The follow-up of his story takes place on a hard disk stolen from the NSA.

When Sam Barlow followed how people played his game of 2015 His history, a narrative-based mystery that focuses on images of fictitious police interviews, he was surprised to discover how many people had devoured him. There are 271 video clips that make up the story of His history, but the deliberately large search engine of the game allows players to see only five at a time. There is no need to watch all the clips to solve the mystery of the murder in the game. A breakpoint is even communicated to the player when he has seen enough to solve the central puzzle.

But Barlow, who spoke with Polygon last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, found that many more players than he expected had watched each clip, telling each story of the game.

"Obviously, this is a video game," said Barlow. "I also made the mistake of having the grid that showed you all the clips you had not seen. But a ridiculous percentage of people hundred percent His history against all the anecdotes and statistics I know by making good video games. "

While His history is centered on narrative and takes about two and a half hours to complete, Barlow says that he is trying to prevent those who play his next game, Tell liesto treat him the same way, because he thinks it's an easy way to make the experience less enjoyable.

"I personally have struggled with this idea of ​​more open games, because of the way I play Zelda games," he said. "It's the desire to be 100% and to flush this game and slowly deprive it of all joy."

Tell lies is an expansion of ideas from His history, using video recordings of four different characters to weave a story together. Barlow and publisher Annapurna Interactive filmed four actors – Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus), Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse), Kerry Bishé (Stop and catch the fire) and Angela Sarafyan (Westworld) – in video calls staged with each other.

With four interconnected stories that take place over two years, Tell lies is a much more meaty game. (Barlow estimated that he was four to five times bigger: "It's accidentally slightly much bigger than His history. ") The 49-second trailer just gives the tone to the game, and the only details provided by Barlow about the plot are the basics of the game: Tell lies is installed on a laptop connected to a stolen NSA hard drive, which contains all recorded video conversations. The central mystery of the game has still not been unveiled, but as in His historythere is a search box and each video clip is searchable.

Sam Barlow / Annapurna Interactive

But unlike His history, Tell liesVideo clips start with the word you searched for, which means players can end up at the end of the clip and have to go back and see the entire conversation. In addition, they receive only half of the information – each video contains only its own sound, not the dialogue to which the person responds.

Barlow said Tell liesThe video cleaning function is intentionally tactile and slow, so players can not quickly return to the beginning. But as each word in a call is labeled as a search option, there are always new threads to follow instead of staying in a clip.

"I wanted to create something bigger, bigger and more messy," said Barlow, "and to get people to lose it and not have to grow the material and extract it." all information. I want you to be distracted by something that someone has said and – boom! – jump in another clip.

The torn principle of the headlines of Tell lies has allowed Barlow to create a larger project – a project that, he hopes, will allow players to get lost in an information rabbit hole and get out after seeing their own version of it. ;history.

"Pbading through this timeline of events, clashing with obstacles, creates this really interesting perspective on a story that would be very carefully calibrated if it was a movie," Barlow said. "But you have the magic of feeling like you've stumbled on some of these clip arrangements. You discover things you do yourself. "

Tell lies has no release date, but Barlow said he would like "to have it in the hands of people this summer." This will happen on Mac and Windows PC.