Telling Lies

My instinct going in was skepticism. I track decision trees and resource loops for a living, and a game where the core loop is typing words into a search bar sounded thin. I was wrong. Telling Lies puts you in the seat of Karen, a former FBI agent, sitting in front of a laptop loaded with a stolen NSA database. The central mechanic is deceptively simple: type a keyword, receive up to five matching video clips, watch one side of a conversation, mine it for new terms, repeat. What that loop actually produces is something close to obsessive. Within thirty minutes I had a physical notepad open next to my keyboard, which is not something any game has made me do in years. The four leads, played by Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishe, and Angela Sarafyan, carry enormous weight here because they are, functionally, the entire game. The good news is that the performances hold up. Marshall-Green in particular earned a Golden Joystick Award for Best Gaming Performance for his work, and watching his character David's arc unspool across 15 months of footage justifies the attention. The shift from Her Story's single-actor police-interview format to two-sided video calls is a genuine mechanical upgrade: every clip you find implies a matching clip on the other end of the call, which turns the keyword hunt into something closer to a chain of inferences. That investigative rhythm is where the game is strongest. Where it strains is in its own ambition. Over 200 clips is a lot to manage inside a system that caps search results at five entries per keyword and, in its original form, forces you to manually rewind footage rather than jump to a timestamp. The in-game memo pad helps, but players who have not kept meticulous external notes have reported missing entire character threads on a first run. The three different endings are determined by which character's footage you explored most, so your keyword choices early on shape what story you actually experience. That is either a clever design choice or a quiet gotcha, depending on your tolerance for non-linear ambiguity. The ending itself risks feeling anticlimactic if you have already cracked the central mystery before triggering it. For players coming from Her Story, the comparison is unavoidable. Telling Lies is broader in scope, around four to five times longer by Barlow's own estimate, and the jump to a political thriller framing from a murder mystery gives the writing more room to breathe thematically. Whether it hits the same emotional peak is genuinely divisive in the community, and the honest answer is that it probably does not land the gut-punch Her Story manages. But as a standalone experience it is a confident, well-cast, and thoughtfully structured piece of interactive storytelling that rewards the kind of player who enjoys working for their narrative. Zero combat, zero fail states, no systems to master beyond your own deductive reasoning. That accessibility cuts both ways: veterans of the genre will find the mechanical ceiling low, while anyone intimidated by games will find this one of the gentlest entry points imaginable.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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