Nuanced performances help in that regard as well, even though the actors are mostly just staring into cameras and emoting. Uncovering the lies and the reasoning behind them will likely keep you pretty well enraptured through the game's eight or so hours of video, especially in the early and middle portions when there are plenty of revelations waiting for you to unearth them. The face we show one person is different from the one we wear for another-and even what we tell ourselves is potentially suspect. As the title suggests, not everybody is fully honest with each other, and much of the game is a meditation on the deceptions humans employ every day in all their interactions.
As with Her Story, the reason those videos are worth perusing, and why the privacy of these people is worth invading, is something you have to glean for yourself. The game starts with a clip of a woman returning to her apartment and plugging a hard drive into a computer, which gives her access to a secret National Security Agency database of videos snaked from the Internet essentially, a series of Skype or FaceTime calls made or received by a man named David. To that end, there's no good way to explain what Telling Lies is about without ruining it.
The question of how much you'll enjoy Telling Lies is very much linked to how far your curiosity will carry you. There are more characters, more videos, and more details to uncover. Where Her Story was something of an experiment with the idea-you skim through a database of unordered full-motion video clips that slowly expose a mystery concerning a woman who was questioned by police-Telling Lies is the larger-scale execution. As with its predecessor, Her Story, director and writer Sam Barlow lets the idea of uncovering the sordid details of someone else's life lead you through the experience. That feeling is how Telling Lies gets away with being a video game that doesn't really contain much of a "game," per se. The game leverages a human desire to pry into others' lives, and that feeling that we're doing something wrong helps to make the draw even more powerful. The psychology of that feeling is central to Telling Lies, a game that really isn't about much more than watching the close, private conversations-sometimes very intimate ones-of other people. There's an intrinsically curiosity that draws us to look into the private lives of others-a burgeoning, guilty draw that pulls humans to tell stories, to gossip, to spy on one another.
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