Indie hit Her Story finally gets its saucy successor in Telling Lies

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.

Sam Barlow, the director and writer of Her Story, did something quite different when he brought out his debut in 2015. Her Story uses filmed clips of actors to lead players on a narrative sleuthing hunt. It uses these video clips as a main source of clues for the player, allowing them to piece together the whereabout of a man named Simon, who has gone missing. It was a new way of thinking about narrative gameplay at the time and now your boy is at it again.

Telling Lies utilises video recordings in a similar fashion to its predecessor, but sends us off after an entirely different story. It’s a non-linear thriller, centred on a stash of secretly recorded video conversations that the player must mine for clues. These video conversations star four unique individuals who’s lives overlap and intertwine, culminating in “a shocking incidence”. What happened to these four, and what lingers within their private lives.

You are scouring a laptop “loaded with a stolen NSA database” which holds the footage needed for your investigation, spanning two whole years. On Steam the game describes itself as an “intimate and intense experience”, and judging from the trailer, thats absolutely on the nose. In an interview with Eurogamer Barlow described the game as “like Sex, Lies and Videotape meets The Conversation – it’s a story of four people, their relationships and how they messily intertwine in the context of larger political questions”. It certainly looks like it’s going to have a saucy slant, but quite how far the game will go is unclear. The mature content warning is a good indicator, though.

It’s sexy, it’s strange, it’s interesting. It’s out August 23rd. Check out Telling Lies on Steam for more info.