Telling Lies wants to be the 'open world' of FMV games

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The investigative thriller is four or five times bigger than Her Story, with 30 speaking roles and more freedom for players.

Sam Barlow is the creator of FMV mystery game Her Story, one of our favorite games of 2015 (and one of our top 100 games), not to mention the winner of loads of awards. His next game is an investigative thriller called Telling Lies, and Barlow appeared on The PC Gaming Show with actor Logan Marshall-Green to tell us all about it. Watch the trailer above, and the entire interview from the show below.

As a spiritual successor to Her Story, Telling Lies is also an non-linear FMV game. Your character has stolen a hard drive from the NSA with about ten hours of footage on it, and you'll watch clips which will give you clues, you'll do keyword searches to uncover more footage, and you'll attempt to make sense of the story as you uncover more and more.

But it's bigger than Her Story, and considerably so. Where Her Story had a single speaking role, Telling Lies has more than 30, and it's four or five times bigger than Her Story. It also promises more freedom for players in how they investigate as they watch a large cache of secretly recorded video conversations between the two-dozen plus characters.

The actors include Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus, Spider-Man: Homecoming), Alexandra Shipp (X-Men Apocalypse), Kerry Bishé (Argo) and Angela Sarafyan (Westworld). To make things feel more real for the cast, the video was often shot simultaneously in two different locations. 

Telling Lies is due out later this year.

Below: Our backstage interview with Sam Barlow and Logan Marshall-Green at the PC Gaming Show.

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Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.