See the first teaser of Telling Lies, the next game of the creator of Her Story

The Telling Lies trailer, the sequel given by Sam Barlow to Her Story, shows that it's another JVM game, but on a much larger scale and with a budget much more important. There are four main characters this time, all recognized actors, and the player will watch them and interact with them in a much larger world than a police interrogation cell. "We invested a lot of money in our engine so we could display more than one character on the screen," he jokes. "We can do outdoor, you know, trees."

This time, the main characters are not interviewed by a detective. They were spied on and the pictures belong to them. This is personal recordings and online conversations, all collected by a government agency and then hacked by someone else to help with a hard drive. stolen. "The opening establishes the story of the setting," says Barlow. "It's settled [in the] Today, it 's dark, you see this woman run out of car in a dark apartment in Brooklyn. She opens a laptop, she pulls out that hard drive that she has on her, she plugs it in, and she has that stolen copy of a NSA database. "

While he was looking for the idea of ​​his game, discovering Optic Nerve, a program used by the British monitoring agency GCHQ to intercept images from Yahoo webcam discussions, and similar means used by security services like agents from the NSA and MI5, Barlow noted an obvious similarity in how people's data was stored. "It was his damn story," he says. "They all have these video clips, they are tagged and indexed."

Since the recordings are personal, filtering them will be a very different experience than separating interrogation videos to solve a murder. "Similar to his story, you go through topics, names, events, places, phrase turns, but you get that extra layer of fun because for me it's a lot of relationships, a lot of things." 39, domestic spaces, intimate moments, people in the rooms talking to each other, pillow discussions, nighttime conversations between people, family affairs. "

Barlow felt that Telling Lies was bigger than his story, four or five times. And in addition to being longer, it will have even more density. He says the game has been more difficult to do (he has several collaborators and a co-author this time), but for Barlow, this is part of the call. "His story had only one speaking role," he says (played by Viva Seifert). "I think we had 30 or 40 different speaking roles in [Telling Lies]. It takes place over a period of two years, so there are many more – it covers time and space in a very different way from its narrative and very interesting.

"I finished his story and did not immediately want to do a direct follow-up, which my accountant would probably have thought was a more sensible thing to do." Some people said: "Do another one with a person different to a seat, and that's a different crime. "I loved it, start over again." But I need something exciting, risky and weird for to be interesting to me. "

Telling Lies explores a group of characters with interlaced narratives and does so without the impulse to solve a murder to push the player forward. "What I liked in his story, it's" you must be a detective, "but you sort of have an idea of ​​what happened," says Barlow, "and the The majority of the experience is then digging into this strange gothic story of this character.

"[Telling Lies] It's really me who looks at his story and says, "I loved this thing, I loved diving into this character's life and feeling like a very intimate dialogue was going on."

The topic of invaded privacy became more relevant to Barlow when his 10-year-old son had his own phone. "He's just on the periphery of social media and all that stuff," says Barlow. "He is very early in adolescence, but I have all his passwords.I know exactly which sites he is looking at, and as he is more interested in the world of the world." I will always be there to make sure that he is safe and stalking him, I can see where he is supposed to be where he is. "

He is, he says, "super-invasive" and reminded him of how comprehensible parenting concerns become a nightmare when they are applied to the adult population of entire nations, with security organizations acting as caregivers concerned on us while we sleep. "This metaphor is used by governments who are now using the same logic and saying," Yes, we are spying on everything you do, but it is to protect you. We love you and we are a big family. "

That did not stop Barlow, as he says so well, from "bringing the NSA to my son". The concern of a parent for his child justifies a certain degree of espionage. "I have to make sure the YouTubers will not turn him into a Nazi," he laughs.

Telling Lies will be released by Annapurna Interactive later this year and will be available on Steam.