Sam Barlow built Her Story out of a single police interview and a search bar. Telling Lies takes that idea and makes it bigger. The game arrived in August 2019 for iOS, macOS and Windows, published by Annapurna Interactive, with ports for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch following in April 2020. It is a desktop thriller about four private lives and one big lie, and it earns its 8.5 out of 10.
Trailer, via PC Gamer.
A USB Drive and Four Video Calls
You play as Karen Douglas, a former FBI agent. In 2019 she opens a USB drive on her computer and starts watching what is on it. The drive holds hundreds of video segments covering a two-year period.
The footage is live action full-motion video of four people: Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé and Angela Sarafyan. Each clip gives you one side of a video call. The player has to work out which clips match the other participants.
That gap is the whole game. You are not watching a story. You are reconstructing one.
Searching for Green Dagger
Barlow calls Telling Lies a “desktop thriller,” the same label he used for Her Story. You sit at a virtual computer, scroll through clips, and type keywords into a search field. You can highlight words in the video subtitles and search those. You can scrub forwards and backwards inside a segment. You can keep notes in an in-game memo pad.
The story those clips tell centers on David Smith, an FBI agent played by Marshall-Green. During 2017 and 2018 he works undercover on a case code-named Green Dagger, supervised by his handler Mike. The target is potential terrorism by an environmental group called Green Storm, led by the activist Riordan.
To get inside, David first infiltrates a smaller team, the Organizing Group, which is targeting the corporation Prosperen over a pipeline the activists believe would pollute the water source. He approaches a member named Ava, played by Shipp, and starts a romantic relationship with her. That gets him invited in.
Peter, Simon and the Boat
The Organizing Group is run by four people: Eric, Wesley, Peter and Simon. Simon is secretly a Black Kite agent feeding information to the FBI, an arrangement David dislikes because he thinks Simon is unprofessional.
David’s behavior gets worse. He finds out Peter slept with Ava while she was underage, drugged her and filmed it. David attacks Peter, which angers both Ava and the FBI. He then uses a former contact named Harry to plant drugs on Peter and frame him. He outs Simon as a Black Kite spy.
Mike grows alarmed at David’s instability and at how close he is getting to Ava. David invites Riordan and the Organizing Group to a meeting on his boat to talk about disrupting movement on a key bridge that matters to Prosperen’s plans. On the boat, Ava tells him she is pregnant with his child. A new Black Kite spy then infiltrates Green Storm.
Three Endings and a Deck Missing a King
There are three different endings, and which one you reach depends on whose videos you explored most often. The game also contains a version of solitaire, and the deck lacks the king of clubs.
Barlow has estimated the content in Telling Lies runs about four to five times longer than Her Story. That is the trade the game makes. Her Story was a smaller thing. Telling Lies gives you a much larger haystack.
Your time inside a single playthrough is limited. If you want to see more of the drive, you have to start over from scratch and lose every note and bookmark. That is a harsh rule, and it is the one design decision here worth arguing with.
What the Search Bar Actually Does
Here is what matters. Telling Lies is not a game about solving a crime. It is a game about watching people lie to each other and to themselves, and about how little you can learn from one half of a phone call.
The four performances are the reason to stay. Marshall-Green plays David across two years of clips, and the plot leans on him hardest. Shipp plays Ava, the member David approaches and then falls for.
The keyword system is the point of the whole thing. You type a word, you get fragments, and you start building a timeline out of fragments. When two clips finally line up and you hear the other half of a conversation you already watched, the format pays off.
Where Telling Lies Sits Against Her Story
The comparison is unavoidable, and it cuts both ways. Telling Lies is the bigger work. It has more actors, more footage, more moving parts, and a plot that spans a case, a boat and a pregnancy.
It is also looser. Her Story’s constraint kept it small. Telling Lies sometimes feels like it is trusting volume to do more work than it can. The three-ending structure means no single playthrough shows you the whole thing.
The solitaire is a detail worth noting. The missing king of clubs is a stranger one. Both sit inside a game that wants you to notice what is absent from the material you are given.
The Case for a Second Playthrough
Three things decide whether Telling Lies works for you, and they rank in this order.
- The search system. It is the engine, and it is the reason the game exists.
- The four performances, led by Marshall-Green as David and Shipp as Ava.
- The limited-time rule, which is the part most likely to frustrate you.
Telling Lies is worth your time. The limited-time rule is the part to argue with, not the story. The search bar, the four actors and the boat scene are what hold.
Key facts
– Release: August 2019 (iOS, macOS, Windows); April 2020 (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch)
– Developer: Sam Barlow and Furious Bee; publisher: Annapurna Interactive
– Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé, Angela Sarafyan
– Content: roughly four to five times longer than Her Story, per Barlow
– Endings: three
– Critic aggregate: 8.5/10 across 7 outlets
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
