Isn’t it just a hoot when people completely lose their shit over a game? Like full-on review-bombing apoplectic rage simply because the game is or isn’t something? I can kind of sympathise when a game is broken, and people use bad reviews to express their frustration and desire for the developers to fix the game, but when the negative reviews are swear-laden single sentences along the lines of “wtf is this?” “Pretentious shit,” and “What a load of dung” (after playing it for 10 minutes), you can’t help but chuckle at the idea that a pretty innocuous game could make people so furious so quickly – especially when it’s a game they didn’t even pay for.
The game in question here, with a phenomenally low score of 1.9 stars on Game Pass, is Telling Lies, the ‘middle child’ of Sam Barlow’s FMV-based trio of games which also include Her Story and Immortality. The latter just came out last month, and its bizarre story and flirtation with some pretty big ideas inspired me to check out what’s seemingly the least loved of Barlow’s games. Game Pass, treasure trove of indie weirdness that it is, has all three of Barlow’s games, which is great for me, but not necessarily great for the games’ user scores.
See, one of the things the various developers I’ve spoken to love about Game Pass is that it lets players who’d never have bought a certain type of game step out of their comfort zone risk-free and give it a go. It’s there, it’s included in the subscription, why the hell not?
There’s no doubt that this can open gamers’ horizons onto new genres and styles of game, and conversely giving that game an avenue to reach new audiences (this is especially handy for new studios releasing their first games). However, some games are so niche and catered towards such specific kinds of audiences, that when you throw them out into wilderness of something like Game Pass, where a game like Telling Lies is way more disposable than when you pay $20 for it on Steam, you’ll put that game fleetingly into the hands of people who literally don’t know what the hell to do with it, discarding it into digital oblivion after 10 minutes, instinctually pissing on it to mark their turf, and moving swiftly onto the next thing.
It’s how a game like Telling Lies ends up with just 23% positive reviews on Game Pass and 66% positive reviews on Steam. Clearly, it’s a divisive game whichever way you look at it, but something about the Game Pass audience, or the way we consume games on Game Pass, didn’t quite click for poor Telling Lies.
Which is a tad unfair, because Telling Lies is actually a pretty good game if this kind of game is your thing. Played from an in-game computer operating system, with a female silhouette reflected in the screen, you listen to online video chats between several people to piece together a story that amounts to something of a thriller. There are a few interesting quirks to these videos: in each one you can only see and hear one person talking (and reacting to whoever’s on the other end, who you can’t hear); you search through videos by using keywords you hear in previous videos. So you may hear a person’s name mentioned, or the name of an organisation, or simply try and track down the ‘other end’ of a chat you just heard one side of. Whatever your method, you’re slowly inching your way towards the truth.
Many of the complaints about Telling Lies stem from the clips being too long and the lack of an option to go straight to the beginning of a given clip (if a keyword threw you into the middle of a clip, you have to manually and rather slowly rewind back to the beginning). But you soon realise that you don’t have to watch the whole clips. It’s all subtitled, so you can read instead, and I understand the devs’ logic in not letting you go straight to the beginning of a clip, because even as the video wizzes by in reverse you can learn vital information from the subtitles. Sure, a ‘back to start’ option would’ve been handy, but at least there’s a method to the madness that you come to grasp.
The idea is that the story (a reasonably well acted and well paced one) unfolds non-linearly based on the words and themes that pop out at you. You may stumble upon an event that happens late in the chronology and think ‘what the hell was that’ before trying to figure out what led to the wild finale, or you may want to figure out everything about a certain side-character to see if they hold any key clues about the central narrative (or simply because that character intrigues you). It’s snappy, and it gives you that feeling of a night-owl PI working from your Linux-like OS, bashing in keywords and perhaps even taking notes so you remember to come back to certain keywords.
It’s a well-paced game so long as you don’t force yourself to watch every single lengthy clip from beginning to end. Watching a dad put his daughter to sleep via Zoom by telling her a ten-minute story of Rumpelstiltskin isn’t something anyone should have to sit through in its entirety, and you really don’t have to.
I’d even go so far as to say that Telling Lies does a few things better than Barlow’s latest critical darling, Immortality. The system of searching for words inspires players to piece things together more logically than Immortality’s system of clicking objects in a given scene. While early on you’ll be clicking actors, camera crew, and noteworthy props, by the later stages these objects will be pretty much random as you try to find the scenes that progress the narrative; clicking a glass of water, a naked butt, or an apple doesn’t evoke that ‘detective’ feeling in the same way as keyword-trawling a computer does.
What’s more, you don’t get to choose the scenes Immortality takes you to when you click an on-screen object, which invariably means that by the late game you’ll be watching scenes you’ve already seen; beautifully put together though those scenes are – much more visually appealing than Telling Lies’ Zoom calls – they don’t make up the game’s pacing problems. Telling Lies, meanwhile, lets you choose which video to watch based on your typed keyword, and gives you an indicator over the video thumbnail when you’ve already watched a given video. It really prevents the game from getting bogged down, and means that you can glide through its story in a sensible four hours or so.
The thing is, there’s a difference between a game being ‘good’ in the sense of being well constructed within its particular niche, and everyone actually liking it. Sam Barlow’s games have had their very loyal audience for years, and the reviews of a few passersby on Game Pass don’t really matter in the face of that. But wouldn’t it be nice if more people were capable of admitting in their reviews ‘I don’t get it,’ or ‘It’s not for me’ rather than declaring something a “pile of dung” simply because they couldn’t grasp it? Probably wishful thinking on my part, but Telling Lies reveals a bit of a problem with the user reviews system (on Game Pass, if not more broadly) that could use addressing.
