrative and phenomenal acting will be enough to spur you on. Searching and scrubbing through videos can be a chore, but it’s worth it, if just for that one tiny piece of information you’ve been waiting to find.
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
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
Without a sense of feedback or progress, the rambling, leisurely narrative of Telling Lies comes across as unfocused.
Whether you call it an interactive movie game or desktop thriller, Telling Lies is a gratifying and authentic-feeling fly-on-the-wall experience. For the most part. Exceptional performances and an intriguing, topical story are undercut by a jarring gameplay choice that forces you out of the game when you least want it.
Telling Lies has an interesting story but is let down by a lack of direction and a clunky UI design. Even interesting characters can save the game, and a watered-down epilogue which is supposed to entice repeated playthroughs just leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
In sum, Telling Lies represents a niche genre that explores interactive storytelling in a very unique way.
Telling Lies is a weak interactive film in screencast format that tries to become relevant at the expense of the left-wing agenda. The keyword search system still looks fresh and together with the player's imagination should have created the magic of immersion, but the lack of convenient rewind system, ability to conduct an investigation and match several videos finished off an interesting concept.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Telling Lies is a flawless piece of work. This is Sam Barlow perfecting what he was able to achieve with Her Story and bolstering it with a bigger story and being supported by four powerhouse performances. Telling Lies offered me five incredible hours and everyone should experience this masterpiece with their own eyes.
Telling Lies is one of the best experiences to make use of FMV on PS4, telling a fascinating narrative that'll have you guessing what revelation will come your way next. What's more, the star-studded cast of characters does an excellent job of bringing the script to life, but it is held back by a perplexing rewind function. Had it been implemented better, the game would be on the cusp of greatness. Although, in its current state, Telling Lies is still a very safe recommendation for fans of the genre.
Some people will absolutely love Telling Lies. The type of person who can watch five minutes of a movie and then has to watch the entire thing will surely be absorbed into this game's mystifying world. However, for other people, sifting through hours of footage and being forced to jigsaw a narrative out of it will just feel like a chore, even if the characters are well depicted. It's up to you to decide which category you're most likely to fall under.
On paper, searching a large database of phone-filmed video clips doesn't sound too exciting, but Telling Lies offers an exhilarating few hours of detective work thanks to clever construction, strong performances and exceptional polish. Given that the game takes place almost entirely in windows on a virtual desktop computer screen (and would therefore seem 'at home' on PC), it survives the transition to Switch entirely intact. While there's not much incentive to reopen the investigation once it reaches its climax, uncovering Telling Lies' web of relationships and intrigue is a case definitely worth taking on.
Sam Barlow is pioneering new ways to bring interactivity to FMV media, blending film, games, and the human experience in ways that shouldn’t be missed.
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.
Telling Lies is almost the perfect metaphor for real-life: inane bollocks for the most part, with some really interesting things happening every so often to stop you from falling asleep.