Your podcast’s name is NOCLIP? We’re going to need to come up with a better name.
Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! This time, for our first episode of Mystery May, we’re going to be talking about Telling Lies. This game is a follow up to Sam Barlow’s previous game Her Story, and the two share a lot of the same DNA. Both are desktop simulations that see you searching through a database to find clips of people talking and use those clips to figure out the characters’ stories. If that sounds exactly like Her Story, well, you wouldn’t be wrong. The main difference comes in a higher level of production value and a much different narrative that is less about uncovering the mystery and more about learning about the characters. Which, I know, Mystery May game doesn’t even have much of a mystery, oof, etc. The mystery that is there, though, is interesting and the characters are all extremely well-acted. It’s hard to pin down exactly what it is that makes us feel so differently about this game as compared to Her Story, but that’s what we’re going to be trying to do over the course of this episode. We’re going to be talking about how the game uses its keyword system to create narrative threads to lead you along its story, the new mechanical elements and design of the clips that makes this game feel and play differently to its predecessor, and we uncover the conspiracy that we agree isn’t a conspiracy.
Thank you for joining us this week! As Her Story is one of our favorite games from the podcast or otherwise, we were excited to carve out the time to finally play this. If you’re a fan of the original, how do you feel about the direction this game went? Did the inclusion of more notable actors enhance the experience for you or take you out of it? Even after doing the episode I still feel kind of torn. And that uncertainty will be the perfect emotional state for the remainder of Mystery May, as for our next pocket episode we’re going to be talking about Hypnospace Outlaw, so we hope you’ll come back for that!