A bunch of new games have dropped on Game Pass today, including the sensational Telling Lies. In this unique FMV thriller you play as a woman who has been given access to an archive of illegally recorded video calls taken from the laptops and phones of four very different people. It's unclear what her—and by extension your—motives are. But as you snoop into these peoples' secret lives, a dark, twisting story begins to come into focus.
At first, the people you're covertly observing are total strangers. But by the end of the game you'll know an uncomfortable amount about them. Scrubbing through their video calls, you uncover secrets about their lives. Yet, adding a further wrinkle of intrigue, some of these people play fast and loose with the truth. Their version of events might not be entirely accurate, and you have to figure out who's telling lies. Now you know what the title means.
The game takes place entirely on the desktop of a computer. You can drag windows around, open files, play solitaire, and jot things down in the notes app. As you play you hear the whirr of the computer's fans and the churn of the hard drive, and occasionally catch glimpses of the protagonist's face reflected in the fingerprint-smeared glass of her monitor. It's a neat gimmick, and makes interacting with this computer feel wonderfully tactile.
The game revolves around searching through a database of fragmented video clips to try and piece together a story. You search fꦆor♉ keywords, which could be a name, a place, or something seemingly innocuous mentioned briefly by someone in a video call. If you get a hit, it can reveal yet more clips, sending you deeper down the rabbit hole. In a clever twist, you can only pull up five clips at a time, forcing you to get creative with your keyword searches.
Telling Lies is a lot of things at once, merrily hopping between different moods, themes, and genres. One minute it's a tense family drama, the next it's a moody crime thriller. The clips are professionally filmed, naturally written, and well acted by a cast of TV and film actors. Logan Marshall-Green is especially good in it, giving his conflicted, duplicitous character real depth. It's just as well, because 99% of the game is spent watching these video calls.
It's a totally nonlinear game, meaning everyone who plays it will have a different experience—and interpret the story in a completely different way. One player might miss a clip that contradicts another, and only see half the picture. It's a unique approach to narrative design, brilliantly playing to the interactive strengths of the medium. I've finished the game twice now, and there are still a few blanks in the story that I still haven't managed to fill in.
One of Telling Lies' neatest ideas is only showing you one side of a conversation. If you want to hear what the other person is saying, you'll have to dig through the database. This means there are periods of silence where one person on the call listens to the other—but thankfully you can fast forward through it. Hearing only half a call adds a nice layer of mystery to the game, especially if someone in a clip reacts in a dramatic way.
Like Her Story before it, the genius of Telling Lies is that even though it's nonlinear—and the order you find the clips in is completely random—it feels like it was paced and structured by hand. When you reveal some crucial, game-changing piece of information, it hits you as hard as it would if the developer had planned it. You're basically directing your own thriller as you play. If you love story-driven games, you have to play it.