After a mysterious delay from December, arcade racing game Hot Wheels Unleashed will finally arrive on PC Game Pass in early February. I hear it's pretty good! It's one of the small handful of games Microsoft have confirmed as coming to PC Game Pass in the next fortnight, which a
After a mysterious delay from December, arcade racing game Hot Wheels Unleashed will finally arrive on PC Game Pass in early February. I hear it's pretty good! It's one of the small handful of games Microsoft have confirmed as coming to PC Game Pass in the next fortnight, which also include the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fighting game and a return to the subscription service for Darkest Dungeon. Alas, games coming mean games going. Do check out Donut County before it's swallowed by the abyss.
The developer of swell narrative games Her Story and Telling Lies teased his next project last summer with a rather redacted store page. Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow's next game, Immortality , has now been slightly more revealed to be a story about the disappearance of movie star
The developer of swell narrative games Her Story and Telling Lies teased his next project last summer with a rather redacted store page. Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow's next game, Immortality, has now been slightly more revealed to be a story about the disappearance of movie star Marissa Marcel. We don't know much more than that, but it sure does sound like another twisty mystery is in store.
We haven't released many details about Project Ambrosio , the next title from Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow, but this Sunday, as part of The Future Games Show, we're letting a few more into the world. We will peel back the ██████! The show will be streamed on Sunday, June 13 at
We haven't released many details about Project Ambrosio, the next title from Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow, but this Sunday, as part of The Future Games Show, we're letting a few more into the world. We will peel back the ██████!
The show will be streamed on Sunday, June 13 at 4PM PDT / 7PM EDT /12AM* Midnight BST / 1AM* CEST (*The morning of June 14) on Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, and GamesRadar.
It's been over a year since Telling Lies dropped on Steam! Thank you to everyone who has played, streamed, wishlisted, talked about and otherwise supported the game over the past twelve months. In order to celebrate this milestone, Sam Barlow, the creator of Telling Lies , Her St
It's been over a year since Telling Lies dropped on Steam! Thank you to everyone who has played, streamed, wishlisted, talked about and otherwise supported the game over the past twelve months.
In order to celebrate this milestone, Sam Barlow, the creator of Telling Lies, Her Story, and the upcoming Project A███████, will stream the game, shedding light on its development, production, and design.
Join Sam this Wednesday @ 1PM Eastern. Set a reminder from this page so you don't miss uncovering the making of this story of four private lives and the lies that bind them.
If you enjoyed the game and want to stay up to date on what Sam and the rest of the team is up to, make sure to follow the studio, Half Mermaid and wishlist our next project!
Looking through the casefile of this year's best games, the evidence shows that it's been a fantastic year for desktop detectives—from the painting that killed its creator in Tangle Tower, to the ancient, planet spanning mystery that runs through Outer Wilds. Jenny LeClue, Later
Looking through the casefile of this year's best games, the evidence shows that it's been a fantastic year for desktop detectives—from the painting that killed its creator in Tangle Tower, to the ancient, planet spanning mystery that runs through Outer Wilds. Jenny LeClue, Later Alligator, Frog Detective 2 and even Disco Elysium—there was no shortage of clues to track down and suspects to question.
I've enjoyed scratching my head over all of these mysteries, but Telling Lies is one that had me glued to my computer—late nights in the office surrounded by empty cups of coffee and scribbled notes, not wanting to leave until I had figured it out. With the game's predecessor, Her Story, Sam Barlow handed us one woman's testimony recorded over the course of a month. With Telling Lies he gives us the tangled testimonies, twisted timelines and half-truths of four people who have all come together because of one lie.
Telling Lies tasks players with looking through an NSA database filled with recorded clips of the personal conversations of four people, unaware that they have been surveyed and recorded. Type keywords into a search bar and videos where someone has used that word will pop up in the search results, with a cap of five videos per search. The whole mystery and how to solve it is hidden within the spoken words of these four people, and, after looking through hundreds of video files of the same characters over and over again, you quickly learn that it's not only what they say that matters but also how they said it.
Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé and Angela Sarafyan play the four troubled characters, and every second of their FMV performances are extraordinary—they pin this whole mystery together. As a seasoned detective this 'ain't my first rodeo, so as well as listening to what they are saying, I'm watching their body language. What was that awkward shuffle about? Why did she look apprehensive when she agreed? Nothing gets past my peepers. The thing that makes Telling Lies a stand out is that the actors all give a detailed enough performance where there is stuff to see and intuit.
Rockstar tried to achieve with it's hard boiled 1940s detective thriller LA Noire, where players would watch a character's facial expressions to see if they were lying. But because it's performances where mo-capped, characters have exaggerated (and unintentionally comedic) reactions to being interrogated, making it obvious to spot a guilty suspect. The witness, Marlon Hopgood, is not making direct eye contact, which, from experiencing previous interrogations, means he's lying. That, or there's a fly darting around that he wants to swat.
This is what Telling Lies does right. Even when characters are waiting for the other person to stop talking (for a full ten minutes in one clip), they are constantly expressing. Telling Lies' mechanics don't differ much from Her Story, but the player's interaction with the game's suspects changes dramatically because you're analysing the thoughts and motives of four people, not just one. I'm watching for every side glance, every awkward pause, every fidget until my brain synapses kick in and suddenly I get it.
Those moments of realisation are not planned, and Barlow has no way of predicting which clips you will watch in what order, so that eureka moment comes completely from within your own investigating. It's something that Telling Lies shares with Outer Wilds and—one of the best story driven games from last year—Return of the Obra Dinn. Everything you need is there and you just need to put the time in to work it out.
That's not to say that Barlow doesn't have control over the pace of the story. Some keywords link to videos that are meant to be watched towards the end of your investigation and, even through all the unpredictability on the player's part, Barlow has created a delicate, invisible structure, using careful dialogue choices and particular keywords to plan a dramatic, eventful finale.
Telling Lies doesn't do things by the book. It has a unique investigative game mechanic that uses brilliant writing and spellbinding acting to challenge the player and create a compelling story. Never in a game have I had to analyse the body language of a character and use it in the same way I would hard evidence. Sam Barlow tested it in Her Story, but he's perfected it in Telling Lies.
At the 2019 Golden Joysticks, Telling Lies was nominated for Ultimate Game of the Year -- an incredible achievement for a game as unconventional as this! But most excitingly, Logan Marshall-Green won the award for Best Performer -- entirely deserved for his tour-de-force work in
At the 2019 Golden Joysticks, Telling Lies was nominated for Ultimate Game of the Year -- an incredible achievement for a game as unconventional as this! But most excitingly, Logan Marshall-Green won the award for Best Performer -- entirely deserved for his tour-de-force work in the game. Fingers crossed this isn't the only gold Logan receives -- his skill and commitment to the project was a huge part of its success. Not to mention the rest of the cast. There are not enough awards in the world to fully acknowledge our amazing team :)
The Golden Joysticks has announced its shortlist for the Ultimate Game of the Year and Telling Lies is on it! They say: "Sam Barlow directs his greatest work to date with this exploded – and explosive – narrative adventure. Telling Lies gives you the tools to explore a stolen NSA
The Golden Joysticks has announced its shortlist for the Ultimate Game of the Year and Telling Lies is on it! They say:
"Sam Barlow directs his greatest work to date with this exploded – and explosive – narrative adventure. Telling Lies gives you the tools to explore a stolen NSA database of live-action clips with the same flexibility and freedom as the very best open-world adventure games. Industry-shaking stuff."
Sam dives deeply into the development of Telling Lies and the inspirations behind the game's mechanics over on Gamasutra: Deep Dive: Telling Lies - Making a mechanic out of scrubbing video
Sam dives deeply into the development of Telling Lies and the inspirations behind the game's mechanics over on Gamasutra:
The Writers Guild of America , which once considered Star Wars: The Force Unleashed the pinnacle of videogame writing, has decided to drop the category from its 2020 awards, and possibly beyond, because too few games qualify. Year after year, the WGA gives the Outstanding Achieve
The Writers Guild of America, which once considered Star Wars: The Force Unleashed the pinnacle of videogame writing, has decided to drop the category from its 2020 awards, and possibly beyond, because too few games qualify.
Year after year, the WGA gives the Outstanding Achievement in Video Game Writing award to big action games like Assassin's Creed (twice!) and Horizon Zero Dawn. The list is full of good games, but good game writing? Not so much. The Last of Us and the latest winner, God of War, look less out of place, but still very conservative picks.
Quality, then, isn't the issue. For a game to qualify, there are a list of prerequisites, including a credited writer that's applied for WGA membership. Instead of an absence of good game writing, it's a lack of WGA members submitting game scripts.
Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann, who won for Uncharted 4 and both The Last of Us and, the following year, The Last of Us Remastered, called it "a misguided slap in the face" on Twitter.
Josh Scherr, who co-wrote Uncharted 4 and is now working on The Last of Us 2, called the WGA incredibly short-sighted and claimed the organisation was to blame for the lack of game writers in its membership.
One of the criticisms of the WGA is that, even if a game writer paid dues, they couldn't get full membership or the ability to vote in the awards. Telling Lies director Sam Barlow, meanwhile, bemoaned the fact that excellent FMV thriller did qualify, but now won't be recognised by the WGA, adding that it felt like the Sceen Actors Guild (SAG) had done a better job of acknowledging videogames.
The WGA says that it will revisit the category when there's a "critical mass of videogames covered by the WGA," though that seems less likely now than ever.
Telling Lies is a compelling investigative thriller from Sam Barlow, the creator of Her Story. It's a twisting, complex tale told entirely through secretly recorded video calls, and there are three Telling Lies endings to discover. How you get these endings is pretty obscure, how
Telling Lies is a compelling investigative thriller from Sam Barlow, the creator of Her Story. It's a twisting, complex tale told entirely through secretly recorded video calls, and there are three Telling Lies endings to discover.
How you get these endings is pretty obscure, however.
So, the ending in the 'reflection world' (that is, the story of the woman reflected in your monitor) will always be the same.
You'll see the clips uploading (which, cleverly, are all the clips you found while playing the game) and then the protagonist will dodge the FBI and walk up to the roof. That sequence never changes.
But you will get a different epilogue clip depending on which character you spent the most time with. So if you watched more clips of character A than character B, C, or D, you'll get an epilogue specific to character A.
And if you saw around 60% of a particular character's videos, you'll get an extra scene in their epilogue.
There are three epilogues in total, which you can view below. Naturally that comes with big ol' spoiler warning, so make sure you play the game through first. And that's how you see every ending in Telling Lies.
FMV investigate em up Telling Lies has launched, bring you reams of stolen footage to search through at your leisure. There s a good reason you re nosing into the lives of these four strangers, I m sure. At least, if you think naked curiosity is as good a reason as any. Which I d
FMV investigate em up Telling Lies has launched, bring you reams of stolen footage to search through at your leisure. There s a good reason you re nosing into the lives of these four strangers, I m sure. At least, if you think naked curiosity is as good a reason as any. Which I do. Look, here s a sneak peak via the launch trailer.
Telling Lies is a series of one-sided conversations. You play as a woman whose motives are initially unclear, who has been given access to an archive of secretly recorded video calls taken from the laptops and mobile phones of four very different people. When the game begins you
Telling Lies is a series of one-sided conversations. You play as a woman whose motives are initially unclear, who has been given access to an archive of secretly recorded video calls taken from the laptops and mobile phones of four very different people. When the game begins you know nothing about them. These troubled souls are complete strangers to you, their lives a mystery.
But by the end you'll know them intimately, and will have uncovered a series of shocking truths about their lives. Well, in theory. Because some of these people are, as the title suggests, liars. Separating fact from fiction is at the heart of this new 'desktop adventure' from the creator of narrative experiment Her Story. Like that game, your interpretation of the plot is determined by which clips you discover and the order you view them in.
As you search the database you'll see clips of a father reading his daughter a bedtime story, a couple watching a movie together, and other snippets of people just living their lives. But then you'll hear something that piques your curiosity. A reference to a mysterious incident, a name, or a place. And you'll search for these things in the database, unravelling yet more intriguing threads, slowly revealing an intricate, labyrinthine story that takes place across two years. The game's blend of the blandly domestic and the thrilling is an effective one, setting the everyday lives of the characters against a bubbling plot of conspiracy and duplicity.
Something a character has said about themselves could be (and often is) a lie
I'm being vague here, but that's because even telling you the characters' names would spoil the experience. Discovering these things yourself by paying close attention to the dialogue, and sometimes the environment, is part of what makes Telling Lies such a rewarding detective game. Especially when you realise that something a character has said about themselves could be (and often is) a lie, encouraging you to find more clips buried in the database to reveal the truth. Starting the game with literally nothing, and ending it with a complex story mapped out in your head, is an immensely satisfying experience.
It almost felt like a personal betrayal when I learned something about a character that contradicted everything I thought I knew about them, which reflects the experience of some of the characters in the story. Telling Lies is incredibly absorbing, especially if you play at night, in a dimly lit room, with headphones on. The moody, almost neo-noir atmosphere, and a gorgeous, cinematic score—composed by Nainita Desai, performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra—makes it a game you can really lose yourself in.
Telling Lies is a lot of things at once, skipping between moods, themes, and genres. One minute it's a family drama, the next it's a tense crime thriller. And it's all brilliantly acted, with a cast of established film and TV actors providing some impressively natural-sounding dialogue. Logan Marshall-Green was the highlight for me, playing his duplicitous, conflicted character with real depth. But the whole cast is great, and the production values are excellent throughout—which is just as well, because 99% of the game is watching videos.
You aren't just watching a story play out in Telling Lies: you're constructing one
That doesn't mean this is a passive experience, though. Far from it. You aren't just watching a story play out in Telling Lies: you're constructing one. A seemingly throwaway word in a conversation—the name of a city, perhaps, or even something more subtle than that—can be massively important, opening up a whole new winding subplot that totally transforms your understanding of the story. This means you have to be constantly engaged with the characters and what they're saying, and if you're anything like me, taking pages of notes.
The game takes place entirely within the desktop of a PC. There are some clues scattered around here—documents, images, notes—that give you an idea of who you are and what you're looking for. You can drag windows around, write things down in a notes app, and even play a spot of solitaire if your brain needs a rest. The whirr of the PC's fans, the churn of the hard drive as you access video files, and the moving reflection of your face in the smudgy sheen of the monitor makes interacting with the computer feel wonderfully tactile.
Occasionally, and I could never figure out if this was random or triggered by something specific, the reflection in the monitor will become clearer and you'll see something happening in the woman's apartment. One of these moments in particular is very clever, and made me jump because I was so engrossed in the story. But again, it's best if you discover it yourself. There are a lot of nice, mischievous little details in Telling Lies, like how your vision blurs if you stare at the screen for too long without moving the cursor—simulating the fact that you're supposed to be looking through these video clips in the wee hours.
You can bookmark important clips and view a log of all your searches
It's also something of a stroke of genius to only show you one side of each conversation, leaving you to fill in the blanks or do some database hunting to find the other half. Wondering what the person is reacting to, or what the other person is saying, gives the game an extra layer of mystery. This also means that, in a lot of the videos, you'll just be watching the subject sitting in silence, listening to the unheard person on the other end of the call. But thankfully you can scrub through any clip you find, rewinding, pausing, and fast-forwarding at your leisure. You can also bookmark important clips and view a log of all your searches.
One thing I miss from Her Story, however, is the database tracker. This lets you know how many clips you've found, and how many remain undiscovered, and I found it a useful way to get an idea of how complete a picture I had of the story. Telling Lies is much more opaque in comparison, by design, but the completionist in me was left with the feeling that I hadn't seen everything. A report at the end of the game gives you a vague idea of how many you found (in my first playthrough it said 'just under half'), but I'd have liked a more explicit visualisation of how much of the narrative I had left to uncover. This hardly dampened my enjoyment of the game, but it's one thing I wish had made it over from Her Story.
Because the conversations you're watching and listening to are so private, I experienced a really powerful connection to the characters in Telling Lies—almost feeling like I knew them by the end. But this also made me feel like a creepy voyeur, seeing things I had no right to. There's something uneasy about listening to a couple talking intimately about their relationship, or watching a little girl in bed listening to her dad tell her a story. But I get the feeling that's what I was supposed to feel like, and if that was the case, well, it worked. However, my desire to know more about the characters and story always took precedent, and the deeper I got tangled up in their lives, the more I fell in love with them, and the game.
If you played Her Story, Telling Lies will be instantly familiar. It even has the same limit of only showing you five clips from any given search term, the explanation for which is a little more tortured this time around. Essentially this is Her Story with a bigger budget, a much more sprawling story, and a surprisingly huge cast. Outside of the four main characters there are dozens of minor and background characters, and a few supporting characters who are just as fascinating as the stars of the show. So, in many ways, Telling Lies feels more like a refinement of what was established in Her Story, rather than a bold new experiment in storytelling.
But that's fine, because the core concept—an open-ended story that's revealed in a different way to every person who plays the game—is still enormously compelling, and only possible in this medium. You might find a clip in your first ten minutes that I found three hours in, and it's fascinating to think about how that would completely skew your perception of the story. But even with all this randomness, it's amazing how the game almost feels like it was paced and structured by hand. Her Story pulled the same trick, but the greater variety of stories here only heightens that sense of mystery, discovery, shock, and revelation.
Developer: Sam Barlow, Furious Bee Limited Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Release: August 23 On: Windows, Mac OS X From: Steam For: TBC If I was really lazy I would just write “you know Her Story ? It’s like that but more,” and call it a day. But I’m not lazy. I am a diligent a
If I was really lazy I would just write “you know Her Story? It’s like that but more,” and call it a day. But I’m not lazy. I am a diligent and enthusiastic employee of Rock Paper Shotgun, and that sentence would be a bit of an oversimplification of Sam Barlow’s new watch videos ’em up Telling Lies.
There's a writing technique called cut-up, in which a text is broken down into small component parts and then rearranged, somewhat at random, into a new text. Cut-up has its roots in Dadaism and was used by boundary-pushing artists like William Burroughs and David Bowie. It's som
There's a writing technique called cut-up, in which a text is broken down into small component parts and then rearranged, somewhat at random, into a new text. Cut-up has its roots in Dadaism and was used by boundary-pushing artists like William Burroughs and David Bowie. It's sometimes called aleatoric writing, which means there's an element of chance involved in the creative process; alea is Latin for dice game.
There's a sense in which most video game writers are using cut-up technique by default - even when they're trying to construct a linear narrative. As well as scripts, they build worlds and storylines out of huge databases of NPC barks, flavour text, lore snippets and branching conversations. Depending on the game design, there might be no telling when and in what order players encounter these, or whether they encounter them at all. That's where the element of chance comes in.
Sam Barlow, the writer-designer of Her Story and now Telling Lies, is doing something much more intentional, tackling this quirk of the medium head-on with his experiments in interactive fiction. In both games, a film made from Barlow's script is atomised into dozens, maybe hundreds of short video clips, which can then be searched like a database by the player using dialogue keywords. In theory, the clips can be viewed in any order; you could stumble into the denouement with your first search.
FMV sleuth em up Telling Lies will be in stores next week, asking players to unravel a mess of fibs told by four strangers in order to figure out the truth behind a shocking incident. I expect task number one will be learning exactly what that incident was, because the new traile
FMV sleuth em up Telling Lies will be in stores next week, asking players to unravel a mess of fibs told by four strangers in order to figure out the truth behind a shocking incident. I expect task number one will be learning exactly what that incident was, because the new trailer isn t going to tell you anything beyond what it feels like to peek in on these ordinary people. Which is suitably creepy.
Her Story developer Sam Barlow's latest non-linear FMV spectacular, Telling Lies, finally has a release day: it'll be available on PC and iOS devices next Friday, 23rd August. Telling Lies, which is being published by Annapurna Interactive (What Remains of Edith Finch, Gorogoa),
Her Story developer Sam Barlow's latest non-linear FMV spectacular, Telling Lies, finally has a release day: it'll be available on PC and iOS devices next Friday, 23rd August.
Telling Lies, which is being published by Annapurna Interactive (What Remains of Edith Finch, Gorogoa), sees Barlow once again exploring the realm of the investigative thriller, and, on a basic level, it has much in common with the critically-acclaimed Her Story.
As in that game, Telling Lies tasks players with scouring a database of videos, using search terms to piece together the interconnected stories of, this time, four main characters, that unfold over the course of two years. Rather than probing a hard-drive's worth of police interview recordings, however, you've access to a stolen NSA laptop full of secretly film webcam video.
Annapurna Interactive announced today that Telling Lies , the new FMV investigative thriller from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, will go live on Steam on August 23. Telling Lies bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor: Using an NSA laptop filled with stolen videos
Annapurna Interactive announced today that Telling Lies, the new FMV investigative thriller from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, will go live on Steam on August 23.
Telling Lies bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor: Using an NSA laptop filled with stolen videos, you have to piece together the "shocking incident" that connects the lives of four people. But as we noted in our June preview, it's a much larger, non-linear experience, weighing in at an estimated four to five times bigger than its predecessor—the video footage covers a span of two years—with 30 separate speaking roles.
Along with a launcher date trailer up above, there's a new website with more information up at tellingliesgame.com.
When Sam Barlow released murder mystery game Her Story in 2015, he probably didn t expect to get a two-page spread in Le Monde about this three-hour FMV game. Her Story worked because it was simple. You had a fictional desktop and a search engine that would bring up videos of an
When Sam Barlow released murder mystery game Her Story in 2015, he probably didn t expect to get a two-page spread in Le Monde about this three-hour FMV game. Her Story worked because it was simple. You had a fictional desktop and a search engine that would bring up videos of an ongoing police interview. When you typed in dead or argument , you d get a video of the main character, Hannah, answering the questions of an unseen detective, with those keywords somewhere in the testimony. A search bar em up.
This year we re getting a follow-up called Telling Lies. It s not a sequel, but the same idea: a search bar and a bank of videos. It s not clear what the big lies of the title are, but we can clear up another mysery right now. Why has it taken Barlow this long to come back to a formula that was so obviously good?
We’ve been drowned by E3 2019 this past week, but maybe you only waded into the river of game reveals and new trailers up to your ankles. If you didn’t get your hair wet, there might be some gems among the flotsam and jetsam that you missed. That’s what this post is for: we’ve ro
We’ve been drowned by E3 2019 this past week, but maybe you only waded into the river of game reveals and new trailers up to your ankles. If you didn’t get your hair wet, there might be some gems among the flotsam and jetsam that you missed. That’s what this post is for: we’ve rounded up our picks for the best games of E3, based on our own impressions of either seeing the games behind closed doors at the show, or of watching the videos from the comfort of our homes.
They just keep coming don’t they? A lot of games were announced at E3 2019, things that we didn’t know about, as well as stuff that’s previously announced, or expansions to already released games. Now, to the casual outsider, what we’re doing might seem absolutely nuts, but we th
They just keep coming don’t they? A lot of games were announced at E3 2019, things that we didn’t know about, as well as stuff that’s previously announced, or expansions to already released games. Now, to the casual outsider, what we’re doing might seem absolutely nuts, but we thought we’d put together an alphabetical list of all the PC games that have been confirmed to appear at this year’s E3 show. With well over a hundred of them now in the books, the next year or so looks packed.
