TELLING LIES
Seeing isn’t always believing
Voyeurs will love this one, and if you’re not a voyeur, Telling Lies is going to make you feel like one anyway. You play a former FBI agent who, during one long night, has to scrub through hours of footage in order to piece together the uncomfortable truths behind FBI Agent David Smith’s undercover mission to infiltrate activist group Green Storm.
While the database revolves around David (Logan MarshallGreen), you also get to learn a lot about those he’s spoken with, piecing together one-sided fragments of conversations. While other, less important, characters appear, most of David’s threads of influence are tied to his wife and daughter, Emma and Alba; a camgirl he confides in; and Ava, a young member of an activist group he grows close to in order to gain a foothold in the organisation.
PEEP SHOW
We’ve been pretty vague about story specifics, and that’s because every small piece of information you come across is a potential clue you can gobble up and spit into the database’s search function to find other examples of where that word or phrase is mentioned. Locations, names, and odd phrases are all things you latch onto as you watch these people living their lives. As the game’s name suggests, you often have to cut through the lies these people hide behind, digging deeper and seeing things from other points of view to get to the real truth.
You can’t simply flick to any point in a video any time you like. Instead, you have a range of rewind and fast-forward speeds you operate with p and i or the right analogue stick, depending on how hard you press down. Clicks and whirrs come through the DualShock 4’s speaker, and it’s all very neatly done. Despite the virtual desktop acting as a framing device, it feels completely natural with a controller.
You can manually type in terms to highlight clips that contain that particular word, or navigate into the subtitles in a clip to dive deeper into the rabbit hole. You’ll be rapt trying to piece everything together, and the terrific actors sell every scene, whether they’re dramatic ones or just low-key moments of downtime. Every player will piece together the narrative in their own way, following their own leads and building their own oddly personal relationship with the candid footage.