Quick Look: Telling Lies

Vinny FMV game

FMVinny time

that dude looks a lot like Tom Hardy

Dan sounds a hell of a lot like Alex.

How do I know when I'm satisfied?

No Papa

FYI: the cast lists Vinny and Dan, not Alex.

The camgirl is Angela Sarafyan from Westworld, so I'm definitely going to type "Bring yourself back online."

The missing features (no "play from beginning", no "match videos up", no grid to show you which videos you've watched) makes this game a REAL bummer. It's very frustrating to play.

The acting is great and I was very intrigued by the story, but the toolset is so limited that it just makes it not fun. I played it for like two hours, and I think I'm done if I don't hear that some of these features have been added. I get that leaving that stuff out is probably intentional on the creator's part, but I just think that was the wrong call.

Surely you'd use the date & time of day to match up conversations, instead of video length?

Oooof - this is a really disappointing. I loved Her Story and was gung-ho to play but the missing functions already stated are a crazy omission. When your entire game is centered around watching videos, designing the tools for playing and tracking those videos should be a high priority. I think I'll hold off till I heard about an update that I really hope comes down the line. The game is kinda getting dragged on Steam for exactly this, which (if Her Story is anything to go by) really overshadows the awesome concept, production, story and acting.

That title card is pretty cool

Other than the technical issues, the story and ending are really, really bad. Not worth the asking price or the time.

Eating sugar?

For anyone interested in this, except for the lack of skip to beginning feature. Check the steam forums, someone has developed a mod for the game that adds the feature in.

I was hoping you all would quick look this. And then you did. Yay!

Edit: I see what you're doing, Sam Barlow. Knock off Tom Hardy simulator.

@processr: lmao

Logan Marshall-Green is a really good underrated actor, I just wish they gave him like waaay more compelling material than this.

Tom Hardly was great in Upgrade

This game is good, but it doesn't quite live up to Her Story.

I don't think the narrative here is as interesting, and the interface shortcomings can be very frustrating (especially in the context of most videos being one-half of a conversation and having considerable dead air).

I know people like to compare the guy from Upgrade to Tom Hardy but I think he looks more like Vinny. (seriously, skip to 14:30)

Anyway, I know it's reductive and kind of shitty to say but this seems like Contradiction without the fun. I think I just prefer my FMV a little more cheesy and self-aware. Also, 20$ seems like a lot for this.

Alex is not a westwood fan.

The lady silhouette being there the entire time seems like a cool idea but boy it sure is distracting.

That "camgirl" is very believably awkward to the point where I almost wondered where her parents went wrong. I dig some of these performances, though it's a shame to hear the tech ain't all that. A game all about video really should cover the most basic functions of a video-player, you'd imagine.

Heck, I get annoyed that I can't rewind with the track bar in Control, and those videos are just a guy smoking. This would drive me up the wall.

Especially not being able to play those two videos together, or easily swap between one or the other for context. That's such a bummer, and really kills any exhilaration or feeling of accomplishment you might have gotten from piecing together two, or possibly more, segments.

Speaking of, I really like the camera work in some of these clips, as with the lady singing. I guess a patch to fix these technical matters is probably too much to ask for, but I feel that's a genuine shame as there's definitely stuff to appreciate here.

The number one thing I wish this game had was a jump to beginning / jump to end button. To be honest, at times I thought “Did they not have that feature because it make the game shorter?”

Besides that I really liked this game. The performances are solid. I have a Google doc with 1,000 words of key terms and names when I was trying to piece the story together.

It’s overall on par with Her Story. I don’t think one is significantly better than the other. I mainly just like this style of game and thought this game nailed what it was going for.

Heads up everyone interested in the game: there is a mod that lets you skip to the start of a videos so you don't have to rewind slowly.

man, it's like someone made a game about (at least some of) the type of internet videos I cannot stand, and then added a ton of even more extended awful pauses. yikes.

I will never understand the appeal of FMV games. Especially not these "simulate sitting at computer to solve mystery" ones.

@do_the_manta_ray: thank you for pointing that out about control because imho the WORST parts of control are whenever you stop playing the game to take in the lore, and the little videos you always gotta sit through (threshold kids isn't entertaining or creepy just obnoxious) including the obnoxious millennial hipster scientist who acts like any smug jackass online

I stopped reading the lore and just smash. Jesse has enough to d3al with I'm not putting her through reading 100 redacted papers that amount to NOTHING.

The best parts of control are playing the game, not reading the game.

I kinda wish vinny would play critical path the best DMV game i still believe there is no way to best that game without a walkthrough and it woild be funny as hell watching them try

A-Squared is a nickname for Ann Arbor, the city the main character mentioned he just moved back to.

It's kind of an eye-rolly nickname that people don't usually actually say with their mouths but just ends up in print for various events and promotions around the city. So the character saying it twice already made me cringe a little but I'm hoping that was the point.

Seems cool. I never got around to Her Story and this seems a lot more fleshed out and polished.

Hey! That's Kerry Bishe from Halt and Catch Fire! She's great!

@eldredpe said:

Oh wow, thanks. I was searching around for the term like it was one of the organisations or something.

I love this game, even the one-sidedness, but waiting around for rewinds didn't add anything for me.

Not being able to combine conversation pairs kills the game for me. This one moreso than Her Story really plays off the back and forth, and instead of rewarding you for "solving" a conversation by hearing it naturally, you're forced to listen to twice as much dead air that makes both sides infinitely more boring, amplified each time you want to refer back to something they discussed.

Talented actors and compelling story as expected, but not sure if I'll finish it.

@r0guesquirrel: I see what you did there.

The complaints for the rewinding are way unfair, I finished it and had to rewind only a couple of times. That being said, the story could have been better, especially at the end of it all. It's still a neat thing to uncover few of the more crucial moments in the story.

Hey look! It's Trey Atwood from The OC.

This is not the FMV I wanted

Hated the gameplay of Her Story but enjoyed the concept of watching prerecorded segments and piecing the puzzle together. Shame that this is basically identical for the gameplay because I'd love to experience the story but with something fun to actually do to get to the recordings.

They didn't touch on the most important aspect of this game. What does the Solitaire win animation look like?

Loved Her Story so i'll probably have a decent time with this. That said, in Her Story the clips were a few min in length at most. Here they tick towards the 10 min per clip, especially if you rewind the clips to see the whole thing. That gives the game a whole different pace. And it's a bummer to see that they have added quirks to the video-puzzle side without making the tools account for those new additions.

I feel if i would play this, eventually i would constantly speed through the videos reading the subtitles instead of actually.. you know, be there for the acting. Those lengthy sections of dead air that you never get to fill in is an annoyance that i might bear for the first few hour, but i doubt i want to sit through it for the full eight-ish hours.

Interesting concept but in practice this game isn't all that fun to actually play.

I bailed after 3 hours and am really quite confused by the positive critical reception this game received. Sure it is conceptually intriguing and quite novel but overall this wasn't a fun experience.