He hasn’t yet announced the next game he is working on, but I would be surprised if Barlow wasn’t at least considering the pandemic as a possible setting. Barlow says he intentionally made it difficult to scrub through a clip at will, which I understand, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. Less so is fast-forwarding and rewinding through the long gaps of silence. That leads to you attempting to guess what the other person must have said in their half in your efforts to fish it out of the database, which is fun. Read more: Death Stranding makes me rethink the morality of the gig economyĪn interesting twist is that the database contains both sides of a video call, but you can only view one at a time. We played developer Sam Barlow’s previous game, Her Story, in the same way, but while that consisted entirely of clips from a police interview cell, Telling Lies takes the same idea and broadens it.

My wife and I played together over a couple of evenings, swapping theories and suggestions of “ooh, try this word”. This extreme non-linear storytelling is fascinating, and great fun when experienced with a friend. One word in particular would let you instantly access what I think is the final video in the chronology, but that would probably leave you with more questions than answers. I am being intentionally cagey about the nature of the mystery you must solve or even the names of the characters involved, because discovering them for yourself is part of the fun. The clips are all shot with real actors on phones, laptops or other in-fiction cameras, adding to the realism.

You can search the videos for particular words, but only the first five results are watchable – there is a slightly hokey in-game reason for this limitation – which forces you to tease out clues. Apparently stolen from the US National Security Agency.

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