With four interconnected stories that take place over two years, Telling Lies is a much meatier game. Barlow and publisher Annapurna Interactive filmed four actors - Logan Marshall-Green ( Prometheus), Alexandra Shipp ( X-Men: Apocalypse), Kerry Bishé ( Halt and Catch Fire), and Angela Sarafyan ( Westworld) - in staged video calls with each other. Telling Lies is an expansion of the ideas of Her Story, using video recordings of four different characters to weave a story together. “It’s the desire to get 100 percent and just rinsing that game and, and slowly robbing it of any joy.“ “I struggled personally with that thing of more open games, because of how I play Zelda games,” he said. While Her Story is narrative-focused and takes about two and a half hours to complete, Barlow says he is trying to prevent those who play his next game, Telling Lies, from tackling it in the same manner, as he thinks it’s an easy way to make the experience less enjoyable. But a ridiculous percentage of people 100-percented Her Story versus all of the anecdotes and stats I know from making proper video games.” “I also made the mistake of having the grid that showed you all the clips you hadn’t seen.

“Obviously it’s a video game,” Barlow said.

Watching every single clip to solve the game’s murder mystery isn’t necessary, and there’s even a stopping point communicated to the player when they’ve seen enough to work out the central puzzle.īut Barlow, who spoke to Polygon last week during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, found that far more players than he’d expected had watched every single clip, mainlining every bit of story they could from the game.

There are 271 video clips that make up the narrative of Her Story, but the game’s intentionally cumbersome search engine only lets players view five at a time. When Sam Barlow tracked how folks played his 2015 game Her Story, a narrative-driven mystery that centers around fictional police interview footage, he was surprised to find just how many people devoured it.

Download telling lies full story