Telling Lies

I won’t tell any lies here, Telling Lies is another excellent piece of narrative game design from Sam Barlow and I sincerely hope there’s more to come.

Sharp writing, believable acting and a twisting plot make Telling Lies an essential detective game.

Barlow has said that Telling Lies was inspired by the freeform design of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I can see that in the way it concedes control completely to the player - a particularly brave and generous thing to do with a narrative game. He also likes to mention two classic films as inspirations: Francis Coppola's The Conversation, that masterpiece of 70s paranoia in which a surveillance expert is tormented by a partial audio recording, and Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, which views intimacy through a camera lens. You can clearly see the influence of both films and Nintendo's magnificent game. They all play with form. But these are mature, confident explorations of established styles. Telling Lies, by contrast, is but a second baby step into uncharted territory: a little wobbly, a little naive. But definitely courageous and exciting.

An atmospheric, brilliantly written and acted detective thriller that tells a compelling story in a unique way.

But Telling Lies struggles to find meaning in that exploration. Its interactivity is only skin deep, like the lies its characters tell one another. As a further expansion of Barlow's ideas about what games can be, Telling Lies is a success. It's unfortunate that, in the end, it doesn't further embrace its interactive possibilities.

Telling Lies is a paragon for storytelling, for character arcs that surprise you and linger on long after the credits – and videos – have ended.

Phenomenal acting and a deep central mystery make this voyeuristic adventure game something special.

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.