Introduction

Telling Lies is the grown-up cousin of Her Story who moved out, got a job in surveillance, and started keeping receipts. You play on a simulated desktop that has the emotional warmth of a government hard drive, and your primary activity is typing search terms into a box to pull up hours of live-action video clips - all taken from a stolen NSA hard drive, naturally. On the Nintendo Switch this whole setup feels oddly appropriate: compact, portable, and mildly accusatory when you play it on the bus. It is an investigative exercise disguised as voyeurism, which is to say it is both compulsively interesting and slightly uncomfortable, like reading someone else's text messages while trying to convince yourself you are doing it for 'research'.

Gameplay

At its heart Telling Lies is a detective story built around found footage, except instead of clambering through a physical crime scene you clamber through search results. The game presents a virtual laptop desktop, complete with a bespoke operating system, a media player, a notes pad, and a solitaire game that, for reasons no one asked for, is unwinnable because the deck is missing the king of clubs. That little touch is the game winking and then immediately looking away. You are Karen Douglas, sort of an archivist of other people's mistakes, opening a USB drive and watching a sprawling two-year tapestry of video calls. The clips are from one side of the conversation only - which is the clever bit. That means you have to infer the missing halves: who was at the other end, what was happening off-camera, and which people are lying, hiding, or performing. Control comes through keywords. See someone say 'bridge'? Highlight it. Type 'bridge' into the search bar and you get every clip tagged or containing that word. The game's small miracle is that this mechanical searching becomes your detective skill. You are not solving puzzles with force; you are coaxing a story out of buried fragments. There are hundreds of clips. The developers filmed over 100 hours of footage and condensed it down to about ten hours used in the game, although Sam Barlow estimates the content is about four to five times the size of Her Story. The main threads follow David, an undercover FBI agent working on an operation called Green Dagger, his handler Mike, activist Ava, David's estranged wife Emma, and Maxine - a cam operator who is both confessional and mercenary. As you jump from clip to clip you build timelines, link relationships, and watch how undercover operations and personal life bleed into each other until nobody looks like a reliable narrator. The Switch version retains the core interface but requires some adapting. Playing on a handheld means you will tap and swipe more than you would with a mouse, and the UI occasionally proves a little unintuitive on the console - something reviewers noticed on other platforms. Typing on the Switch is not joyous, which means your keyword searches tend to be fewer and more brutal. This is actually kind of fun in a masochistic way: you learn to be efficient, like a detective who never learned touch-typing. The game also gives you a limited amount of time per playthrough to explore the hard drive - a choice that gratefully forces focus, rather than endless treading water through every clip. Finish your time, and you have to restart if you want to see more, which incentivizes multiple playthroughs and different investigative paths. Mechanically, the search-highlighting mechanic is the star. You can pause clips, scroll forwards and backwards, and highlight words in the subtitles to search for them. Your in-game memo pad is for keeping notes; you will use it a lot and then inevitably ignore it because the clips are written to be addictive. The structure is intentionally open-ended: there are three different endings, determined by which characters you focus on. That means if you spend your time obsessing over Maxine, you get one wrap-up; if you let Ava or Emma dominate your watchlist, you get another. None of the endings feels cheap. They are less about a final twist and more about which emotional truth you decide to prioritize. The acting is another surprise. FMV games historically felt like experiments in earnestness, but the cast here - including Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé, and Angela Sarafyan - sell the conversations with a naturalism that makes the voyeurism sting. Scenes were filmed mostly in chronological order, with actors often recorded as if on actual video calls across a compound of sets. That technique gives the exchanges the spread of real relationships: small pauses, overlapping speech, the sense that these people existed before you turned on the file. That, along with smart writing, is what turns what could be a gimmick into emotional gravity. There are criticisms, and they are worth stating with the same flat voice the game reserves for its characters. The interface sometimes hides rather than helps: figuring out where to go next can feel like fumbling in the dark if you don't hit the right keywords. Some reviewers have argued the game lacks structure and agency - you are more a witness than a puppeteer. That can be liberating or frustrating, depending on whether you're allergic to linearity. Personally, I liked that the game trusts you to be curious, not to be told. Whether that counts as 'agency' is an argument best had at 2 a.m. over coffee and police procedural podcasts.

Graphics

Calling Telling Lies 'graphical' feels like calling an actor's face a painting. The visuals are live-action full-motion video, not rendered polygons, so 'graphics' equals 'how convincing do the people look when they exist in front of a camera'. The answer is: convincingly human. The Switch version compresses and streams the files effectively; nothing about the FMV falls apart on the console. Textures, lighting, and composition are used deliberately - close-ups, half-lit rooms, and the frequent artifice of a webcam frame all reinforce the game's theme of mediated intimacy. The game's visual identity is minimalistic by design. The desktop interface is sober and functional, with occasional easter-egg touches like the reflection of your avatar in the virtual monitor. Video quality varies because the clips are supposed to be recordings from different environments, but the variance feels intentional and not lazy. Porting to the Switch required scaling down bitrate and resolution, but the result is a clean, readable picture; subtitle clarity matters far more than cinematic sheen here. On a Switch OLED handheld the game can look especially sharp, but I tried it docked too and it remains faithful to the mood: not flashy, never lurid, always watching you watch them.

Conclusion

Telling Lies is a study in controlled voyeurism, a game that makes you complicit in watching imperfect people unravel. On Switch it is portable guilt, perfect for short sessions on a commute when you want to feel like a cautious investigator rather than a weekday stalker. Its strengths are its scripts, performances, and the satisfying puzzle of keyword archaeology. Its weaknesses are the occasional clumsy UI choices and the fact that it sometimes prefers mood over mission - you will be asked to care about characters without a lot of mechanical help to get you there. If you liked Her Story, this is the expansion pack to your curiosity. If you hated Her Story's typing treadmill, this might still win you over, because the stakes are emotional rather than forensic. The game won awards for user experience and acting nominations that are not there just to puff up press releases; these are well-earned. The unwinnable solitaire is the cherry on top: a small, melancholy joke about control, or the lack of it. Play it because you enjoy putting a story together like a jigsaw whose pieces are arguments, confessions, and misdirection. Play it because its cast will make you trust them and then not. Play it because, in the age of surveillance, the most fascinating mystery may be how people persuade themselves they were ever honest at all. Score: 8/10 - an intelligent, unsettling, and unusually human FMV experience that translates neatly to the Nintendo Switch, even if the keyboard makes you type like a person navigating bureaucracy with a broken stylus.

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