Review: Telling Lies and the Player's Role as a Detective in 2019

I was going to start my text saying that it's been a long time since I played something as interesting from an investigative point of view as Telling lies, but it would be unfair to what I've been playing for the last few months. Better late than never, in 2018, I had the pleasure and privilege to meet Her story, game director Sam Barlow's first independent game.

And it wasn't just the press and the public that saw the potential of the English director and screenwriter: Annapurna Interactive, publisher of What Remains of Edith Finch e Florence, showed interest and embraced the project from the beginning. Armed with his past experience with AAA games and a lot of artistic freedom, Sam Barlow found in Telling lies the opportunity to make the player autonomously observe, annotate and make decisions in order to find truths, contradictions and nuances in a collection of personal video records.

Detective Starter Pack

Telling lies literally puts us in the role of a researcher in front of a computer loaded with information pilfered from the NSA (American National Security Agency). With an advanced search engine and word indexing to assist in the recovery and viewing of videos confiscated by the NSA, your role is to investigate videos and solve a story of betrayal, corruption, conspiracy and lies.

If you've ventured into the mysterious investigative monologue of Her story, it is easy to understand the origin of the interface and modus operandi of this new title. Unlike the first, Telling lies it is not a set of statements made before a police authority — nor does it require your imagination to extrapolate the answers recorded in video format to try to guess what the questions were and where the investigation could lead.

Obtained in the format of videoconferences, the conversations recorded over two years always reach the player in an asymmetrical way: you literally hear only one side of the scene, which can be just an uncompromising exchange of words or even an extensive story of fairies. Only the first five results (in chronological order) containing the searched word are made available to the player.

Each video watched is marked as viewed — it can be added to a selection of favorites — and starts playing from the scene involving the searched word. The logs must be manually rewound if you want to watch them from the beginning — which is even interesting for those who don't want to hear every conversation, but need to be on top of events.

Lights, camera, (re)action!

As you probably already noticed from the description and images, Telling lies is an FMV (Full Motion Video) experience. All the scenes that make up its non-linear narrative were filmed with real actors, including some well-known names in the seventh art. Actress Angela Sarafyan, for example, played the character Clementine Pennyfeather in the HBO series Westworld.

The experiences with the worlds of TV and cinema present in the CVs of the four main actors were essential for the game to have the narrative impact proposed by the director and screenwriter. As we discover more video games and start to connect them to their respective parallel registers, we realize how much acting and directing during long scenes corroborates the approximation between the world we live in and the game universe.

In order not to spoil the experience by talking about the degree of closeness between the protagonists, I will not comment on the moments that most affected me, but I want to make one point clear: the name of the game does justice to the development of the characters and the solutions of the plot. . Many recordings occur naturally, as if they were unpretentious conversations about the passing of the days, while others give the feeling of being happening because one of the parties involved was interested in the recorded material.

The exhibition at Telling Lies

There are several types and positions of cameras recording the privacy of the characters, with a large part of the videos composed of video conversations via mobile devices (such as cell phones, tablets and notebooks). Some scenes, however, seem to be filmed from more distant and hidden points, raising doubts about a potential instance of espionage or a character exercising dual functions. There are scenes that move, that make us tense, curious and even those with a long and uncut performance, almost like in a play.

Telling lies is a game that highlights uncomfortable moments in the characters' lives, but in an interesting and thought-provoking way. Some scenes invade the intimacy of couples, families or groups of people, exposing the desires, conflicts and feelings of those involved. At all times, he seems to deliver a message about the causes and consequences of our words and actions (even in the private realm) when it comes to digital communication.

Despite the numerous qualities, accessibility and quality of life features in the game are lacking. The rewind/speed up function even allows for three speed choices, but a button to automatically go back to the beginning of the video would do well in a digital age where VHS and cassette tapes are no longer part of everyday life.

Unlike its predecessor, Telling lies It has several language options for subtitles — including Spanish and Spanish. The only problem, though, is that the main gameplay element is the words found in the testimonials. In some isolated cases, I separated words spoken loudly and clearly in the testimonials, but I couldn't find the videos again when I searched for them in the search bar (even playing in the original language). My impression was that, to suit the linguistic variety, the algorithm had to be simplified.

Although not as innovative and debatable as Her story, the title certainly conquers an important space in the (already not so popular) Adventures genre. If you like to investigate (read “curiar”, gossip) other people's lives and enjoy playing games on PC/iOS, Telling lies is the right choice for a year full of lies like 2019.