The goal is to figure out what the hell is going on, who these people are, and why the player’s avatar is doing this in the first place. The way players ‘progress’ is by listening to conversations and then picking up on key words like “murder” or “spy” and then searching for new videos where characters speak those words. On this computer is a wide assortment of recorded videos with conversations from four different people. In Telling Lies, the player controls a woman staring at a computer screen in first person perspective. As with its predecessor, the less one knows about the core plot before going in, the more interesting and surprising it will be, so please excuse my intentional vagueness.

Telling Lies, the new game from Her Story developer Sam Barlow (who also served as the creative director on the astoundingly underrated Silent Hill: Shattered Memories) is essentially a more refined, higher-budget spiritual successor. Along with contemporaries like Undertale, Soma, and Gone Home, Her Story helped blur the lines between smaller, ‘budget’ titles and the AAA sphere, and that’s absolutely been a net positive for both the industry and consumers. Her Story sticks out in my mind as a fairly important game as it came out at a weird time in 2015 when indies were transitioning from “Retro platformer/artsy piece on Xbox Live Arcade” to whatever nebulous definition one wants to assign to the term “indie” at this point. WTF: Someone tell the Need For Speed team that FMV is alive and well. LOW Playing with a controller is simply inferior.