Telling Lies on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Four private lives. One big lie. Search through secretly recorded video conversations to discover the truth. The successor to the acclaimed Her Story.
Telling Lies is a mystery, fmv and thriller game
developed by Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid and Furious Bee Limited
and published by Annapurna Interactive.
Released on August 23rd 2019 is available on Windows and MacOS
in 12 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Latin America, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 1,231 reviews of which 786 were positive and 445 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.2 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 18.49€ on Steam, but you can find it for less on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified Telling Lies into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Telling Lies through various videos and screenshots.
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: 2.0 GHz Dual Core Processor
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce 8800 or equivalent
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 4 GB available space
MacOS
- OS: OS X Yosemite
- Processor: 2.00 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Storage: 4 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Well, this game is exceptionally well-designed in terms of the acting, realism, and the very precise writing that's necessary to ensure the player uncovers the story gradually but reliably, but it's quite poorly designed in regard to the actual user experience. The worst part is that each clip is only one side of a conversation, so you have long stretches of time where the character is just staring silently at the camera. Some of the clips are pretty meaningless, as well. You can fast-forward through the videos, but if you try to grab your note app to write down a keyword, you lose your spot in the video, which is really annoying. Also, a keyword will take you to the precise part of the clip where that word is used, which necessitates rewinding through sometimes several minutes of footage to see the entire thing. So, I think LESS realism would have actually been optimal here. But, well, it's an interesting experience, and the story is interesting.
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Nice & interesting, with a running time of your average feature film and way better than many A-movies. HOWEVER, the idea of having to watch one side of a dialogue (with the actor reacting for 30s to the other side's responses you can't actually hear) is absurd. It should have been an obvious feature to enable "coupling" of two videos of identical length (once you track them down) and playing them simultaneously, to get the full back-and-forth between the actors. I kind of 'finished' it, with a few gaps in the plot left, but I don't care enough to replay or dig deeper, mostly due to the problem I mention above.
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I recently complained to a friend about investigative games. Open-world private investigative work from the safety of my couch sounds wonderful, but game designers couldn't possibly implement that. The structural limitations of a constrained action set undermine any real sense of freedom. Instead of being the PI, I'm just watching one. Creator Sam Barlow has figured out if he not only limits the action set, but cripples it -- reduces it to a bare minimum -- somehow, ironically, the freedom is resurrected. That entire action set: (1)Search a video database using keywords. (2)Watch video. That's it. Like a proof of concept, I'd already enjoyed the smaller-scoped Her Story before I started this. Nonetheless the first hour was excruciating. Boring (albeit beautiful) people talking about boring things. With no "start at beginning of clip" function when searches dumped me into the middle of clips, forcing minutes wasted holding rewind buttons. And no way to combine the two videos containing opposite sides of a conversation, so I had to sit through each conversation twice. Then *poof* it's three hours later, and I'm a full-fledged PI. Or a despicable voyeur. Take your pick. I've mastered predicting the unheard party's responses to unlock both sides of every story. I've carefully curated a list of keywords for tactical digging. I'm hooked. None of this would work without great acting and writing. Both are top-notch. No big stars, but you might recognize the leads from underrated works like Halt and Catch Fire, Westworld, or tick, tick...Boom!. Aside from a mid-credits epilogue, the writing never strays into theatricality. The characters' reactions feel as candid (or appropriately coy) as you'd expect from found self-recorded video. It's the closest I've ever come to the thrill of investigation. Well, outside of creepy and regrettable social media stalking, but that's a story for another day.
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Telling Lies definitely represents an upwards trajectory for Sam Barlow from the Her Story days in terms of scope and ambition. I suppose that comparisons between this game and both its predecessor and successor ( Immortality ) are unavoidable, both because of Barlow's unique style and also because there aren't that many decent FMVs out there. The reviews are very mixed, and I think I can get why: the story itself is less riveting than either Her Story 's or Immortality 's (it's also possible that I was just unlucky to get very important videos in my first two hours of play and connected the dots together quickly), and the gameplay suffers from endless mandatory manual rewinding which in the end probably accounts for a couple wasted hours. Personally, I was able to make abstraction of that problem to focus on the interpersonal drama that's the heart of Telling Lies . I do think the game does a very good job of showing the complexity of the relationships between the characters: Barlow writes women in particular, in a way that is consistently engaging, and I really loved all three actresses here. Basically, this is not a Must Play game, but if you have tried other FMVs and enjoyed them, I think Telling Lies is one of the stronger games of the genre. Nevertheless, it is more for the completionists, and if you want to only play one Barlow game, I'll advise to try Immortality instead.
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Bottom line up front: The UI/navigation in this game can sour it for many people; it didn't for me. If you like other Sam Barlow/Half Mermaid games then give this a try (you can always refund it w/in Steam's restrictions). I let the negative reviews on account of the UI/navigation steer me away from this for a long time and I now regret that. It is phenomenal. The review proper: 'Telling Lies' adopts a very similar gameplay experience as its predecessor, 'Her Story': type a word or phrase into a database search box, watch a clip, use info in that clip to inform future search queries, and unravel a mystery all while doing so. (If you have not played 'Her Story,' I strongly recommend doing so before purchasing this game; it is slightly simpler but will act as a good litmus test for whether 'Telling Lies' will jive with you.) The story is much stronger in 'Telling Lies,' if only because you engage with a greater number of characters (roughly four main ones). By the time one reaches the end of the game (having watched such-and-such many videos, including certain key ones) they are suffused with the narrative's themes, subtext, and irony. It is a slow burn, but one well worth enduring. Fortunately, Water is Life. The black eye on this game, as most negative reviews single out, involves how one navigates the videos. Unlike 'Her Story,' most of 'Telling Lies' 's videos come from two-way FaceTime-style calls. That means some videos will have minutes-long breaks of silence from one party, indicating its complementary video to involve someone else talking for that time. The game allows for fast-forwarding and rewinding, but the maximum speed at which one can do so can still be painfully slow in many cases. When choosing a video to play it will start at the time during which the relevant word the player searched is tokened by its speaker. In a 9-minute video whose search term appears at the end, rewinding to the beginning at max speed can take minutes. Even if patience is a virtue, in gaming and in life, no virtuous person enjoys spending minutes at a time rewinding a video. Some have suggested that it would have been useful to have a synchronization function that, once one has identified a correct video-pair, they can synchronize them in order to watch both simultaneously and experience the conversation in real-time, rather than trying to piece it together by going back and forth between the clips. I can't say I disagree, but I wouldn't say this would necessarily make for a better game, just a different one. The lack of such a function didn't bother me in my playthrough. And one can always watch YouTube videos of the completed video pairs afterwards. Overall, I strongly recommend this game for fans of Barlow/Half Mermaid's other FMV titles. Do not let the negative reviews stop you from at least trying it.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Telling Lies is currently priced at 18.49€ on Steam.
Telling Lies is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 18.49€ on Steam.
Telling Lies received 786 positive votes out of a total of 1,231 achieving a rating of 6.22.
😐
Telling Lies was developed by Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid and Furious Bee Limited and published by Annapurna Interactive.
Telling Lies is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Telling Lies is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
Telling Lies is not playable on Linux.
Telling Lies is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for Telling Lies. Explore additional content available for Telling Lies on Steam.
Telling Lies does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Telling Lies does not support Steam Remote Play.
Telling Lies is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Telling Lies.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 25 January 2026 19:32 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 24 January 2026 14:26 |
| Steam price | 29 January 2026 04:42 |
| Steam reviews | 27 January 2026 05:49 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Telling Lies, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Telling Lies
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Telling Lies concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Telling Lies compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
4
Developer
Sam Barlow,
Half Mermaid,
Furious Bee Limited
Publisher
Annapurna Interactive
Release
23 Aug 2019
Platforms
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