Heart Of Altai
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Heart Of Altai
Game
Game2019
Telling Lies
Developer Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid, Furious Bee Limited
Telling Lies (stylized as telling l!es) is a narrative video game developed by Sam Barlow and Furious Bee and published by Annapurna Interactive in August 2019 for iOS, macOS, and Windows. Ports for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One were released in April 2020. As with Barlow's previous title, Her Story, the game uses live action full-motion video of four people (played by Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra… From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
226 reactions from 3 sources (Steam reviews, Bluesky, Mastodon) · newest Oct 28, 2026 · last updated Nov 5, 2026 · How this works
Audience score
54
Mixed
103 positive · 86 negative
95% range 47–61%
| Source | + | − | = |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam reviews | 103 | 86 | 0 |
| Bluesky * | 4 | 1 | 25 |
| Mastodon * | 1 | 0 | 6 |
* shown, not counted in the score (label accuracy below our 85% bar or not yet audited).
Steam's own rating
Mixed
453 of 730 reviews positive (all languages, per Valve)
What players are saying
54% recommend · 103 yes, 88 no
Counted from the reviewers’ own thumbs up/down on the 191 English Steam reviews we collected, not by the AI. Valve’s all-language rating: Mixed (838 of 1,330 positive).
Players praise the story and acting but criticize the interface and one-sided video calls. [1][2][3] Many find the slow rewinding and long clips frustrating, with some recommending mods or guides. [3][4][5]
Liked
Representative posts
- [15]
This game's biggest problem is pacing. If you've played Her Story, you'll know that clips in that game were a minute long, maybe two - and always fraught with information, which kept players engaged the whole time. Telling Lies's clips are often 5-10 minutes, and due to the fact you're only seeing one side of an ongoing conversation they're often 5-10 minutes of silence as the other person (which we can't hear) …
- [4]
A compelling premise ruined by a terrible control scheme. The gimmick is that you're searching videos via words in their subtitles. The problem is, there is no button to go to the front of the clip. You have to manually rewind it at a maximum of 3x speed. But there's more! These are local copies of Skype calls, meaning you'll need to piece videos together based on their overlap to get the whole conversation. Which …
- [2]
It’s easy to guess why Telling Lies gets such lukewarm reviews compared to the other FMV titles by the same developer. It certainly doesn’t make a very good first impression, with multiple core mechanics such as one-sided videos or slooow rewinding that make it seem like this game is not planning to respect your time. However, I’d wholeheartedly recommend giving it your full attention anyway, because what can be …
- [3]
I was on the fence about buying Telling Lies for ages, having loved Her Story and Immortality, but seeing very mixed reviews for this one. In the end I wound up really enjoying it, but I almost refunded it in the first few minutes due to the terrible playback controls (or lack thereof) that immediately drove me insane. Fortunately I was saved by a mod that actually gives you the ability to go to the start/end of a …
- [1]
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 …
Summarised from 34 of the 225 public posts collected about this game; every point cites the posts behind it ([n] opens the post) and the split is counted from the posts’ own ratings. Updated Oct 12, 2026. How summaries are made
RottenBot@rottenbot · automated account
54% of the 191 Steam reviewers we collected recommend Telling Lies. The complaint that keeps coming up: poor video playback controls and slow rewinding. Deal-breaker or nitpick?
Critics, per Wikipedia
Telling Lies received an aggregated score of 84/100 on Metacritic, indicating "generally favorable reviews". GamesRadar+ said that the exploration of footage felt "totally organic and beautifully paced", and that "Sam Barlow has another masterpiece on his hands." Kotaku praised the story and acting, saying that "the cast of Telling Lies is uniformly excellent, delivering performances far beyond anything I've seen in an FMV game." US Gamer said that in terms of "good interactive mysteries, Telling Lies is among the best you can get." PC Gamer said "the core concept—an open-ended story that's revealed in a different way to every person who plays the game—is still enormously compelling". IGN…
From the “Reception” section of Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Critic context only — not part of the audience score.
Reactions
60 of 226 · most liked firstPlay IMMORTALITY, Telling Lies & Her Story! 🔥 halfmermaid.co Wishlist new projects PROJECT C & PROJECT D to prepare for our fresh takes on horror to blow and irreparably alter your minds store.steampowered.com/publisher/Ha...
neutral · AI labelView post →[thinks about Telling Lies] They should pay Sam Barlow a lot of money to make the FMV Halt & Catch Fire Missing Season game and give us the interactive multimedia cd-rom Cameron and Donna toxic yuri payoff we deserve.
neutral · AI labelView post →Telling Lies was a pretty disappointing experience for me. I really like Sam Barlow's Immortality and Her Story and this one shares some good qualities with them. But overall it's a little lacking in direction and acting (which is funny considering we have some notable Hollywood actors here, unlike Her Story or Immortality). One of the game's design decisions is particularly odd because it both improves the storytelling and makes the game extremely boring. You see, throughout the game you watch…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game's biggest problem is pacing. If you've played Her Story, you'll know that clips in that game were a minute long, maybe two - and always fraught with information, which kept players engaged the whole time. Telling Lies's clips are often 5-10 minutes, and due to the fact you're only seeing one side of an ongoing conversation they're often 5-10 minutes of silence as the other person (which we can't hear) speaks. I've sat through 10 minutes of a silent toddler staring at a screen as…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Telling Lies is, by all accounts, a richer and more technically impressive game than Sam Barlow's previous oeuvre, but it can't assemble any of that power into a more compelling premise. The acting is outstanding, especially Bishé and Sarafyan. The writing is nearly as good, putting together a wild and circuitous tale that keeps hiding surprises. It has some missteps, but even those feel almost like it's taking one for the team, setting up an idea or searchable connection to keep the story…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I really enjoyed her story so i thought i'd give this game a shot too despite all the negative reviews. while yes, it is annoying that the clips are on average 5 minutes long, compared to 15 seconds in her story, what's different about this game is that you have a limited amount of time to "solve the mystery", so the clips being that long and not having time to check everything is also an interesting experience and it only took me 3.5 hours to beat so its not that much longer than her story.…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A compelling premise ruined by a terrible control scheme. The gimmick is that you're searching videos via words in their subtitles. The problem is, there is no button to go to the front of the clip. You have to manually rewind it at a maximum of 3x speed. But there's more! These are local copies of Skype calls, meaning you'll need to piece videos together based on their overlap to get the whole conversation. Which means you will spend roughly 50% of your in-game time watching videos rewind…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The mystery wasn't all that engaging in this one. Skip this, go give Her Story or Immortality a shot instead.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →If you claim to enjoy fast forwarding through minutes of people nodding to unheard conversations, then YOU'RE the one Telling Lies!
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A sophomoric effort if I’ve ever seen one. Written by someone who had just finished Her Story, loved it, and was hungry for more. Right at the start you’re hit in the face with some sweeping camera work and a fully orchestrated soundtrack. While the production quality peaks with this short introduction, one thing is made immediately clear. This game had a much larger budget, and it's fully willing to use it to elevate its fantastic storytelling. The performances are more nuanced and…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It’s easy to guess why Telling Lies gets such lukewarm reviews compared to the other FMV titles by the same developer. It certainly doesn’t make a very good first impression, with multiple core mechanics such as one-sided videos or slooow rewinding that make it seem like this game is not planning to respect your time. However, I’d wholeheartedly recommend giving it your full attention anyway, because what can be found on the other end is a unique, thought-provoking, emotionally charged and…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I'm so sorry for this game. It had the potential to be a great story but it's simply unplayable. The video player is so poor and doesn't have anything other than pause, go forward or backward, and it makes the gameplay so bad. I swear, if they only embedded an youtube video instead I'd recommend this game but if the game revolves around watching videos and that itself is done so poorly, you can't expect the rest to be good.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I was on the fence about buying Telling Lies for ages, having loved Her Story and Immortality, but seeing very mixed reviews for this one. In the end I wound up really enjoying it, but I almost refunded it in the first few minutes due to the terrible playback controls (or lack thereof) that immediately drove me insane. Fortunately I was saved by a mod that actually gives you the ability to go to the start/end of a clip as well as going 2 or 10 seconds backwards/forwards. It saved the game for…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Review from 2020: A follow up to Her Story that didn't pack the same punch. The trickle of story was neat like it was the first time around and the videos were well acted, the problem arose from videos having long chunks of time where it was just the actor nodding and staring at the camera in a response to whatever was being said in the other video. At the end, the story was okay but nothing ground breaking or nothing that was left up to interpretation like Her Story was
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →They took a bad interface from Her Story, and made it worse somehow. And while Her Story had immersion as an excuse, this is running on what's supposed to be a modern platform. So that fact the it starts videos in the middle, and you can only rewind very slowly, is mystifying and unjustifiable. The acting and story, once again, are pretty good. But not enough to subject yourself to the pain of sifting through them.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The story and acting are pretty good. That is the only good thing I have to say about this "game". Playing this thing is very annoying. I'd suggest just using a guide and looking up the keywords and bookmarking videos. Then just watch them in order. The reason for this is because each video has to be manually rewinded like a vhs tape and some of them start in the middle. This is tedious for no reason. Also stupid that you can't have both sides of conversations play at the same time. Watch 1…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Previously I played Her Story and really liked it. This game in many ways is the same as Her Story. But my expirience with this one was not good. Begining of the game is quiet harsh. At the beggining you were presented with first videos and first keyword. After watching these first videos, I was not quite sure, what exactlly I was suppose to find. I enjoyed middle part of my playthough. At this point in the game I was already familiar with main characters, and it was interesting to collect…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The game is a hell in UX standarts, in the sense of the game is virtually unplayable. Considering its a video collection and there is no way to choose the starting point of a video without waiting 1 min of backing a 4 minute video that has pauses for half of the video time, i wanna die every time i have to watch a new video. If it had a "compare-mode" or something like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TIMESTAMP BAR, this game woudn't be so jarringly painful to play. I don't recomend this ♥♥♥♥ to anyone who came from…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Just give us a proper rewind button and stop wasting our time.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →'telling lies' is a totally skippable fmv game and by far the weakest fmv game of sam barlow/half mermaid's output. i have 100% 'her story,' 'telling lies,' and 'immortality,' and 'telling lies' just seems confusingly thin when compared to the other two games. the acting is quite good and the story is fine (if not all that engaging), but there is so much padding that seems pointless in the overall scheme of things. one of the four characters in particular that is used to promote this game…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The story itself is very interesting, but as a video game it does not work. I click a video and then I have to manually rewind it to get to the beginning of each video. That is a horrible decision. Just look up the story on Wikipedia and save yourself the time.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A poor follow-up to Her Story, which even with some flaws, is a great game. A bigger budget, more complex story, and higher profile actors don't have the game from having an overall weak story. Most importantly - gameplay loop goes from super quick and engaging in Her Story to super awkward with looooong moments of silence and dumb facial expressions as your watching basically half of a conversation. Only buy it if it's on deep discount
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Sooooo boring and tedious, skip this one and play Her Story and Immortality instead </3
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Obviously I’ve written an actual book about IMMORTALITY (more on which *very* soon) but Telling Lies is a wildly underrated game, full of fascinating frictions - and a quartet (at least) of great performances. Perhaps the Metroid Prime-iest game of Sam’s oeuvre?
positive · AI labelView post →This spiritual sequel to Her Story works well to build an immersive story that is well worth the klunky interface. It is an FMV game, so there aren't really any video game graphics to talk about. Apart from the interface, it can only be judged in terms of purely cinematic criteria. Yet, everything works to create a voyeur modern spy movie atmosphere. You would not think those videocalls were shot using traditional cameras and not just screen capture software. The music seems non-existent at…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I think the best way to "play" this "game" is to watch the movie on YouTube. Some people took the effort to piece it together. I got the game to support the developer. It's an as bad idea as you'd expect that you can only see one side of a dialogue. The movie itself is good.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →While I still think you should give this game a chance, especially considering the terrific acting and interesting gameplay I just couldn't be engaged in the story. It felt unnecessarily drawn out and I didn't find the will to properly finish it.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →"Telling Lies" hinders the detective work due to the lack of a few key features that, in my opinion, would significantly improve the flow and clarity of the gameplay: - Enable Jump to Start: Add a quick "jump to 0:00" option to instantly return to the beginning of the video. - Enable Skip Video to Part When Actor Speaks (Skip to Next Dialogue): Add the ability to skip to the next segment where the actor speaks, bypassing periods of silence or listening. - Enable "Coupling" of Two Videos…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Didn't really like this game. It wasn't really interesting as it was just too confusing. I actually had more fun playing Solitaire mini-game, because winning that felt more satisfying. You do trust me, right?
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Game is boring af, The in-game solitaire was way more fun.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Hard to recommend. I really liked Her Story. If you liked that, you will probably like this as well. I think the overall story was more immersive, more engrossing. There is something really interesting about learning to know characters through their most mundane activities. It makes the twists hit harder, hurt more. I really enjoyed the way I got to experience the story, and I think the overall story was just generally more interesting, at all points of progress. There most boring part was…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →If you had to watch this much Logan Marshall-Green, you'd be as sick of him as these three women are.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Just watch the chronological cutscenes on youtube. 80% of your playtime is staring at people as they listen to someone else speak which you have to hunt to find the other side of, watching them sleep, and rewinding to the beginning of the clip.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Playing this game after being mindblown by Her Story a few years before, Telling Lies was an immense deception. I hoped it'd be Sam Barlow's next masterpiece, but to be honest there's infortunatly not much to save here. You can safely skip this one and buy Immortality instead.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I think this game is fine, but I would not recommend it. It has a nice cast, interesting plot and it can be engaging. But there are some issues: - fast scrolling is really slow and makes this feature almost unusable, - videos start in the middle and (because of the bad fast-scrolling) it's hard to see it from the beginning. - there is a lot of silence in the movies. You can have a few minutes of it at the time, which is getting old pretty fast. I think this is just a worse version of Sam's…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →One of the best interactive film games I've played. To me, it's a worthy spiritual successor to Sam Barlow's game, "Her Story" (a critically acclaimed success). I found it to be deeply immersive, with a heavy voyeuristic angle since the majority of content is private video calls. I grew attached to these characters quickly and wanted to understand this world and it's story. There is one specific flaw that people point out about this game: the private video calls are split, you can't see who…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →between the silent nods at the camera, and the overall confusion about what the mystery really is, i found myself abandoning this game early
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →TRUMP AND HIS ENTIRE ENTOURAGE SHOULD BE TRIED AS TRAITORS TO THE COUNTRY. BY TELLING LIES, NOW ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALE, THEY ARE SUPPORTING THE RIGHT-WING IN A DANGEROUS GAME OF BRINKMANSHIP, ONLY IN THE NAME OF VESTED INTERESTS.
neutral · AI labelView post →I didn’t finish this game because it didn’t give me the same excitement as Her Story. There were too many paths to follow, which made it feel more like work than fun at times.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Okay so, the game did leave me a bit confused on what exactly was happening fully, but I got the gist of it. I think it's worth playing when you're bored with time and patience to watch videos. You can eat or snack while playing lol. It's definitely left me not wanting to play it again because I don't think there is any replay value. Getting it for cheap, like a few bucks isn't bad.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Telling Lies is tedious and trite. It's essentially a 2-hour movie, chopped into half-conversations to artificially stretch it out to 4 hours. The biggest and most wide-spread complaint is the inability to quickly rewind to the start of a video clip, and this complaint is completely valid. The story is well-acted, but the characters are all insufferable. The storyline is extremely trite and bogged down with relentless progressive beats on race and feminism (which is odd, since the focus is…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Weird Interface that makes the game really tedious and boring. Loved the first game (Her Story). Stopped playing this one after ten minutes, hoping to get my money back.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Recommended for eclectic game players. This is a unique take on a video game. Some people will find it too slow or boring if they don't get what the developers were after in what you are supposed to DO in the game. Recommendation: Read the instruction PDF in the database file (in game). It clarifies what you can to do to advance in the game. I found this a little later in playing, and it sort of helped me to get the premise a bit better. This is NOT a spoiler, as it is just a pointer to…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I'd love a (detective or adventure) game about identifying a snitch using activist heuristics. Telling Lies was like "what if Spycops but Green Scare, and 'ecoterrorism' is bad, actually" lmfao, but I liked the desktop UI.
neutral · AI labelView post →Immortality (2024, PS5) Rating: 7/10 An interesting experimental FMV title from Sam Barlow (“Her Story”, “Telling Lies”). There are some unsettling and cryptic moments, and one really arresting sequence. But the game as a whole doesn’t add up to much. Some extremely hot men on display, at least. 😅
neutral · AI labelView post →Just as engaging as Her Story, Sam Barlow has basically created his own genre of interactive fiction. The less you know about the games before going in the better. Give it a shot, should only take about 4-6 hours to get through.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The game has its own style but it is a horrible fail in terms of implementation. The navigation in the video is absolutely clumsy and constantly fails if you play on 2 screens. The achievements, even simple TIME achievements do not work and were never fixed years later. It just looks like a spit to the face of the players: "suck it up !". I feel like after I watched a movie that won Oscars or rewards and was a nightmare to me (Anora for example?). This game would deserve an instant refund if I…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is frustrating to play without the playback control mod. I felt there was a lot of filler in the story and did not like it. The videos you have to search through are just one-sided video calls. Many videos are very long (6+ min) and usually filled with silence. It tries some new things but Her Story is definitely the better game for me.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game is so boring. Almost every time I find and watch a new video, I feel like it's a complete waste of time. For example, you watch a guy who looks at the camera and after 2 minutes he pronounces only one word "Wow", you just wait for his conversationalist to tell him a story((( In another scene you just watch people sleeping, what is wrong with this game? If you compare this game to Her Story. The developers looked at the success of Her Story and decided to lengthen the game this way,…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Her Story and especially Immortality are much more interesting Give this one a miss
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →DO NOT REDEEM! I've been sitting there more than half of the time rewinding and sitting through empty monologue footage trying to pick up keywords to progress in the story progress is just an endless stream of more empty monologue footage. If I wanted such a mundane activity in my life I'd already applied with secret services myself. Can't believe I'm wasting even more time on this game writing this review...
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →nice to play once
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Oh god I wish I liked this game but it's insufferable from beginning to end. The "main" character is a creep who spoiler alert [cheats on his wife with a teenager to try and frame her for terrorism, knocks up the teen- and doesn't once question if its weird that the teenager has the same type of toy his daughter has. amongst many others. Obviously a protagonist doesn't have to be likeable persay, but it feels like we're supposed to at least sort of be on his side since we're basically viewing…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I got this game to play with my mom and I genuinely could not get through it. The pauses in the videos made it such a chore to get through, with the two of us just sitting there as the characters would sit there and listen to a side of a conversation we couldn't hear. Even going on for a minute or two of just silence with maybe a word or two said by the character on screen. Interesting concept but a chore to get through
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The only engaging part of this game is figuring out it was based on real events. However, the gameplay, which barely exists, is so garbage it undermines the entire thing.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →
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