I'm about to write what will certainly be my longest review on this site (and probably my longest review period cause it ain't like I'm writing a lot of reviews outside of this site) on a game that some people wouldn't consider a game. The interactivity comes down to using a busted search engine to view what mostly amounts to half a video chat. I'm sure there is a crowd of people who hate this game or games like it. And I think their perspective is valid...

But I love it.

And also expect more from it.

And want more from it.

Let's unpack.

AS A GAME

I made a game. It is a simple game you can play right now with a friend. I call it "Wiki-Cathalon". If you hate that title, you can change it. The game is simple. You and a friend think of two different subjects that almost certainly have a wikipedia page. You both say the subjects, confirm they do have a wiki page, and then choose one of the two subjects to start on. The goal is to get from one subject to the other by only clicking the on wiki links. Whoever gets from one subject to the other first wins.

People love Wiki-Cathalon. I love it. It is a stupid game, but it is also stupid fun? It is a good example of what can be a game: Anything. Which is why as minimal and obtuse as Telling Lies can be, it can also be wonderful fun. When you search a word based on an inkling of an idea- you're just following your basest curiosity and BOOM you find 5 videos you've never seen before. You get genuinely excited. Especially if you're working out the mystery with a friend. It is an experience I've only really experienced with Obra Dinn, Her Story, and this. You genuinely feel like a detective. Sid Meier talks about how games should cultivate interesting decisions and "what should I search next?" ends up not only being interesting, but also thrilling.

I think the tagging options could be refined, the notes function isn't as convenient as just keeping physical notes, and it would have been nice to be able to see a video chat side by side if you found them both. Outside of these small gripes, I don't know how else to change the formula up for another NSA footage style game. Sam Barlow has basically nailed it after two games...

AS A VISUAL STORY

The "It" Sam Barlow nailed is the gameplay. The story is good and bad. This will probably be the most contentious part of my too long review no one will read. The story is excellent for a game, but when compared to a miniseries or movie, I think it falls a bit flat. Games are capable of great stories and stories told in vastly different ways from movies or TV. Telling Lies, however, uses full motion video to show you up to (if a video from "The Gamer Turtle" is to be believed) eight and a half hours of story. That’s eight and a half hours of story that feel visually and tonally similar to a TV show or movie. It is hard not to compare. Screenwriting 101 would tell us that each scene should progress the plot/teach us about the characters and their motivations. This isn't the case in Telling Lies. The game is more interested in fleshing out its world than driving toward its conclusion. It almost artificially adds in pacing. Sometimes you are going to open a video where someone is sleeping for a few minutes in between revealing Skype calls.

I don't even know if I truly think this is a bad thing. It is good that there is a lot going on beyond David's mission. It makes the world feel real. It also gives ample opportunity (which the game takes advantage of) to reflect on the game's many themes. But I spent a lot of time figuring out what happened with Peter when they didn't come into play at all in the second half of the game. It felt like time wasted, especially when the game is on a ticking clock.

I've watched the videos we missed in our play thru and read the wikipedia synopsis to confirm I got everything. It is a bit of a shame that a game so dense leaves some narrative loose ends. So I am slightly disappointed by a great game story...

AS A PERFORMANCE

But the story is elevated by some really great performances. The four leads (Logan Marshall Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishe, and Angela Sarafyan) all put in performances that would impress across any medium. Oftentimes I would sit and watch a video where the actor is mostly just reacting to another video call. I would watch them express and twitch and adjust and I thought to myself This is way better than Killing Eve.* I almost never sped through footage, finding most every video fascinating.

Most of the auxiliary actors feel very nice and natural too. There are some weak links but they are few and far between. Mike and Alba feel a little off compared to the main cast, but not jarringly so. Also, I don't even think Spielberg could get a child to give a consistently interesting reaction over a nine minute oner.

The performances are excellent, and there are some moments I won't soon forget...

AS A STANCE

While I won't forget the performances, I think I've already lost the message of Telling Lies.

Early on in the game, I joked with my wife that maybe we shouldn't have picked the kinky sex lady game. A few hours further into the game, I thought that the game should be considered a great empowering piece of female media even if it can't pass the Bechdel test. When the credits stopped scrolling, I walked back that opinion. The game has a lot of different stances it takes. Truth is the bedrock of trust. Government agencies do not define or exhibit morality. Greed corrupts. Violence is not the answer... etc.

I think the game does a good job touching on these topics, but its main message is one of female empowerment. Sadly, I think they drop the ball by the end. This realization hit me as I watched each ending and realized, outside of the topic of the morality of Maxine's profession, (which the game certainly does not take umbrage with) the female leads of this game are without flaws. They vary slightly in their personalities. Emma likes wine while Ava likes beer. Maxine likes the idea of living in France or New York, while Ava won't leave the Motor City. Maxine won't share personal details while Emma shares everything.

The little things make them different, but at their core, they are basically all the same woman. The same perfect woman. None of them have real human flaws. And without those flaws, we don't connect with the game's main message. Maybe the women in the game can be strong, but they are so removed from the player that it certainly doesn't drive home the intended message. If the women could be a bit more fleshed out, a bit more flawed, a bit more human- I think the game's thesis would really resonate.

IN CONCLUSION

Look, this game broke me. Here I am writing a three page essay, single hecking spaced, on Grouvee. If you've reached this part of my review, you should get a prize or something. One big smooch once the Coronavirus quarantine is done!

It broke me because this is a game I see clear flaws with, and yet I want to give it a five. I want you to play it and I want you to know I loved it. Even though the game is particular and niche and you may hate it, I want you to play it. And I'm going to give it a 5 after mulling over what score to give Captain Toad and denying Toad a 5 because my brain said that Captain Toad can't be a 5, and I'm giving out too many 5s. Sorry brain, but I'm giving out another 5.

Anyway, this has been a real stream of consciousness review. I can't neatly tie this ending back to the beginning. So let me instead close on this: My wife does not like games. She won't sit down and play them with me even when we're free from the little voices of our little children. But for three nights she sat down and played this with me. Heck, she asked me on the third night if we could play Telling Lies that night. And now that we finished, she asked me why we don't have more controllers for our Switch and told me to buy Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (even though I own Mario Kart 8 for Wii U).

If you have a loved one that gets TV and movies, but just doesn't get games- play this with them. Maybe it'll get them into games. Maybe they'll give you permission to buy an old Nintendo sports game. But more likely, you'll have a really great time playing it with them.

*The new season of Killing Eve is good, not great. So use that as your comparison. A good, not great season of TV. I started to pull a bunch of examples and then felt uncomfortable declaring a bunch of shows were "good, not great". I decided most everything else I was picking was either bad or great. Friday Night Lights=Great. Walking Dead=Bad. Daredevil=Bad. The Good Wife=Great...I really can’t think of other "good, not great" shows. I hereby declare Killing Eve season three the only "good" TV!

This game is just like Her Story. You search for words in a database to bring up different videos related to that word. You're doing this to uncover a story. This time, there are more characters involved. You play as an FBI agent named Karen who is looking into an undercover case led by another FBI agent named David Smith. The footage in the database involves videos related to that case, but also contains personal videos between him and his family. Since the game just drops me into this without any set up, I don't know what I'm working to uncover. I just followed where my curiosity led me. This story goes places, and it ended up being one of the more complicated undercover stories I have seen.

Going through the different videos, it was pretty easy to get emotionally invested in the characters involved, but it's also uncomfortable to watch these personal moments. There are sweet moments between David and his wife and daughter, but you also learn about what he's doing as a part of his job. The relationships he's building with lies, and how these relationships are a betrayal to his wife. In his interactions with his wife, I'm aware of when he's lying to her. Outside of those his family and his job, he's also building a relationship with a cam girl. His videos with her are disturbing. There is something wrong with David, and it's something that can't be excused away by saying he's just doing his job.

The fun part about experiencing a story in a game like this is getting parts of it out of order. In one video, I would see two characters at the start of their relationship, and then a few videos later, I would get some shocking news in a video that's clearly around the end of the relationship. It doesn't feel like I spoiled the story though. It pulls me more in because I have to know what the hell happened, and how other characters in the story feel about this news.

The annoying part of this game is when you open a video, it doesn't start at the beginning. Instead, the video starts at the point where the word you searched for is said. It took me about an hour to realize that this was happening, so I had to go back through the old videos that I viewed to rewind and play them from the beginning. The other issue with this is rewinding takes too long. There's no button to reset the video to the beginning as far as I know. I had to manually rewind these videos which could at times take a while because these videos can go up to 9 minutes long and the rewind isn't that fast.

Most of the videos I watched were about David's wife and daughter, so I got an ending that said what happened to them. From what I here, there are different endings based on which characters you focused the most on during your research. I'm not that curious to find out what happened to characters after this story, so I probably won't go back to play through this again. I think I saw all the ending of each character's story too.

Patience is not one of my virtues and this game certainly tested it.

I loved Her Story. It was a tight experience with an intriguing premise and main character. Telling Lies takes the exact same gameplay formula - searching for keywords to bring up videos which slowly reveal what's going on - with a bigger cast and more ambitious story.

Unfortunately, while in Her Story each video clip took the form of the character answering a question in 30 to 60 seconds, in Telling Lies each clip is the recording of a Skype call where we see only one side of the conversation. These clips usually last from 2 to 8 minutes and half of the time consists of the character staring at the camera silently as the other, unseen and unheard, person talks. You can scrub through the videos, forward and backwards, but it's very tedious.

It's too bad they couldn't find a more engaging way to present the clips, as everything else is quite well done. The writing and acting is good, the way info is drip-fed as you take note of new keywords to search is often rewarding. The story I uncovered wasn't quite as interesting to me as the one from Her Story.

Sam Barlow really does have a knack for this type of game. FMVs aren’t necessarily my thing, but after loving my time with his latest release last year, I decided to jump into some of his earlier work. And Telling Lies certainly delivers on most of what it was supposed to, although it could do with a couple of crucial improvements.

The main thing missing from this game is such an obvious requirement in these types of titles that it is inexplicable to my why it wasn’t included. In Telling Lies, you work by uncovering a series of video clips and using words from the subtitles to uncover other clips. Clicking on a specific word allows you to open other videos at the exact moment that word was said. That’s all fine and good and a neat mechanic, but the problem is that not only can you not immediately see the clip from the start, it takes quite a bit of time to rewind or fast forward since it never does it too fast. This isn’t a big issue for the shorter clips, but for the long ones - 8 to 9 mins - it makes quite a difference and it adds needless frustration to the mix. These types of games already don’t have much gameplay to speak of, so why not make the little that they do be as pleasant as possible? I don’t get it. There’s also a 5 video limit in your searches that I wasn’t a big fan of, since this seems too artificial a restriction for the sake of extending gameplay time. I get why they did it, but they should have, at the very least, lifted that limit once you beat the game and want to continue uncovering more footage (which you can do).

Apart from that, there really wasn’t much I didn’t like about Telling Lies. All the other important aspects in a good FMV are there, mainly a pretty interesting story, very solid acting and a mysterious tone to the narrative that keeps you wanting to move on to the next clip to find out more. At times, this game was absolutely engrossing, to the point of having the 5 hours I spent with it absolutely fly by without me realising it. Once you start to unravel it, it is quite hard to put Telling Lies down. There are a few different endings depending on who you focus on the most, which I thought was a nice touch as well. Not all acting lands across the board, but the main four absolutely steal the show and eclipse everyone else. This happens in the forefront of a story that wasn’t as dark as I expected, or at least not within the shade of darkness I expected.

I wish the technical hurdles I talked about above weren’t present, since at times they do become a tad annoying. But on the whole, everything else in Telling Lies works well enough for it to be quite enjoyable, making this a solid experience for anyone who doesn’t have a direct issue with these types of games. It’s not on the level of Barlow’s latest stuff, but it’s still very much worth experiencing. 7.5/10

Semi-spoiler-y review: (Meta spoilers for both games, no plot details)

I thought the story, characters, and acting were very nice (much better than Her Story's, which was an intriguing concept but loses by default due to not having the same emotional journeys to get invested in), however I do not think the game took advantage of the medium as well as Her Story did.

Her Story was a simple game, but everything in it came down to solving a mystery, and that thread basically never lets up throughout. And in fact, once that game ends, it's still not over because there's no definitive answer and I loved how you had to go online and read the different interpretations and continue to try to make sense of things in your head.

This game doesn't really have that. It takes maybe a couple dozen videos, an hour or two of gameplay, before you basically get the whole picture of the story. You learn the core relationships, the situation. And from there, the plot develops, but it doesn't have any more twists or turns. You don't learn anything new that challenges your previous beliefs - you just learn new events that happen to the characters. You get a structure and fill it in with more details, sort of like drawing a sketch and then coloring it in.

As a result, the game is less satisfying as a mystery narrative game, and feels more like watching a TV series but with interaction required. Nothing wrong with that, but when you go in expecting more of the same mindblowing mystery stuff, it can be a little underwhelming. And I think there is more to be dug out of this interactive medium.

I'd also echo the common complaint that watching two sides of a video call can be a bit of a drag sometimes, especially when there's long periods of silence. As well as the inability to jump to the start of a video without installing a mod. Apparently this is because you're encouraged to just jump in wherever and not always see the whole thing, but as a completionist, that was too frustrating and I had to rewind.

A great follow up to Her Story. Better production values, perfect cast, lovely writing and an interesting storyline. The basic plot is nothing particularly new but it's full of nuances and depth in how it defines the relationships between the characters. And there is the same masterful touch in the little details. I particularly loved when Logan Marshall-Green's face made me guess that his daughter had just said "Steven" during the Rumpelstiltskin story, but the game is full of great moments and revelations and it plays so well on repetitions, with the different ways the same character tackles the same situation in different moments (again, the final Rumpelstiltskin bit was heartbreaking like most of the second half of the story). The many ways in which the game talks about lying to ourselves and to others are really interesting, there are so many intense, emotional, sad moments and overall I think writing, acting and direction are great. And sure, like with Her Story, you can kinda break the structure of the plot twists if you guess certain keywords too early, but I think the game is extremely well balanced in terms of always having some fun little bits to uncover here and there.

In gameplay terms, it's basically an upgraded version of Her Story but I particularly liked the idea of the videochats and the simple mechanical twist that comes with it: trying to guess the keyword I needed to find the other side of a conversation was always fun and stimulating. I can understand why people got bored with the interface and the rewind/fastforward but honestly I think it's mostly an issue of approach: it really isn't a problem if you just go with the flow, jump around between conversation and roleplay. If what you're trying to do is uncover the mysteries and follow leads, the game flows beautifully, if you get out of character and try to 100% all the videos, sure, it can become tedious, but that's more or less what happens when you try to 100% any game, isn't it? Anyway, I was never bored until i decided to actually do that... but still, it was less boring than, I don't know, finding all the collectibles in an open world game.