Near midnight, a woman in a hurry returned to her quarters. She solemnly took out a mobile hard disk to connect to the laptop, opened the retina system, entered the keyword "love", and began to explore the truth behind hundreds of video clips...
At the beginning of the game, the woman's facial reflection appears in the game screen, and the player clearly knows that he is "playing" the investigator
This is how Lying begins coldly: it only demonstrates the basic interaction patterns, and keeps the story background and purpose of the game secretive. "Who am I playing?" "Who am I investigating?" "What happened?" ", all to be solved by the player.
It's like giving you 1,000 pieces of a puzzle without a reference chart for you to see the whole picture. Needless to say, it's certainly confusing.
However, game developer Sam Barlow is not afraid to make the opening of "Lying" like this, after all, "Her Story" started so cold 4 years ago, and everyone said good after playing. Popular word of mouth eventually earned "Her Story" the "TGA Best Narrative Award" that year.
The key here is that sam barlow designed the basic gameplay of "keyword search", so that the vast number of story fragments are "scattered and not scattered". Players don't really need to work hard or troubleshoot like a puzzle, just use some memory and association, follow these steps to experience the whole story in its entirety:
1. Watch a set of plot clips;
2. Extract key phrases from character dialogue;
3. Retrieve more videos by keyword sentence;
4. Repeat the steps above until the storyline is complete.
Today, "Lying" completely inherits the above gameplay and also has an edge in annapurna interactive: an "angel" distributor that has never been stingy about literary works. Lying has more characters and actors than it can tell a bigger story.
There are 4 main actors, which is much more lively than the one-man show of the previous game viva seifert
Unexpectedly, although sam barlow is not bad for money or bad people, he did not want to make a big news, but chose a realistic and honest script.
"Lying" is intended to explore some deep and complex issues in human relationships, but there is rarely the kind of "god unfolding" in "Her Story", which is a bit unhelpful. In the eyes of some players, such a story is somewhat conservative... Even boring.
Coupled with the game's non-linear narrative architecture, which allows the player to know the "end result" before learning about the "intermediate process", weakens the suspense and makes the whole script more gimmicky.
Of course, it cannot be said that the story of "Lying" has no value, nor can it be said that the film and television content in it is completely unwatchable. In fact, there are many unexpected "acting" passages in the game flow, such as rock performances, such as emotional monologues, which are still quite enjoyable.
A complete live performance
This monologue narrated with the help of toys is not shocking on the surface, but in fact it reveals a rather frightening past
Sam barlow also arranged "multiple endings": according to the proportion of players unlocking videos, viewing tendencies, generate different "investigation reports" to comment on the clearance process; in addition, will send players "preferred" characters "after the day talk" to supplement the character's whereabouts.
This report is equivalent to a "pass evaluation" of a normal game
So, in terms of script writing and film and television production, "Lying" is still a good quality; those things that are not interesting enough can probably only be attributed to the fact that sam barlow's choice of topic is too serious.
In addition to discussing the story, we also look at the gameplay and supporting design of "Lying". In this regard, "Lying" also did a good job, but it is still a little bit interesting.
On the plus side.
The interface of "Lying" is more eye-catching, the interaction is more convenient, the label notes are more convenient, and the operation is quite comfortable. There is a feature that allows players to pause the video at any time, cut words and phrases from subtitles and retrieve them directly, which is really crazy.
Also, the game Chinese support is quite perfect. Simplified Chinese subtitles are well translated, and chinese word and sentence input search is supported. In other words, the game is not only easy to understand, but also allows interactions directly with Chinese.
Since the release of the game, as of August 28, the official is still prompting the game's Chinese support problems. In my process, except for the tab management page, which sometimes did not pull to the end, fortunately, I did not encounter other localization problems.
However, "Lying" still has some places to go.
For example, "Lying" forgot to assign a reliable explanation to certain settings.
In order to control the progress of the game, "Her Story" is set to "a single search can only show the five videos recorded at the earliest time". In the era of the story, it is understandable to use an old computer to encounter this inconvenience.
Obviously, there are 35 records, but you can only view the earliest 5, which programmer's ghost design?
In 2019, when "Lying" happened, it was impossible to use a special software set up by the US information security department to develop this restriction. Is this "sacrificing authenticity for gameplay"?
What has a more serious impact on the gaming experience is that Lie forgot to add a progress bar to the video.
Don't forget that this is a game that requires hundreds of videos to browse, and cannot be separated from frequent rewinds and fast forwards! Just arranging the following video time positioning method is simply not enough wow!
Coupled with the game's strange design of "playing from the moment the search term appears by default", various uncomfortable experiences are inevitable. Imagine that the search term only appears in the last few seconds of a 10-minute long video, and the player can only drag the mouse out of the mouse to pull the rewind speed, and then press the left button to do nothing for half a day...
Lying inherits the core gameplay that has proven to work from Her Story, and with plenty of budget and staff from annapurna interactive, it's really more beautiful, easier to play, and easier to understand.
However, the various aspects of "Lying" are still a little bit less interesting. If the "not interesting enough" in the play can also be attributed to sam barlow's ambition to engage in serious storytelling, the omission in the details of the gameplay can only be attributed to the lack of attention of the developer.
In terms of current evaluations, "Lying" may have difficulty reproducing the glory of "Her Story". What to do next with sam barlow's "keyword search" narrative game doesn't seem so clear now. But in any case, "Lying" is still the largest and most experienceable work in the genre of fmv games.