Telling Lies

Never played a game or experienced a story unfold quite like this. Annapurna constantly impresses me with their really unique indie game releases, this one no different.

You play as a NSA agent who uses a computer to sift through video files to get to the bottom of what exactly happened with a character named David. Using these videos (which mostly consisted of one sided conversations) you must organize the videos to eventually start forming the unraveling story. Lots of pairing the one sided conversations with each other to form a cohesive conversation, which was also the biggest pain of the game ,but ngl was sometimes kinda fun.

Figuring out this story with this method was a truly memorable and unique experience, and I even really got invested in these characters. Awesome acting between all 4 of the main cast; truly amazing stuff here. After 27 hours of digging through videos and playing the unbeatable Solitaire game, I finally completed it, finding all the videos to form a comprehensive story of a man who made one too many bad decisions. In the end, I got the Ava ending, and while it tries to be hopeful, knowing what happens to David is just depressing, and made me leave the game a bit depressed (but in a good way).

Solid game that's designed for people who enjoy storytelling and mystery solving. Recommended.

This review also contains INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW YOU CAN PLAY ANY IN-GAME VIDEO FROM THE START OF CLIP instead of halfway through, something you will want to do many times and an option that the game itself does not provide. IT IS NOT CHEATING and if anything makes the game more enjoyable. Read on to get a mini review but more importantly a handy hint.

A few years ago I read about a game called 'Her Story' where you sifted through police interrogation videos to piece together a story and solve a murder. So I downloaded it onto my not gaming laptop. This was the first PC game I had downloaded since Rollercoaster tycoon in 2003. Anyway I plugged the laptop into the TV and my wife and I payed it through and really enjoyed it. So when I read that 'Her Story' creator Sam Barlow had made another game featuring FMV I didn't hesitate to download it and this time I didn't have to check the old laptop specs because it was available on the switch! Straight away I was drawn into the challenge of finding clues in the five videos available to me at the start. These clues are in the form of words that I can enter into a database to search the dialogue of other videos and start my journey down the rabbit hole of murder and deceit. And all if this is great however there was one feature or lack thereof that became obvious very early on. There are a lot of videos to watch and a lot of those videos are well over 5 minutes. Oddly you are not given the option to start the video from the start, instead you only have the option to start it from wherever the word you searched for appears in the clip. There is a rewind/fast forward feature however they are very slow. HOWEVER.... I have discovered a glich that lets you jump to the start of any clip with the press of a few buttons. If you are thinking of playing the game read on, you will be glad you did.

How to instantly jump to start of any video...

I can't find this anywhere else so at risk of looking like a fool I will disclose a little trick that I found while playing Telling Lies on the Switch that lets you watch any video from it's start.

Here it goes...

Once you select the video from the search results you get the option to start the video at the time the matching word showers in the clip. Select any matching word or starting point and as the screen fades to black to load the video press and hold the left trigger (rewind button) until the video appears, normally about 2 seconds. Then once the video appears briefly release the trigger (half a second) and then press and hold it again for about 2 seconds. Now when you release the trigger and press play (A button) it will start from the beginning. This works on all videos regardless of length or search word starting point. There's an hour of your life back. You're welcome.

To begin with the good: I really dig the story! And the actors? Amazing! Very well played and I was surprised to see so many faces that were familiar to me. The detective aspect of it all was also something I loved to a degree (it can become annoying, when you are missing certain words or clues).

Now that was the good (I have not played Her story, but I did buy/download the app on my cell phone), on to the bad. I did not have the "life hack" that the at the moment only other reviewer writes about in their review! Check it out, it will help you. Because one of the bad things of the game is that the videos you uncover all start wherever the word you searched for is ... only getting the first 5 results for your search is also limiting ... or rather expanding uncessarily the game time you need to get through the game.

While I love the actors in this and the fast forward/rewind button helps more than a few times, having just one side of a conversation without the replies ... it is not just weird but can get quite unnerving. It also would save one to rewatch the "same scene" a second time - although you might want to do that for the performances ... still there is something vital missing which makes this quite the ordeal.

I also would have loved to see the whole thing once I uncovered everything ... but I reckon one can do that on youtube ... although if you do that, you may also ask, why "play" this in the first place? I'll leave that up to you, know that you have all the clues (pun intended)