Telling Lies 17+

The story and acting are spot-on, and the gameplay element of “ahah! a word I can search for to find more video” is really fun.

But once you’ve identified the two halves of a conversation, why can’t you watch them side by side? (We know in-game from meta-data that the clips are perfectly synchronised.) The writers’ and actors’ work deserves to be seen properly.

Just like with Her Story this game has a great concept when it comes to mechanics, and one has to admire the sheer effort and time it must have taken to film over five hours of people talking to a camera. But the story itself really left me underwhelmed. It’s true that I was anticipating something that would use the mechanics to create a more thriller-like atmosphere and in the end it was much more of a drama, but even then I don’t think it was engaging or believable enough a drama to keep me interested enough to spend hours mining for clips if I hadn’t been holding on to the hope that there’d be some kind of twist or clever revelation or eerie moment of suspense or something. I wouldn’t have said anything at all on this were it not for the appalling epilogue, an unintentionally cold and ugly affair that feels like it fell out of another story entirely.

A number of times I’ve had to come out of clips and try and scrub to get the subtitles to move on from the search term, apart from that I’m loving the game. A double tap to rewind to the start of the clip would be welcome.

This is a game changing use of FMV, Her Story was brilliant but this takes it up to another level, using proper actors and a variety of cameras and settings make you feel like you’re the detective trying to unpick the truth, like Big Little Lies but you’re in the driving seat - please fix those niggling issues. I can’t help wonder if the bug in the patience game has some relevance, I bet it does - bravo team!