Telling Lies Critic Reviews

Telling Lies requires a deliberateness from its players that turns us from viewers to active plot participants. It’s a game that doesn’t hold your hand, and ultimately it’s down to you to decide the truth – another secret of a good mystery done well.

For everyone else, especially avid followers of character-driven art forms, these are performances you can really sink your teeth into.

Telling Lies feels like it's about four times as big as Sam Barlow's previous game Her Story, and it shows. You feel it not just in the four characters you're sifting through footage of, but in the variety of its videos too: from FaceTime calls to hidden cameras capturing secretive meetings. In Her Story, it was famously easy to go down a rabbit hole of sorts on your own intuition; in Telling Lies, that tendency is mechanized in smart, intuitive ways. When it comes to good interactive mysteries, Telling Lies is among the best you can get.

Telling Lies is a paragon for storytelling, for character arcs that surprise you and linger on long after the credits – and videos – have ended.

Sharp writing, believable acting and a twisting plot make Telling Lies an essential detective game.

I won’t tell any lies here, Telling Lies is another excellent piece of narrative game design from Sam Barlow and I sincerely hope there’s more to come.

Telling Lies is like the best parts of an adventure game, a mystery novel, and an art nouveau movie all rolled up into one. It tells an exciting story uniquely and shows that Sam Barlow’s success with Her Story wasn’t just a fluke. Besides a few frustrating moments, Telling Lies was one of the most compelling gaming experience I’ve had yet in 2019.

Telling Lies is an absolute masterpiece. It offers some brilliant writing and acting that drive us to passionately discover all of its secrets through its very simple but effective mechanics.

Barlow creates an aura of intimacy around the scenes which makes watching any number of them feel like an invasive act. Telling Lies’ crafted voyeurism should inspire the creep in you.

Telling Lies is especially interesting in how its themes connect to real-world politics and ethics surrounding privacy when in the hands of a government bureau.

Telling Lies not only confirms Sam Barlow's quality in writing and game design, but exalts even further the expressive potential of the videogame medium

Some may argue that Telling Lies is less of a game and more of a form of loosely interactive media. If that’s the case, well, it’s the most engrossing ‘non-game’ game I’ve played in recent memory.

The variety of ways for a player to interact with a single narrative is breathtaking, and the way Barlow has paralleled how we shape our own view of a story in the digital era - clicking back and forth across an exploded timeline - truly incisive.

Telling Lies expands the concept seen in Her Story, and it does a great job. We think its predecessor did a better job overall, but if you like to feel like a detective, take notes and uncover the truth, make sure you give it a try.

An atmospheric, brilliantly written and acted detective thriller that tells a compelling story in a unique way.

One thing is for sure: My laptop camera will remain taped for the time being.

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.

The Telling Lies video game - from developers Sam Barlow and Furious Bee, and publisher Annapurna Interactive - is an engaging, interactive film.

Barlow is single-handedly creating a genre out of the movie-video game combination. This story is more complicated than Her Story, which revolved around a single actress. Four more people are relevant in this tale, but the game has more than 30 characters altogether.

Telling Lies may borrow its core mechanic from Her Story, but shifting from monologues to two-sided conversations brilliantly expands the investigative gameplay, and a pivot from murder mystery to political thriller gives director Sam Barlow a much richer set of ideas to explore. A few storytelling hiccups and awkward edges do little to detract from a thought-provoking look at the modern surveillance state—delivered not through soapbox lecture but by forcing you, unsettlingly, to participate.