Telling Lies

 PC
User Score
5.9

Mixed or average reviews- based on 71 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 29 out of 71
  2. Mixed: 18 out of 71
  3. Negative: 24 out of 71

Review this game

  1. Your Score
    0 out of 10
    Rate this:
    • 10
    • 9
    • 8
    • 7
    • 6
    • 5
    • 4
    • 3
    • 2
    • 1
    • 0
    • 0
  1. Submit
  2. Check Spelling
view
per page
  1. StarkAgentos
    Jun 12, 2022
    5
    Мне было интересно просто полазить по рабочему столу, увидеть упрощённую версию macOS, но пройти эту игру мне кажется просто нереальной задачей. Непонятно, что делать, на какие видео натыкаться, что вводить в поиске.
  2. Woolee
    Sep 29, 2021
    6
    Hi to everybody i just felt alone when my brother got to Canada so i waited to play this game so i can release my feelings . you know nowadays we do not see many games which gives us stories and some kind of looking to life in other hand telling lies is a masterpiece for people like me who had much more bad moments than good moments in their life. enjoy it and i hope to see the new Silent Hill too
  3. apeot2002
    Feb 1, 2023
    6
    Telling Lies tries to bottle lighting a second time

    “Telling Lies” is the second game in the genre that Sam Barlow seems to have established as his own playground, and it hews pretty close to the trail blazed by “Her Story”. Since I am a big fan of “Her Story”, I was looking forward to “Telling Lies” quite a bit. The gameplay loop is almost unchanged: You have a database of video files    Telling Lies tries to bottle lighting a second time

    “Telling Lies” is the second game in the genre that Sam Barlow seems to have established as his own playground, and it hews pretty close to the trail blazed by “Her Story”. Since I am a big fan of “Her Story”, I was looking forward to “Telling Lies” quite a bit.
    The gameplay loop is almost unchanged: You have a database of video files which you can query with a search string that is matched against the spoken dialogue within the videos. These videos tell a story, and the player is tasked with puzzling this story together. The difficulty comes twofold: The number of search results is limited to five and ordered by date, so the later videos that contain most of the dramatic plot developments tend to be excluded, just as it was in “Her Story”. Also, almost all these videos are recordings of one side of conversations over the web, so to get the full picture, you need to find the recording of the other side. This actually is a meaningful step forward from “Her Story”, where only one side of the conversation was recorded.

    The game provides you with a few tools to help you keep track of the developments you uncovered: A notes tool, which is bare bones but absolutely sufficient, a search term history, the ability to set bookmarks and to mark and search for terms from the current dialogue. This leads to the immersive gameplay loop known from “Her Story” and provides quite a bit of fun.
    For a while. But then things started to drag a bit for me.

    I think this is not inherent to the gameplay systems, but to the story “Telling Lies” wants to tell. It is an engaging yarn with quite a few plot twists and some very clever and important things on its mind, but it is a bit too long. The game contains almost 10 hours of video content, and not all of it is engaging. Also, the plot of “Telling Lies” is not as well matched to its medium as the plot of “Her Story” was. That game has a few twists that work uniquely well in the interactive medium of computer games, and “Telling Lies” struggles to provide similar peaks of engagement.

    It is not a problem of the production values: The images and sound are crips, the performances are all at least adequate.

    In the end I think this might be a case of diminishing returns. Barlow’s unique style of game wowed me the first time, but the second time around, the wow factor was gone and what engagement remained wasn’t enough to overcome the bloat of the story.

    TLDR: If this is your first Sam Barlow Interactive Video Detective game, you should have a lot of fun: “Telling Lies” is the superior product. But if you’ve played “Her Story” or “Immortality”, “Telling Lies” might lose you before it reaches its conclusion.    … Expand

Awards & Rankings

28
#28 Best PC Game of 2019
56
#56 Most Shared PC Game of 2019

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
84

Generally favorable reviews - based on 34 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 27 out of 34
  2. Mixed: 7 out of 34
  3. Negative: 0 out of 34
  1. Eurogamer Italy
    Oct 23, 2019
    70
    Telling Lies is a desktop thriller that takes a bit too much to be in gear and suffers from avoidable technical intricacy, but if taken with the right amount of patience,it gifts us with a story of love and violence, fear and lies, with credible and admirably interpreted characters.
    Read full review
  2. IGN Japan
    Oct 8, 2019
    75
    As a successor of Her Story, Telling Lies succeeds in delivering a deep and varied story with what is essentially the same system. However, whether that story is full of surprises or not, depends hugely on the player’s reasoning powers.
    Read full review
  3. COGconnected
    Sep 23, 2019
    85
    In sum, Telling Lies represents a niche genre that explores interactive storytelling in a very unique way. The game’s director, Sam Barlow, evolved the Her Story formula, but at a cost. After all, what makes the game so good also reveals its flaws. The ending, for example, can feel very anticlimactic depending on how you uncover specific videos. Still, as the saying goes, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” And Telling Lies is quite a journey — hopefully, one that will inspire many more story-driven games to come. Now go, awaken the sleuth inside you.
    Read full review
See all critic reviews »