“Oh yes, I was an astronaut. In France there are not many rockets so I started camming instead.”
I recently came across the incredible game “Her Story” (2015) by Sam Barlow and I was hooked. This was a simple premise; Unsure, at least at the start, of who our player character is, we are presented with an interactive search engine with a multitude of clips for us to peruse. They are all of Hannah Smith and her police interrogations, and our goal is to try and understand what really happened to her husband and if she is responsible. To do so, we just need to enter keywords into the search engine, such as “murder” or “lie”, and tagged clips will be available to us, but only the first 5 meaning you will need to try other keywords to be able to access those. However, searching in this manner means you never get the story in a linear fashion and instead have to piece it together yourself and find your own meaning from it. I spent hours ensuring I got all the videos and came away having loved it and the end questions I was left with.
When I discovered that Barlow had made another game with a similar premise called “Telling Lies” (2019) I just knew I had to get it and I was not disappointed. Using the same concept of an interactive search engine, we are able to search for keywords and uncover the story behind the 4 main characters. We can watch conversations between these characters……but only one side of them. That means we need to pay attention and listen out for any keywords that will help us find the other side of the conversation and reveal who the first person was talking to. Unlike Her Story, some of these videos are as long as 8 minutes and you will really feel like you get to know them as you spend time witnessing their most intimate moments; you feel close to them but also hidden in the shadows, often like a voyeur, and can sometimes feel uncomfortable at parts that you really feel weren’t meant for your eyes.
So what is Telling Lies about? As I intend this to be a post free of major spoilers, I will just say that it is exactly that; It is about the lies people tell and the consequences of those lies. Let’s dig in.
The search engine called Retina was very user friendly when searching for keywords. We can bookmark videos to come back to later and keep an eye on our previous searches. We have a memo app that we can use to keep notes of any relevant words we want to search for later which I can tell you I used constantly! As well as keeping track of things I wanted to explore more of, it also made me feel more like a detective! You have the option to click any subtitle word on the video that stands out to you and it will immediately search for any other videos that relate to that word, saving you a lot of time writing notes. There is the option to play some Solitaire if you need a break from the story, which happened to me a few times. In the screen we can see the reflected face of the person we are playing as, and if we don’t click anything for a moment, the screen becomes slightly fuzzy like when you aren’t focusing completely on something, which adds to the realism of the experience.
The story is fantastic. As the game is purely watching videos of 4 people having conversations over phones and laptops, the story needed to be great to hold your attention and keep you keen, which this game does effortlessly. I will not be telling you what the story is or even the characters names as part of the fun is figuring this out, but let’s just say that it is exciting and extremely rich in terms of what is actually going on and what these people have done.
Aside from the main story, there is a theme that runs throughout it as I mentioned above which is the idea of lies, the consequences that they have, and what it does to trust in relationships. Being only able to watch one side of a conversation at a time makes you very attuned to the slightest facial expressions or body language of the people you are watching. After a certain amount of time, I found that I was able to know who a character was talking to based on his body language and would try to search for a keyword I thought would take me to the other side of that conversation! Sometimes I would feel like I was punched in the gut when I believed something one character said only to discover an hour later that they were actually lying. You begin to question everything that everyone says and soon stop taking things at face value. Worst of all, is that when things start going wrong and you come across hard videos to watch, and you’re piecing together what has happened. you find that you sometimes need a break because you can see where it is going to go and it fills you with dread. You don’t want people to get hurt, but the train is hurtling towards that conclusion and there is nothing you can do to stop it. As I discovered the videos in a random order, there were videos that came out of the blue that essentially shocked me to the point my jaw dropped and I was furiously trying to follow that thread to know what the hell I had just seen. Worst still, I would watch videos and what I saw would make me feel overwhelming sadness for a certain character.
The acting is phenomenal by all 4 main characters, which may not be surprising considering the big names attached to the project: Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus, The Invitation), Alexandra Shipp (X-Men Apocalypse), Kerry Bishé (Narcos), Angela Sarafyan (Westworld) and Vivien Lyra Blair (Bird box) are incredible in their roles and really work to carry the intrigue and depth that this story provides. It was so easy to forget that this is a game and find myself carried away with their lives and trying to uncover the full details on what took place. In a game that is purely about watching and listening to people’s conversations, the acting needs to be spot on, effortless, and believable otherwise the whole concept would crumble, and so it is a testament to their hard work and their craft in being able to pull off such a hard job so well. The little girl Alba, played by Vivien Blair, was certainly one of the highlights for me! She was very sweet but also very funny to watch and her clips always left me with a smile.
This game brought me full-circle in terms of my feelings about the characters. I would find myself liking someone, to disliking them, to then liking them again and feeling sorry for them. No one person is 2 dimensional here; they are as complex as real people are, they make mistakes, they do good things and they do bad things, they live in the shades of grey. There is a theme of identity here that is worth a serious think about. Certain characters are despised for who they are to one person and the things they have done, but liked by others for a different identity they put forward. Identities are changed to protect, to be safe, to influence, to destroy, to entrap, for good and for evil. However, little things remain from one to another, until it is hard to discern who is the real person and what is just a smokescreen. Can you truly remove one from the other? And is there such a thing as a good lie? These are all questions that I came away with and still think about and I don’t know what is the right answer here.
What I do know is that all that had an impact on the 3 women in the story, on the man at the heart of it, and when the end rolled around, all I felt was sadness. I wish it didn’t have to end that way, but I know why it did. And it took my breath away.
Something that drove me crazy while playing this game was the rewind function. When you search for a keyword and click on a video, it will take you straight away to the part of the video where that word was spoken. That could be the 6th minute in an 8 minute video, and if you want to watch the whole thing which is the point of the game, you need to rewind the video to the beginning. Now, here is the thing. We are using some sort of decent, technological system to access, view and search for these clips, but it uses the rewind function of a fucking VHS player. Even DVD players have a skip function! But here, if you want to rewind, you need to hold the mouse to the left and watch it, even at the fastest speed, rewind SO FUCKING SLOWLY. If you just clicked on an 8 minute video, and it jumped to the 7th minute, you’re going to have to rewind it all the way back which will take you at least a minute of your actual damn time AT THE FASTEST SPEED. Now, I don’t know about you, but I play games for escapism and to be immersed in a story, not to have to be furiously rewinding a video like a VHS tape I need to get back to Blockbusters before 8pm.
The time stacks up as well, if it takes an average of 30 seconds per video, then after 10 videos I’ve spent 5 entire minutes rewinding. There was a trick to get it to go straight to the beginning, but seemed to have to be done as soon as the video started and was so difficult that I couldn’t reproduce it more than a couple of times. I found myself browsing Reddit often while waiting for it to go back to the beginning which took me out of the immersive experience and sometimes made it feel like a chore.
Finally, a gripe for me was not having a database checker which was available in Her Story, which allowed me to see how many videos I had left to discover. As someone who is a bit of a completionist, I like to find everything I possibly can! Thanks to that, I was able to find every video in Her Story and understand the entire story. In Telling Lies however, that function is not available to us and so I had to go to Google to see how many videos there were to find, and then open up the endgame programme (without clicking to end the game) as it shows how many I had found at that point and keep track that way. I think it would have been better to have carried that function over from Her Story instead of the convoluted way I had to use so I could keep track on my progress.
That is all I have on the criticism front however, and they are small points in the grand scheme of things. If you fancy yourself an armchair detective and want to delve into this incredible story and uncover for yourself what the cost of a lie is, then get this game. Your head won’t regret it, but your heart might.
