Her Story is a masterpiece, a game that explored an uncommon, fascinating approach for video game storytelling. That's why I anxiously awaited the release of Telling Lies, the spiritual successor by Her Story's creator Sam Barlow. Telling Lies had a lot to live up to, and on its release, I pushed the backlog aside and dove in headfirst. And did I regret it.
If you played its predecessor, you pretty much know what to expect from Telling Lies, as it uses the exact same mechanical framework with only a few new interface quirks. If you haven't played HS -- well, play that instead, but -- this is how it goes: you, the player, are given access to a video database with over one hundred clips that happened over a given period of time.
The catch is that, to actually view any one video, you have to query the database with words that are said in the video, so you have to know what questions to ask before you can get any answers. Additionally, if your query happens to be too generic and results in more than five videos, it'll only show five, and only those that happened earlier in the chronology.
Instead of a murder interrogation like in Her Story, in Telling Lies, you find yourself perusing a database containing recordings of video calls between a man named David and several other individuals, from his family, to his friends, to his boss, and so on. As the game starts, you don't even know what you're supposed to be looking for in the footage.
It's the first of Telling Lies's mistakes: the game doesn't have any kind of hook to engage its player as it opens. Her Story began the game with an ominous "MURDER" query, which is bound to draw a player in not only by instigating a morbid curiosity, but also by beckoning them to don their detective hats and solve the mystery of whodunnit.
In contrast, Telling Lies opens with a rather empty "LOVE" query, which results in a set of disconnected videos that I guess are meant to introduce its main set of characters, but really only manages to instill confusion as to why these people spend so much of these videos without saying a word.
You see, Telling Lies’s pretense is that you’re supposed to be accessing a database containing recordings of video calls between David and the other characters. Except, each video isn’t the whole call, it's the audio and video feed from one side of the conversation, complete with awkward silence whenever the other side is speaking. You often won’t find both sides of a given conversation at the same time.
While, mechanically, this does create situations where you’re trying to catch on to keywords that the other side might be saying so you can search for them, it has the unfortunate consequence of having the recordings being silent at least half the time. With the lack of good you UI or a reliable fast forward feature, this is an annoying waste of time.
But if that was the full extent of Telling Lies’s issues, it would still have been a great game. Its greatest flaws lie in its storytelling, both in regards to the "story" and the "telling". It’s astounding how this is supposed to be the successor to a game that excelled in that area, and yet, it seems to wholly misunderstand what made its predecessor so great.
A key element of Her Story’s storytelling is how much of a complete mess it is. Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s actually the point: you’re listening to a woman retelling the circumstances around a crime she is being suspected of. We don't even know if she's mentally sound, and even if she is, she has every reason to lie. It’s the textbook example of an unreliable narrator.
Combine that with a confusing, completely unthinkable chain of events, and the more you dig into the game, the more questions you have. By the end, even after seeing every video there is, it’s still impossible to be sure of what’s true and what’s not. The last video on the chronology actually alludes to this fact, with the woman stating that “all we’ve been telling each other here are just stories“. This lingering uncertainty is a huge part of what made the original game so memorable.
Contrast with Telling Lies and, from the format alone, we already have a far different beast on our hands. This isn’t an interrogation, they’re conversations; not a retelling, but the facts unfolding as you go, and because of that, there is far less uncertainty to the events of the game.
The game is very much about David, a man who, through some questionable decisions, ends up in a very bad situation. I won't spoil anything as it’s sort of the point of the game to find out who David is and what happened to him, but I will say this: the story is as boring and predictable as it seems to be, and any twists you might want to happen are simply not coming — again, in stark contrast to its predecessor. If I was to be generous, I'd call this "cheap Hollywood drama".
It's even more disappointing when you take into account the outright deceitful pre-release material. When Telling Lies was announced, with a trailer showing recordings of multiple characters and suggesting multiple perspectives, I figured that was the direction it was going to go. Early reviews from the pre-release period seemed to indicate that as well, claiming that the game contained multiple perspectives about different story threads.
That's an interesting narrative framework that's been successfully used in many stories. Very famously, there is In a Grove, a short story, more known from its film adaptation Rashomon, that uses the perspectives of different characters to present contradictory accounts of the same incident. Since each of those characters presents a limited, sometimes deceitful or self-serving version of the facts, it's impossible to tell what the absolute truth from the accounts alone.
To my shock, in Telling Lies, this never happens, and all those reviews I saw turned out to be flat-out lies taken straight from PR releases. I thought I was crazy at first, having played the game on the weekend it released, but a few weeks later, the Steam rating dipped to a Mixed level, a lot of other people pointing out this exact contradiction.
The story in Telling Lies is simple and is told pretty straightforwardly by the videos. The additional characters are just window dressing to David's narrative, and present they present no conflicting or questionable accounts. This is the ultimate irony about the game: it's called Telling Lies, and yet, nobody actually lies in it.
So much for having high expectations placed upon you, and so much for thinking that a bigger budget means a higher quality. Telling Lies is a boorish attempt to build upon Her Story whose existence is hard to justify. It's a game I'm legitimately confused as to how it turned out this poorly.
As a side note: I get that it's meant to emphasize the voyeurism angle the storytelling is supposed to have, but god, was it infuriating to have to sit through minutes of people being awkwardly horny at each other. I hope to never go through such a thing again.
If you played its predecessor, you pretty much know what to expect from Telling Lies, as it uses the exact same mechanical framework with only a few new interface quirks. If you haven't played HS -- well, play that instead, but -- this is how it goes: you, the player, are given access to a video database with over one hundred clips that happened over a given period of time.
The catch is that, to actually view any one video, you have to query the database with words that are said in the video, so you have to know what questions to ask before you can get any answers. Additionally, if your query happens to be too generic and results in more than five videos, it'll only show five, and only those that happened earlier in the chronology.
Instead of a murder interrogation like in Her Story, in Telling Lies, you find yourself perusing a database containing recordings of video calls between a man named David and several other individuals, from his family, to his friends, to his boss, and so on. As the game starts, you don't even know what you're supposed to be looking for in the footage.
It's the first of Telling Lies's mistakes: the game doesn't have any kind of hook to engage its player as it opens. Her Story began the game with an ominous "MURDER" query, which is bound to draw a player in not only by instigating a morbid curiosity, but also by beckoning them to don their detective hats and solve the mystery of whodunnit.
In contrast, Telling Lies opens with a rather empty "LOVE" query, which results in a set of disconnected videos that I guess are meant to introduce its main set of characters, but really only manages to instill confusion as to why these people spend so much of these videos without saying a word.
You see, Telling Lies’s pretense is that you’re supposed to be accessing a database containing recordings of video calls between David and the other characters. Except, each video isn’t the whole call, it's the audio and video feed from one side of the conversation, complete with awkward silence whenever the other side is speaking. You often won’t find both sides of a given conversation at the same time.
While, mechanically, this does create situations where you’re trying to catch on to keywords that the other side might be saying so you can search for them, it has the unfortunate consequence of having the recordings being silent at least half the time. With the lack of good you UI or a reliable fast forward feature, this is an annoying waste of time.
But if that was the full extent of Telling Lies’s issues, it would still have been a great game. Its greatest flaws lie in its storytelling, both in regards to the "story" and the "telling". It’s astounding how this is supposed to be the successor to a game that excelled in that area, and yet, it seems to wholly misunderstand what made its predecessor so great.
A key element of Her Story’s storytelling is how much of a complete mess it is. Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s actually the point: you’re listening to a woman retelling the circumstances around a crime she is being suspected of. We don't even know if she's mentally sound, and even if she is, she has every reason to lie. It’s the textbook example of an unreliable narrator.
Combine that with a confusing, completely unthinkable chain of events, and the more you dig into the game, the more questions you have. By the end, even after seeing every video there is, it’s still impossible to be sure of what’s true and what’s not. The last video on the chronology actually alludes to this fact, with the woman stating that “all we’ve been telling each other here are just stories“. This lingering uncertainty is a huge part of what made the original game so memorable.
Contrast with Telling Lies and, from the format alone, we already have a far different beast on our hands. This isn’t an interrogation, they’re conversations; not a retelling, but the facts unfolding as you go, and because of that, there is far less uncertainty to the events of the game.
The game is very much about David, a man who, through some questionable decisions, ends up in a very bad situation. I won't spoil anything as it’s sort of the point of the game to find out who David is and what happened to him, but I will say this: the story is as boring and predictable as it seems to be, and any twists you might want to happen are simply not coming — again, in stark contrast to its predecessor. If I was to be generous, I'd call this "cheap Hollywood drama".
It's even more disappointing when you take into account the outright deceitful pre-release material. When Telling Lies was announced, with a trailer showing recordings of multiple characters and suggesting multiple perspectives, I figured that was the direction it was going to go. Early reviews from the pre-release period seemed to indicate that as well, claiming that the game contained multiple perspectives about different story threads.
That's an interesting narrative framework that's been successfully used in many stories. Very famously, there is In a Grove, a short story, more known from its film adaptation Rashomon, that uses the perspectives of different characters to present contradictory accounts of the same incident. Since each of those characters presents a limited, sometimes deceitful or self-serving version of the facts, it's impossible to tell what the absolute truth from the accounts alone.
To my shock, in Telling Lies, this never happens, and all those reviews I saw turned out to be flat-out lies taken straight from PR releases. I thought I was crazy at first, having played the game on the weekend it released, but a few weeks later, the Steam rating dipped to a Mixed level, a lot of other people pointing out this exact contradiction.
The story in Telling Lies is simple and is told pretty straightforwardly by the videos. The additional characters are just window dressing to David's narrative, and present they present no conflicting or questionable accounts. This is the ultimate irony about the game: it's called Telling Lies, and yet, nobody actually lies in it.
So much for having high expectations placed upon you, and so much for thinking that a bigger budget means a higher quality. Telling Lies is a boorish attempt to build upon Her Story whose existence is hard to justify. It's a game I'm legitimately confused as to how it turned out this poorly.
As a side note: I get that it's meant to emphasize the voyeurism angle the storytelling is supposed to have, but god, was it infuriating to have to sit through minutes of people being awkwardly horny at each other. I hope to never go through such a thing again.