Sweet Little Lies

Separating fact from fiction in telliNg lies, the next game from the creator of Her Story.

- Andy Kelly

Telling Lies is a series of one-sided conversations. You play as a woman whose motives are initially unclear and who has been given access to an archive of secretly recorded video calls taken from the laptops and mobile phones of four very different people. When the game begins you know nothing about them. These troubled souls are complete strangers to you and their lives are a mystery.

But by the end you’ll know them intimately, and will have uncovered a series of shocking truths about their lives. Well, in theory. Because some of these people are, as the title suggests, liars. Separating fact from fiction is at the heart of this new ‘desktop adventure’ from the creator of narrative experiment Her Story. Like that game, your interpretation of the plot is determined by which clips you find in your playthrough, and the order you view them in.

As you search the database you’ll see clips of a father reading his daughter a bedtime story, a couple watching a movie together, and other snippets of people just living their lives. But then you’ll hear something that piques your curiosity. A reference to a mysterious incident, a name, or a place. And you’ll search for these things in the database, unravelling yet more intriguing threads, slowly revealing an intricate, labyrinthine story that takes place across two years.

The game’s blend of the blandly domestic and the thrilling is an effective one, setting the lives of the characters against a bubbling plot of conspiracy and duplicity.