Last updated on January 16th, 2026 at 08:15 pm
Telling Lies – Word Game Review
Telling Lies is a Word/Adventure/Entertainment game from Annapurna Games, LLC, first launched in 23rd August 2019.
It’s rated 17+ and currently has 106+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Telling Lies Stand Out
A Video Game About Private Conversations
An investigative thriller game with non-linear storytelling, Telling Lies revolves around a cache of secretly recorded video conversations. Starring Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé, Angela Sarafyan and directed by Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
How does it work?
Telling Lies sits you in front of an anonymous laptop loaded with a stolen NSA database full of footage. The footage covers two years in the intimate lives of four people whose stories are linked by a shocking incident. Explore the database by typing search terms, watch the clips where those words are spoken and piece together your story.
Unlike anything you've played before, Telling Lies is an intimate and intense experience. A game where you decide the truth.
This Word game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Telling Lies is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 30th August 2019
Recent improvements include:
Thank you for playing Telling Lies!
This version includes key bug fixes, including enhanced input for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Download & Availability
Telling Lies is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This game really sucked us in. Its been a long time since we stayed up too late playing a game, but we really came to want to know about the characters and unravel the mystery.
As we mentioned in metacritic before there are so many advantages for this game Sam Barlow is a master of story tellings and we really wanna see this man working on the Silent Hill franchises again and the acting and the atmosphere of this game is cosy and has a relaxed ambiance with dark materials.
But gave it 5 stars right away based off the originality. It seems pretty intuitive so far, but Is a game like none we remember playing. Not sure it will last that long but def High praise for something totally different.
Wow. What a fun ride. We enjoyed host of things about this game. Please make more.
We hope you dont have ocd over uneven things ;).
So we downloaded on our iPad (large file for videos Im sure) at 11:00 at night just to try it out. Four hours later! Fun to try and match videos. We think Ive got the overall story figured out, but still fun to see the filler videos. First challenge was trying to determine what was the first and the last video. Problem: no sound on our iPhone8, but experience is better on iPad.
Important Note: After over 10 hours play time, the game suddenly started crashing repeatedly on startup, impeding all further progress. We were driven mad trying to figure out why and thinking we had lost all that time and might have to start over… We even came and wrote a one star review detailing this issue as unacceptable (which it would be)… BUT we figured out the issue has something to do with Bluetooth audio! We play almost all our iPad games with audio going through Bluetooth to our headset. Never had a problem with it. After we left our review here, we decided to try a few more random things to get the game to avoid crashing, and one of those things was turning off the iPads Bluetooth and viola, game started up and allowed us to continue playing without any further issue… WHEW! Devs, please look into this as a possible need to patch; most people who experience a problem like this would likely not troubleshoot as much as we have to get around it. Now that the problem is solved and the crashing has stopped, Ive been able to return to playing with Bluetooth on and have happily been back to obsessing about these characters and this enrapturing story.
Love the way the story unfolds between each player. However, like most players have stated the function to rewind and fast forward needs to have a 30 second function. It is just a tedious action when you need to go back or forward past a certain point. However, it is a great game. Story superb. Actors and Actresses are on point. The game in all just needs the functionality of the game to be a little more fast paced.
The game is good, and we had this game on our PC as well. On the mobile version, however, we cant really rewind the videos very well. Its possible, but slow and tedious. Ill attempt it again and maybe come on here and change our review. There might be something Im missing. If Im not, then its really disappointing, because the game itself is really good. As far as we can see, its only a mobile version issue with game mechanics.
Big fan of Her and the storytelling platform. Not sure if others experienced the same, but got to the end of the story in under 30 minutes. Wish it was longer.
It was definitely a mistake to make us listen to each side of video conversation separately. It means half of the time we get bored by looking at the actor just staring into the camera, and when they talk, we still get frustrated, because it means we'd have to watch equally lenghty awkward pause in another half. It should be a normal dialog. Also, scrolling mechanism is terrible. You search for a term, find a video where it's mentioned at the end, spend a minute scrolling back to the beginning, then spend another ten to fifteen seconds scrolling forward until the character finally starts talking. At least there should be a way to quickly jump to the beginning of the video. Combined with the most important character being extremely unsympathetic almost from the beginning, and only going downhill from there, there isn't much to really enjoy.
We were having an okay type playing – we're a big fan of games like her story and simulacra – we kind of noticed something in the game that has become extremely prevalent in the media today. Nazis and anti-nazis are only portrayed as hating people darker than them. There is not a single jewish character. Nothing about origins of the movement, the lack of mentioning who they targeted; the media is erasing jewish history and this game is just another one of those "the nazis are back guys" stories that once again avoids the targeted group nazis then and the ones today want to eradicate. Have we forgotten "jews will not replace us"? That chant from a bunch of white supremacists holding tiki torches? Stop trying to erase our names and the torture we still face by these people to capitalize on a movement that hasn't abandoned us, but only because we should just "stay in our lane" as if they don't know the impact and irony of those words. And this is everywhere we go. Our brothers don't have white privilege when they don their yarmulkes, hold their tefillin, or wear tzitzit. It should be a known fact that we've already gone through multiple instances where we have been told to "just pretend you're not jewish". That sentiment killed has led to massacres and yet is still peddled today, only with the added "because you're not the main target so stay in your lane" line to sound more socially aware. Jews aren't white to nazis. Even good ol' modern day skinheads don't see jews as white. They think we're the puppeteers behind anti-racist groups, manipulating minorities into joining our alleged "cause". You could have worked with that. You could have called that out. But you didn't. You made a game that involves someone fighting nazis and forgot to mention who their main target still is. And it hurts.
We really liked the first game, but this one requires you to sit and stare in silence for long periods of time as the on-screen character listens to whomever theyre video chatting with. We dont have that kind of time to waste and it can be quite boring at times. Another annoyance was the fact that most of the videos did not start at the beginning, so before you could watch them, you have to rewind, which took too much time. Its a bummer because we can tell a lot of thought and effort went into the game, but it was a waste of $6.99 for us because our play-time is limited and we dont want to spend what little time we do have rewinding videos and staring at a silent screen.
We loved Her Story, but this game is pain of rewinding videos all the time. Its so inconvenient and we gave up. Would love to continue playing if the authors do something about rewinding though.
We really liked Her Story, so we were really excited to play Telling Lies which has been on the top of our to buy list for a while now. Unfortunately, Im finding it more tedious than Her Story. The interface is really confusing and we dont like how certain clips start playing in parts where the key term you searched is mentioned (for example, the ok, love you clip in the very beginning) and when this happens, you have to rewind the entire clip, which is frustratingly slow. There is also conversations between certain people, and you have to piece them together because you can only listen to 1 side of them at a time (if you know what we mean) and figure it out. Some of the clips are awfully long, and have silent moments, which makes us become impatient. And unlike Her Story, you are unable to take notes and write down certain key terms. Im going to give it another chance later today, but we really hope that there is an update that resolves these issues. In the meantime, we recommend playing Her Story instead.
We love Her Story. We couldnt enjoy Telling Lies. The vast majority of the game is watching one side of a random two-sided conversation, which means lots of silence. The game starts you in the middle of these random videos, forcing you to manually (and slowly) rewind them if you want the full video. And even after piecing the story together, it just wasnt exciting like Her Story was. This nonlinear format worked amazingly for Her Story, here we just found it annoying and tedious.
Yeah. So the acting is great (despite the overacting done by Logan Marshall-Greens eyebrows), and the storyline interesting albeit all over the place. Thats about where any fondness ends. One man, three women, and hours wasted watching (really more time was spent rewinding, which has to be the most irritating aspect of the game) stories which never really collide. The goal of solving a mystery isnt quite present, unlike Her Story, and it frankly ruins the game entirely. Very disappointing. And the endings? What utter crap. We almost feel more robbed seeing those endings than we did when there was no ending at all. Ugh. And perhaps we missed something, but we didnt see any way to jump to the beginning of a video without having to waste time on the slowest rewind feature since VHS. So annoying it made us want to give up several times (if we could have found a decent summary online, we would have quit solely for this reason like thirty minutes in). Meh.
Ive tried playing this game on our iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 11 Pro Max. The sound doesnt work.
All you can do is watch the people! You cant do anything! Its a waste of money :/.
Interesting game but cant get through it as it keeps crashing.
This game is Terrible , why they keep making games that are too difficult The App Floerence was Better.
We kinda got unmotivated when we noticed the videos are like 5 minutes each, but the most annoying part is the slow rewinding system, Half of the game is just rewinding. It might be an interesting story but Ill never know we guess, Ill just go to YouTube, check the ending and move on with our life.
We want to finish this (potentially) awesome game.
The graphics are the only thing that is great about this game. This game is confusing af. They dont really show you how to play or what you are even doing. The game ended and we still dont know what the story was about. We are utterly confused and so annoyed that we payed $7 for this. We will try and get a refund, we dont even care about the money we just want this game removed from our memories. NOT WORTH EVEN $1.
Horrible. If you were selling us a short story we would be like cool some decent acting in here (a bit) and interesting. But as a interactive game all you do is see a bunch video and wonder whats gonna happen then its over! We fell asleep we were so bored waiting for something to happen then to wake up and play for two more mins to find its over, we couldnt believe it. What a rip.
…we wasted 6.99 and 20 minutes of our life on this before deleting it.
Wow, this is just so good. The story is excellent, and the acting is superb and totally believable. It is so rewarding to slowly unravel the stories and begin to see how they fold together. Her Story was ground-breaking. This one is every bit as good.
And keep going until it all comes together. We love the way Annapurna is taking storytelling and gaming to a whole new level. As a gamer AND storyteller this was a fun new way of interacting and participating in a world that is unknown and out of the box. Great cast, casting, imagination… Go for it.
We LOVED the experience of playing Her Story. Its such a rich story with a genuine sense of discovery from the manual searching. We are so very happy to get to relive that sense of discovery with a new narrative.
So far so good!!! Im still trying to connect the dots to this masterpiece of a game. This is really for 17 and older honestly, but the stories by these characters conversations are interesting or either touching to some point. We had to read the directions on paper within the game to learn how to play because it could get a bit difficult putting the pieces together. The gameplay is awesome without any flaws, touch responsiveness is on par without any complaints, video quality is superb..no blurry effects (on iPhone 8 anyways) and the acting is very good also with smooth performance. More downloads and ratings needed for this gem.
Its a decent mystery game. Putting the story together is fun, but it can be frustrating if you cant figure out what to search for. Not a game thatll keep you on the edge of your seat but one thatll keep you interested for a little.
Scrubbing is the issue… We need a restart video button or 30 second skip. We dove in for an hour the other night before vacation and we are afraid we uncovered most of the plot. We hope not, Ill play more today… But so far it was very easy to unlock everything. A few key words and youre suddenly down the rabbit hole. We hope there is more to the plot than what Ive already figured out, but we love the game. The production, the gameplay, the person in the monitor is awesome. Great stuff, WAY worth your time and money.
Compelling game so far. However Ive been getting constant crashing on our iPad Pro 12.9. Currently cant continue at all.
We pre ordered the game, mainly because we love mystery games and it seemed promising and an overall interesting concept. We started playing and the game play is pretty vague and you just kind of figure it out. Which isnt bad, Ive played games like this before. However, it can get a little boring and tedious. Its hard to piece together the video calls when you can only hear one side of a conversation at a time. Like, we wish there was a way to see the video calls synced once you find the other half. Also, the forward and rewind process is ridiculously slow! Omg. We search a word and it brings us to the end of 7 mins video call and it take us soooo long to rewind to the beginning. Most importantly though, we have no idea how to win this game. Like is there a real objective. There are no like check points or rewards for finding something out. Idk if Im evening doing it right. Its kind of irritating. We play for like 20 mins and then we get bored and frustrated and play another time. We wanna complete the game but its getting hard to keep our interest. Overall, the concept seemed promising but the execution is not ideal. We want to like this game but Im having hard time getting ourselves into it. Usually Im hooked by this point with games like this. Maybe its just us? Hopefully we can complete the game and enjoy the work we put into. But Im feeling doubtful.
Let us start off by saying that we were a big fan of Her Story. This one just doesnt do it for us. Its great if you like watching a movie out of order while only hearing half the dialogue. You get to spend half of your time fast forwarding through 30 seconds of some dude making reaction eyebrows into the camera. Once weve discovered both halves of a conversation, why cant we play them simultaneously.
We like the idea of the game. We see that a lot of work and creativity went into it. One of the things that bugs us is the one sided conversations, we really wish it was possible to open two windows to watch the conversations instead of trying to remember a 3-7 minute convo, finding the related video it goes with and listen and try to remember what the person youre watching now is responding to and the questions being asked or the answers. Its a lot of going back and forth. The next HUGE problem, which we will get our money back for being unplayable and broken, is the crashing. After about a couple of minutes the game crashes. Open it back up and youre stuck in a crash loop that will never resolve itself. Close out the program in the game computer stops the crash but as soon as you play a video youre back in the crashing loop. Only temporary fix is uninstalling and reinstalling the game but you have to start over and all our notes got deleted. So no kind of local or cloud save. Could be fun, nice change of pace, no saving and horrible bugs that makes the game unplayable. Update: So doing as the developers suggested, we emailed them our problem, our phone version and software version….Still no answer and its been a week now. How do you expect people to enjoy your story game when none of the story makes any sense. We get you have to piece together your own story and what not but whats the point when IT DOES NOT WORK? Not so much as a automated message from them like most developers. Garbage.
This game is not even a game. We love story driven games but this story is absolutely confusing. We finished the game with out given the footage needed to understand what happened.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.0.4
- Size: 3,186.53 MB
- iOS: 12.2 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References, Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes, Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor, Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity, Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence
- Developer: [Annapurna Games, LLC]()
Last updated: 30th August 2019 | Genre: Word, Adventure | Developer: Annapurna Games, LLC