Her Story Follow-Up Telling Lies Has A Release Date, New Trailer

The bigger, more involved follow-up to the critically acclaimed 2015 FMV game Her Story is coming in hot. All we've known for a while about when you could play the Annapurna-published Telling Lies was that it was coming in 2019. Turns out, that's extremely soon, with the game dropping on August 23 on Steam, Mac, and iOS.

The announcement comes with a new trailer, which gives a sense of the creepy voyeuristic nature of the game. If you're not familiar, Telling Lies is about peering into the private video communications of four people, thanks to a stolen database filled with NSA surveillance files. The game stars Logan Marshall-Green (The Invitation, Prometheus), Alexandra Shipp (Dark Phoenix, Love, Simon), Kerry Bishé (Argo, How It Ends), and Angela Sarafyan (Westworld, American Horror Story). Check out the new trailer below.

As the person watching the files, your job is to dig through what are essentially a bunch of recorded Skype calls and solve the mystery what they're about and why they're important. The thing is, you can't watch the videos in chronological order--you can only search through the clips by keyword. That means Telling Lies is mostly about listening and paying attention as you watch the videos to try to glean important information that will take you to your next relevant clip. Each video also only presents you with one side of a conversation, meaning you'll have to listen carefully to intuit what the other person might be saying, so you can track down their video and get the full story.

Of course, the game is called "Telling Lies," so you quickly discover that not everything is as it appears and not everyone can be trusted.

Telling Lies is written and directed by Sam Barlow, who previously made Her Story, a game that with a similar set of mechanics. That game gave you access to a series of police interview tapes featuring a woman, tasking you with figuring out everything about a murder she'd been accused of committing. Where Her Story is a smaller experience that focuses on one room and one person, Telling Lies expands the idea significantly, giving you much more to discover as you learn about more people and how they relate to each other. It also tightens the mechanics of the game, making it easier to scrub through the videos to dissect every second, and allowing you to click on words in the subtitles that appear in each scene to search for new clips.

You can pre-order Telling Lies on PC now for $19.99 or on iOS for $6.99.