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It rewarded methodically poring over the database. The fact that the setting hardly altered from scene to scene made the sleuthing player extra attentive to any little discrepancy. Every video clip was shot in an interrogation room with one actor. This system worked well for an investigation like Her Story, which centered on a 1990s murder. There's an incredible freedom to explore within a tightly constrained search bar. (By the time I finished my first playthrough, I had 86 search terms scribbled down and had seen only about half the clips.) You're motivated not by winning or losing but by curiosity. Telling Lies forces you to listen, because any word could be a portal to the next level or an illuminating side quest.Īnd that's how you progress in the game: by discovering more and more specific keywords. In Telling Lies, your options are as limitless as the number of words in the dictionary.Įven a well-written traditional RPG can cause your eyes to glaze over and impatiently skip ahead to the response options.
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In an RPG made by Bioware or Obsidian, you might have half a dozen dialogue options to progress from a given conversation. This is one of the most groundbreaking aspects of the gameplay: how it focuses your attention on dialogue. Every video raises fresh questions - why is the main character apart from his kid? What's his relationship with this other woman? - and every revelation you uncover registers as a small personal win.
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Or maybe that search will reveal another clip entirely. From the response "I'm not gonna tell you," you could perhaps infer that the question was "where are you?" It focuses your attention on dialogue. So if a character starts playing with his beard and talking about the tooth fairy, you can search "beard" or "teeth" and see if a corresponding clip appears. The rub is that you only see and hear one side of the video conversation at a time and have to find the other half yourself. All of them involve people talking to each other by video, and all of them mention the word "love." You can watch any of them, scrubbing forward and backward. The word "LOVE" is already typed in, so you may as well hit search. By subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy.
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