Telling Lies, the follow up to Her Story, kinda sucks

[Legend]

In great mystery games, there is always a great revelation. It can be a twist, something that recontextualizes everything else, or even just a confirmation of something you feared.

Telling Lies however just becomes busy work. The game starts strong yet I quickly ran out of interesting discoveries. It felt like I finished the game in 3 hours and then had to wait another 3 hours for the game to arbitrarily end.

In Her Story there is a reason for both the player and in game player character to be searching a video database. You both want answers and an understanding of what happened. In Telling Lies, both the player and in game player character are equally bored and unmotivated.

7/10 first half, 2/10 second half.

Spoiler for Hidden:

<br>Rewinding videos sucks. All the empty spots in videos sucks. I get that they wanted people to jump into the middle of a video instead of watching the whole thing, but they did not pull it off. Unlike Her Story, it feels far more artificial and gamey. It&#39;s designed around you playing the way the devs intended vs you pursuing your goals.<br><br>The video I found that I thought would be the end game was David blowing himself up. It was the biggest revelation and I felt like every detail past that point was uninteresting. Why would I need to watch every conversation between him and a partner when I already understand their family dynamic? In universe why is Karen, the woman you play as, caring either? She worked with David and knew all of this. Why would she destroy her career to learn a little bit more? Why would anyone care about these videos being leaked? The game has multiple endings so I think the devs didn&#39;t want to have answers. They left it open ended so the player&#39;s own motivations control her, but imo they executed that very poorly. Could have been greatly improved if there were multiple ways to end the game, such as the current leaking but also simply deleting the info or selling it.<br><br>

[kitler53]

yeah, i heard that.   

going to play that next one?  immortality?   from a guy that's played none of the above i think it has the best looking trailer.

[Legend]

yeah, i heard that.  

It's funny. 84 on metacritic yet a 61 user score and 66 positive rating on steam. It's rare for steam ratings to be worse than metacritic ratings so I can only assume journalists got this one wrong.

going to play that next one?  immortality?   from a guy that's played none of the above i think it has the best looking trailer.

I'll try it since it'll be "free" on gamepass, but I doubt I'll finish it unless I get hooked. With Telling Lies I only kept playing because I thought for sure something major was still to come (it didn't).

Telling Lies suffered from the increased production values so hopefully the same isn't true for Immortality.

[the-pi-guy]

So uh, when are you going to play the Jak series.

[Legend]

So uh, when are you going to play the Jak series.

Has it ever been free on PS+?

I'm trying to put a few hours a week into playing my backlog. All these short video games are great for that.

[the-pi-guy]

Has it ever been free on PS+?

I'm trying to put a few hours a week into playing my backlog. All these short video games are great for that.

It hasn't.
It's a good thing Jak is shortish.  

I'll get you it, when it goes on sale.  

[Legend]

It hasn't.
It's a good thing Jak is shortish.  

I'll get you it, when it goes on sale.  

Dang you must really like it!

[the-pi-guy]

Dang you must really like it!

They were some of the games that really made up my childhood. And I still like them.