Video Game, 2019
Telling Lies cultivates a wonderful feeling that at any given time there’s a wealth of choices you could make, all of them good. For each video, I would jot down possible leads, pick one to pursue, then start a new search. The process repeated recursively, branching into an endlessly unfolding array of new paths. I was content to hop from one video to the next, only to remember that nine videos ago, there was another promising keyword that could have spun me off in an entirely different direction. And yet, it’s remarkable how, without noticing, I had come to develop a solid grasp of the relationships between the characters just by following an aimless path through the videos.
The non-linear narrative is refreshing. Sometimes, it feels like you’re triangulating on the center of a mystery, step by step. Other times, you start at the center, disoriented, and each new video deepens your understanding of the truth.
By only showing one side of a video call at a time, Telling Lies halves the pace of conversationI found sitting through the speechless segments more pleasant than trying to fast-forward and rewind over them.. But just as your hearing becomes more sensitive in the dark, long stretches of silence left me more attuned to facial expressions and sharpened my imagination for the unheard words on the other side. A central part of the game for me was the trance-like experience, oddly intimate, of staring at these characters wordlessly listening to others from across the screen.