When Sam Barlow tracked how folks performed his 2015 game Her Story, a story-pushed thriller that centers around fictional police interview photos, he was amazed to locate simply how many people wolfed it. 271 videos make up the narrative of Her Story, but the sport’s deliberately bulky search engine most effective shall we gamers view five at a time. Of course, watching every single clip to solve the game’s homicide thriller isn’t necessary, and there’s even a preventing factor communicated to the player once they’ve visible enough to exercise session the valuable puzzle.
But Barlow, who spoke to Polygon final week during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, observed that far more players than he’d anticipated had watched every unmarried clip, mainlining every little bit of story they may from the sport. “Obviously, it’s a video game,” Barlow said. “I additionally made the error of having the grid that confirmed you all of the clips you hadn’t seen. But a daft percent of humans one-hundred-percent Her Story versus all of the anecdotes and stats I recognize from making right video games.”
While Her Story is narrative-targeted and takes approximately two and a half hours to complete, Barlow says he is attempting to save you folks that play his subsequent recreation, Telling Lies, from tackling it identically, as he thinks it’s a clean manner to make the experience less exciting. “I struggled individually with that thing of greater open games due to how I play Zelda games,” he said. “It’s the desire to get one hundred percent and simply rinsing that sport and, and slowly robbing it of any pleasure.“
Telling Lies is an expansion of the thoughts of Her Story, the use of video recordings of 4 unique characters to weave a story together. Barlow and writer Annapurna Interactive filmed 4 actors — Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus), Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse), Kerry Bishé (Halt and Catch Fire), and Angela Sarafyan (Westworld) — in staged video calls with every other. With 4 interconnected memories that take region over two years, Telling Lies is a miles meatier sport. (Barlow envisioned it changed into four to 5 instances bigger: “It’s by chance slightly plenty bigger than Her Story.”) The forty-nine-second teaser trailer slightly units the game’s tone. The most effective details Barlow offered at the plot were the sport’s fundamental premise: Telling Lies is set on a laptop linked to a stolen NSA hard pressure complete of people’s recorded video conversations. The recreation’s middle mystery is still under wraps; however, there’s a search field in Her Story, and every video clip is searchable.
But unlike in Her Story, Telling Lies’ video clips start properly at the phrase you’ve searched, meaning gamers ought to locate themselves at the end of a clip and need to scrub backward to look at the entire communication. They’re additionally best-getting half of the data — each video best incorporates its own audio, not the talk that the individual is responding to. Barlow said Telling Lies’ video scrubbing characteristic is deliberately tactile and sluggish, so players can’t zip back to the beginning fast. But because every single word in a name is tagged as a seek alternative, there are constantly new threads to observe in place of staying in one clip.
