If I used to be actually lazy I might simply write “you recognize Her Story? It’s like that however extra,” and name it a day. But I’m not lazy. I’m a diligent and enthusiastic worker of Rock Paper Shotgun, and that sentence could be a little bit of an oversimplification of Sam Barlow’s new watch movies ’em up Telling Lies.
Not a complete oversimplification, nevertheless. Telling Lies feels very very like Her Story 2, within the sense {that a} sequel is just like the earlier entry in a collection however extra: larger, higher, quicker, stronger. Like its predecessor, it entails watching movies on a simulated pc desktop. But the place Her Story had you looking via archive footage of police interviewing one girl a number of instances, Telling Lies has you rummaging via a stolen exhausting drive of NSA surveillance footage, together with a number of folks and not less than 4 completely different dialog threads, stretching out over two years.
The controls are very related: you seek for phrases or phrases within the database, and it’ll throw up any movies the place somebody says that actual factor. This time its simpler to wash via the dwell motion movies, bookmark essential ones, and examine your search historical past. You can seek for phrases immediately from the subtitles too. The entire factor is far more streamlined than Her Story.
This time there’s a notepad inbuilt too, in case you don’t need to scribble Pepe Silvia throughout actual life paper. It’s a part of what makes your desktop-within-a-desktop really feel virtually actual. You can see the battery cost indicator going up within the display nook, and even play Solitaire in order for you a break from looking at critical faces.
Telling lies is manufactured from half-truths. Even the query of who you might be and why you’re investigating this archive is a thriller buried within the information. In every of the movies you solely see one half of a dialog, so the trick is discovering the opposite — matching dates and instances, trying to find a probable query that prompted the reply you noticed. It’s good enjoyable doing this — a really rewarding puzzle the place you match two halves of a word-coconut collectively with none cracks. And there’s a lot to look into. The two yr timespan of the movies consists of espionage, eco-terrorism, being pregnant, enamel falling out, bedtime tales, blackmail… there’s rather a lot occurring, mainly. It’s like condensing an entire arc of Eastenders into a couple of hours.
As a end result, a number of the movies are upwards of ten minutes lengthy, with the identical kind of density and resistant texture as a chip store sausage, whereas others essentially embrace lengthy gaps the place the opposite particular person is talking. It’s each efficient in some scenes, and actually bloody annoying in others. It additionally throws up a couple of points, with a capital italic, that appear handled in an arbitrary vogue due to how the game is structured.
Finding a video that includes a grandmother with dementia, for instance, is jarring while you aren’t in search of it, particularly because the final time you noticed her she was blissful as a clam. It’s exhausting to say if Telling Lies actually handles its points nicely, as a result of usually, by the point I’d pieced collectively the top of a plot involving one, I’d forgotten the beginning. And finally, as with Her Story, when you locate a couple of key scenes early on, you’ll be capable to work out virtually the entire story. Whether or not you retain going after that is dependent upon how invested you might be.
Logan Marshall-Green, who performs the principle character (and appears inescapably like an alternate universe Tom Hardy), is definitely superb. His character is a person who’s many issues to many alternative folks, and as you study extra about him you uncover a variety of completely different layers round what’s mainly a shithead. After watching all his secret foibles and dodges and, ahaha, telling lies, it’s extremely satisfying to find the movies the place varied folks inform him that he’s, in actual fact, a shithead.
The remainder of the solid are up and down, however three supporting characters (all ladies with completely different relationships to the principle character, performed by Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé and Angela Sarafyan), flip in some stellar performances. You’ll get very connected to not less than one in every of them.
The game performs off attachments like this, providing you with a type of report when you’ve completed enjoying that tells you which of them characters you paid probably the most consideration to. In a really good transfer, you even have a time restrict of about 5 hours, after which you’ll get nudged into ending up the game. It means you don’t get caught in an infinite loop of looking the archive, and offers you a cause to play once more. I managed to look at about half of all of the movies in a single run, and ended up getting invested within the canny intercourse employee who stored her cam lady channel recent by frequently altering her persona (and her identify, which made monitoring down her movies all of the tougher).
Barlow informed Brendy he doesn’t think the game is voyeuristic, and is as a substitute intimate and private, however I don’t purchase that. It doesn’t really feel actually voyeuristic, as a result of the plot finally ends up being so John le Carré by the use of Tom Clancy that you simply by no means get tricked into considering you’re watching actual lives unfold (apart from the one video I discovered that was simply a number of minutes of a sleeping little one’s face, which I discovered a bit creepy, tbh). But nonetheless. In Her Story, everybody concerned knew the dialog was being recorded. This time you’re selecting via an illegally acquired NSA file dump! That’s your start line! Even when folks know they’re on digital camera (which they usually don’t) they most likely don’t know they’re being recorded! Indeed, the cam lady explicitly says “no recording the show”! Vidbud Matthew described two movies the place the principle character seems to be having a wank off display! Which I didn’t locate and haven’t appeared for but! Because I don’t need to seek for “jerking off”, or think about the kind of issues that dude would possibly say out loud whereas honking his pud!
The query of whether or not Telling Lies is voyeuristic or not doesn’t essentially have a bearing on the standard of the game — I do, in actual fact, assume it’s good and loved it. But the concept it isn’t voyeuristic is a few snort.
