Telling Lies asks players to untangle one big truth from four sets of FMV fibs
Eating sugar? No papa!
Her Story was an interesting experiment in FMV sleuthing, and writer Sam Barlow's followup Telling Lies looks like the next step for the format. Players are asked to pick through four people's lives through stolen and secretly recorded videos, and unravel the truth behind a "shocking incident" linking them all, plus an oddly specific "96 small lies" along the way. Developers Furious Bee have roped in a cast of professional actors for this ambitious mystery, who you can get a peek at in the debut trailer below.
The trailer doesn't give much indication of it, but Telling Lies looks to expand on the format of Her Story by giving you a virtual laptop to poke around, apparently with a stolen NSA database on it. You'll be clicking around these illicitly gathered videos looking for key-words to search, cross-referencing information given by characters until you can piece together the facts behind the case. As for what the mystery involves, and who exactly the player character is meant to be is still unknown. I have a feeling the devs will be playing their cards close to their collective chest until launch.
The four lying leads in Telling Lies are played by Logan Marshall-Green (Shocker in Spider-Man: Homecoming), Alexandra Shipp (Storm in X-Men: Apocalypse), Kerry Bishé (Lucy in Scrubs) and Angela Sarafyan (Clementine in Westworld) - not a bad lot. All capable of delivering a convincing scene, given decent direction and a well-written script, so the quality of this one will hinge on its writing. It's interesting to see mid-budget FMV adventures with professional actors making a comeback after the genre crashed and burnt in the CD-ROM era. Although the less said about Barlow's #Wargames, the better.
Telling Lies is due later this year. You can find it here on Steam, although no date and price have been set. It's published by Annapurna Interactive.