Telling Lies

Genre: FMV Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Telling Lies is an FMV Game puts the player in the role of someone looking through a collection of video chats recorded by the NSA, pertaining to conversations had between four primary characters (and multiple secondary characters). However, the player can only access conversations by keyword, and only the first five conversations that keyword finds chronologically. It’s a game system that will be familiar to those who played the indie PC hit Her Story, which was made by the same developer and works similarly.

Players are presented a somewhat-convincing PC desktop to work with, complete with a recycle bin full of deleted photos and a playable copy of Solitaire (broken, I’m afraid – the controls are a bit wonky and my deck was missing a king). This is made more convincing by having players see the reflection of the user in the dark parts of the screen, a nice touch. There are even moments in the story where your character talks with someone else in the room, adding to the feeling of immersion and reality here, like you’re seeing through her eyes.

The videos players search through are themselves of pretty high-quality, and feature some extremely good acting. As much as Her Story won accolades for its main performances, I feel that there are multiple performances here that are worthy of acclaim. I like the story here much better this time too. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say it starts out seeming about love, sex, and relationships, grows to be about politics, activism, and the role police play, and ultimately ends up being the tale of a lie that spirals out to wreak havoc on everyone it touches. Over the course of the game, events unfold pretty believably in a way that has mostly well-meaning people on all sides ultimately making for some nightmarish situations, and I’ll warn players that those likely to be triggered by sexual content, abuse, and allusions to modern-day politics… you may want to stay away from this one, as it can get pretty intense (even if there’s not really any significant violence or nudity to speak of here).

I felt that the way Her Story handled the slow release of information was quite novel, and it works similarly here – players can type any keyword into the prompt (you can even plug in a USB keyboard), or select any word in the subtitled conversations, and run a search on that word, but doing so only returns five results. Doing this, players must gradually watch clips until they learn more of what’s going on and learn new search terms to look for, whether that’s a character’s name, an event that happened, or just a turn of phrase that seems likely to come up again. Heck, you could look up “the” if you wanted, though that’s just likely to bring up the first five videos in the chronological order.

However, this game tries to do something cute and new with this formula, and it doesn’t quite work. See, you only get to see one half of each conversation whenever you click on a video, and you’re not allowed to see or hear what that person is responding to. To find the other half, you need to deduce what the other person might be saying in the conversation and search for that term, hopefully finding what you’re looking for based on the flow of the conversation. It’s a clever idea, but in practice it causes multiple problems.

Firstly, players are plopped into the game without any idea what they’re doing or why. Who are you supposed to be? Why are you looking at these video files? What are you searching for? Even after playing through pretty much all of the game, I’m still not entirely sure of the answers to some of these questions.

Furthermore, it’s really tedious to have to piece together each and every conversation you come across to get the whole thing. It’s one thing to have to try to find a matching pair for a key bit of information, but if you just want to see the story unfold, it feels like an unnecessary amount of work. What’s more, this way of doing things pretty much guarantees that you’ll have to watch each conversation twice – one time for each side of that conversation. This can be really frustrating when it’s just two people chit-chatting about nothing… which you’ll still feel compelled to watch in case someone drops a vital tidbit among the chatter. I really wish you could save the clips you search for, and possibly even pair them to play against each other to see the full conversation, but sadly you’re just left to try to picture what the game’s actors are reacting to, especially during their long pauses in conversations.

What’s more, when you look up a conversation by keyword, the video automatically jumps forward to that point, which is nice… except if you just want to watch the entire video, you have to manually rewind the thing – there doesn’t seem to be any button you can press to just start the video from the beginning. With rewinding in this game being maddeningly slow, this gets old very quickly.

In terms of controls, this isn’t the only issue, either. While the lack of a “start at the beginning of the video” button is probably my biggest gripe about the game, I also have to say that the touchscreen controls in portable mode are pretty terrible, and it’s so much easier to rewind just using buttons or the controls stick.

Oh, and one final complaint – I saw what I felt pretty sure was the final video to end the story, but didn’t really get any sort of conclusion to follow it, and was left feeling like any further searching yould just be picking at details to try and trigger the credits sequence. This felt sloppy.

It’s a shame that these flaws mar what is otherwise a phenomenal story – in my opinion, Telling Lies was absolutely poised to overtake Her Story as one of my favorite games in this genre, but while I much prefer this story to that one, the problems added in to the gameplay this time around really hurts what I felt was an elegant gameplay system in Her Story. For those looking for a great story on the Switch, this is still worth a look, but just be aware that this game isn’t perfect.

tl;dr – Telling Lies is a FMV Game from the developer of Her Story, and it uses a similar “keyword search” gameplay system to reveal its story to players. That story, an increasingly engrossing adult tale about relationships, policing, politics, and lies, is extremely well-told, with some fantastic acting, but multiple gameplay elements make this game far more tedious and frustrating than it needed to be. It’s still worth a look for those looking to partake in a fantastic drama, but be warned that you’ll need to have some patience to piece together that drama.

Grade: B

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