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?