The trailer for Telling Lies, Sam Barlow’s follow-up to Her Story, makes it obvious this is another FMV game—but one on a much larger scale, and with a much bigger budget. There are four main characters this time—all recognisable mainstream actors—and the player will be watching and interacting with them in a world much larger than a police interrogation cell. “We put a lot of money into our engine so now we can render more than one character on screen,” Barlow jokes. “We can do exteriors, you know. Trees.” This time the main characters aren’t being interviewed by a detective. They’ve been spied on, and the footage is their own. It’s personal recordings and online conversations, all collated by a government organisation and then hijacked by someone else thanks to a stolen hard drive. “The opening establishes the frame story,” Barlow explains. “It’s set [in the] current day, it’s night, you see this woman run out of a car into a darkened apartment in Brooklyn. She opens up a laptop, she takes out this hard drive she has on her, she plugs it in, and she has this stolen copy of an NSA database.” While researching the idea for his game, reading about Optic Nerve—a program used by British surveillance agency the GCHQ to intercept images from Yahoo webcam chats—and similar ways security services like the NSA and MI5 record people, Barlow noted an obvious similarity in the way people’s data was stored. “It was fucking Her Story,” he says…. [Read full story]