- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Hot Wheels coming to PC Game Pass soon - 26 January 2023
After a mysterious delay from December, arcade racing game Hot Wheels Unleashed will finally arrive on PC Game Pass in early February. I hear it's pretty good! It's one of the small handful of games Microsoft have confirmed as coming to PC Game Pass in the next fortnight, which also include the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fighting game and a return to the subscription service for Darkest Dungeon. Alas, games coming mean games going. Do check out Donut County before it's swallowed by the abyss. Read more
- Telling Lies developer's next game is Immortality, about a missing movie star - 14 June 2021
The developer of swell narrative games Her Story and Telling Lies teased his next project last summer with a rather redacted store page. Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow's next game, Immortality , has now been slightly more revealed to be a story about the disappearance of movie star Marissa Marcel. We don't know much more than that, but it sure does sound like another twisty mystery is in store. Read more
- THIS SUNDAY: Project Ambrosio Reveal - 9 June 2021
We haven't released many details about Project Ambrosio, the next title from Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow, but this Sunday, as part of The Future Games Show, we're letting a few more into the world. We will peel back the ██████! The show will be streamed on Sunday, June 13 at 4PM PDT / 7PM EDT /12AM* Midnight BST / 1AM* CEST (*The morning of June 14) on Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, and GamesRadar. Remember: celluloid is highly flammable 🔥🔥🔥
- Telling Lies 1st Anniversary! - 28 August 2020
It's been over a year since Telling Lies dropped on Steam! Thank you to everyone who has played, streamed, wishlisted, talked about and otherwise supported the game over the past twelve months. In order to celebrate this milestone, Sam Barlow, the creator of Telling Lies, Her Story, and the upcoming Project A███████, will stream the game, shedding light on its development, production, and design. Join Sam this Wednesday @ 1PM Eastern. Set a reminder from this page so you don't miss uncovering the making of this story of four private lives and the lies that bind them. If you enjoyed the game and want to stay up to date on what Sam and the rest of the team is up to, make sure to follow the studio, Half Mermaid and wishlist our next project!
- Telling Lies' FMV performances modernise the way we tell stories in games - 23 December 2019
Looking through the casefile of this year's best games, the evidence shows that it's been a fantastic year for desktop detectives—from the painting that killed its creator in Tangle Tower, to the ancient, planet spanning mystery that runs through Outer Wilds. Jenny LeClue, Later Alligator, Frog Detective 2 and even Disco Elysium—there was no shortage of clues to track down and suspects to question. I've enjoyed scratching my head over all of these mysteries, but Telling Lies is one that had me glued to my computer—late nights in the office surrounded by empty cups of coffee and scribbled notes, not wanting to leave until I had figured it out. With the game's predecessor, Her Story, Sam Barlow handed us one woman's testimony recorded over the course of a month. With Telling Lies he gives us the tangled testimonies, twisted timelines and half-…
- Telling Lies wins at Golden Joysticks! - 29 November 2019
At the 2019 Golden Joysticks, Telling Lies was nominated for Ultimate Game of the Year -- an incredible achievement for a game as unconventional as this! But most excitingly, Logan Marshall-Green won the award for Best Performer -- entirely deserved for his tour-de-force work in the game. Fingers crossed this isn't the only gold Logan receives -- his skill and commitment to the project was a huge part of its success. Not to mention the rest of the cast. There are not enough awards in the world to fully acknowledge our amazing team :)
- Telling Lies shortlisted for Ultimate Game of the Year - 25 October 2019
The Golden Joysticks has announced its shortlist for the Ultimate Game of the Year and Telling Lies is on it! They say: "Sam Barlow directs his greatest work to date with this exploded – and explosive – narrative adventure. Telling Lies gives you the tools to explore a stolen NSA database of live-action clips with the same flexibility and freedom as the very best open-world adventure games. Industry-shaking stuff." Click here to see the full list and vote.
- Deep Dive into Telling Lies - 9 October 2019
Sam dives deeply into the development of Telling Lies and the inspirations behind the game's mechanics over on Gamasutra: Deep Dive: Telling Lies - Making a mechanic out of scrubbing video https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F33027628%2F9ee4f5d3771b66c6629fb392cb3b84c86565a397.png
- Writers Guild of America scraps its videogame writing award - 4 October 2019
The Writers Guild of America , which once considered Star Wars: The Force Unleashed the pinnacle of videogame writing, has decided to drop the category from its 2020 awards, and possibly beyond, because too few games qualify.  Year after year, the WGA gives the Outstanding Achievement in Video Game Writing award to big action games like Assassin's Creed (twice!) and Horizon Zero Dawn. The list is full of good games, but good game writing? Not so much. The Last of Us and the latest winner, God of War, look less out of place, but still very conservative picks.  Quality, then, isn't the issue. For a game to qualify, there are a list of prerequisites, including a credited writer that's applied for WGA membership. Instead of an absence of good game writing, it's a lack of WGA members submitting game scripts.  Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann, who won for U…
- Here's how you see all the endings in Telling Lies - 29 August 2019
Telling Lies is a compelling investigative thriller from Sam Barlow, the creator of Her Story. It's a twisting, complex tale told entirely through secretly recorded video calls, and there are three Telling Lies endings to discover. How you get these endings is pretty obscure, however. So, the ending in the 'reflection world' (that is, the story of the woman reflected in your monitor) will always be the same. You'll see the clips uploading (which, cleverly, are all the clips you found while playing the game) and then the protagonist will dodge the FBI and walk up to the roof. That sequence never changes. But you will get a different epilogue clip depending on which character you spent the most time with. So if you watched more clips of character A than character B, C, or D, you'll get an epilogue specific to character A. And if you saw around 60% of a particular…
- Sleuth through strangers' FMV lives in Telling Lies - 24 August 2019
FMV investigate em up Telling Lies has launched, bring you reams of stolen footage to search through at your leisure. There s a good reason you re nosing into the lives of these four strangers, I m sure. At least, if you think naked curiosity is as good a reason as any. Which I do. Look, here s a sneak peak via the launch trailer. (more…)
- Telling Lies review - 21 August 2019
Telling Lies is a series of one-sided conversations. You play as a woman whose motives are initially unclear, who has been given access to an archive of secretly recorded video calls taken from the laptops and mobile phones of four very different people. When the game begins you know nothing about them. These troubled souls are complete strangers to you, their lives a mystery.  But by the end you'll know them intimately, and will have uncovered a series of shocking truths about their lives. Well, in theory. Because some of these people are, as the title suggests, liars. Separating fact from fiction is at the heart of this new 'desktop adventure' from the creator of narrative experiment Her Story. Like that game, your interpretation of the plot is determined by which clips you discover and the order you view them in. As you search the database you'll see clips of…
- Wot I Think: Telling Lies - 21 August 2019
Developer: Sam Barlow, Furious Bee Limited Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Release: August 23 On: Windows, Mac OS X From: Steam For: TBC If I was really lazy I would just write “you know Her Story ? It’s like that but more,” and call it a day. But I’m not lazy. I am a diligent and enthusiastic employee of Rock Paper Shotgun, and that sentence would be a bit of an oversimplification of Sam Barlow’s new watch videos ’em up Telling Lies. (more…)
- Telling Lies review: flawed but fascinating experiment in storytelling - 21 August 2019
There's a writing technique called cut-up, in which a text is broken down into small component parts and then rearranged, somewhat at random, into a new text. Cut-up has its roots in Dadaism and was used by boundary-pushing artists like William Burroughs and David Bowie. It's sometimes called aleatoric writing, which means there's an element of chance involved in the creative process; alea is Latin for dice game. There's a sense in which most video game writers are using cut-up technique by default - even when they're trying to construct a linear narrative. As well as scripts, they build worlds and storylines out of huge databases of NPC barks, flavour text, lore snippets and branching conversations. Depending on the game design, there might be no telling when and in what order players encounter these, or whether they encounter them at all. That's where the element of chance comes in. S…
- Telling Lies will send you panning for FMV fibs next week - 17 August 2019
FMV sleuth em up Telling Lies will be in stores next week, asking players to unravel a mess of fibs told by four strangers in order to figure out the truth behind a shocking incident. I expect task number one will be learning exactly what that incident was, because the new trailer isn t going to tell you anything beyond what it feels like to peek in on these ordinary people. Which is suitably creepy. (more…)
- Her Story dev's latest investigative FMV thriller Telling Lies is out next week - 16 August 2019
Her Story developer Sam Barlow's latest non-linear FMV spectacular, Telling Lies, finally has a release day: it'll be available on PC and iOS devices next Friday, 23rd August. Telling Lies, which is being published by Annapurna Interactive (What Remains of Edith Finch, Gorogoa), sees Barlow once again exploring the realm of the investigative thriller, and, on a basic level, it has much in common with the critically-acclaimed Her Story. As in that game, Telling Lies tasks players with scouring a database of videos, using search terms to piece together the interconnected stories of, this time, four main characters, that unfold over the course of two years. Rather than probing a hard-drive's worth of police interview recordings, however, you've access to a stolen NSA laptop full of secretly film webcam video. Read more
- A new Telling Lies trailer tells the true release date - 16 August 2019
Annapurna Interactive announced today that Telling Lies , the new FMV investigative thriller from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, will go live on Steam on August 23. Telling Lies bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor: Using an NSA laptop filled with stolen videos, you have to piece together the "shocking incident" that connects the lives of four people. But as we noted in our June preview , it's a much larger, non-linear experience, weighing in at an estimated four to five times bigger than its predecessor—the video footage covers a span of two years—with 30 separate speaking roles. Along with a launcher date trailer up above, there's a new website with more information up at tellingliesgame.com .
- I hate repeating a trick the writer of Telling Lies on going back to the desktop thriller - 17 June 2019
When Sam Barlow released murder mystery game Her Story in 2015, he probably didn t expect to get a two-page spread in Le Monde about this three-hour FMV game. Her Story worked because it was simple. You had a fictional desktop and a search engine that would bring up videos of an ongoing police interview. When you typed in dead or argument , you d get a video of the main character, Hannah, answering the questions of an unseen detective, with those keywords somewhere in the testimony. A search bar em up. This year we re getting a follow-up called Telling Lies . It s not a sequel, but the same idea: a search bar and a bank of videos. It s not clear what the big lies of the title are, but we can clear up another mysery right now. Why has it taken Barlow this long to come back to a formula that was so obviously good? (more…)
- The best games of E3 2019 - 14 June 2019
We’ve been drowned by E3 2019 this past week, but maybe you only waded into the river of game reveals and new trailers up to your ankles. If you didn’t get your hair wet, there might be some gems among the flotsam and jetsam that you missed. That’s what this post is for: we’ve rounded up our picks for the best games of E3, based on our own impressions of either seeing the games behind closed doors at the show, or of watching the videos from the comfort of our homes. (more…)
- E3 2019 games every game confirmed - 13 June 2019
They just keep coming don’t they? A lot of games were announced at E3 2019, things that we didn’t know about, as well as stuff that’s previously announced, or expansions to already released games. Now, to the casual outsider, what we’re doing might seem absolutely nuts, but we thought we’d put together an alphabetical list of all the PC games that have been confirmed to appear at this year’s E3 show. With well over a hundred of them now in the books, the next year or so looks packed. (more…)
