NOCLIP Pocket E41 - Finish Your Vegetables - Telling Lies

Your podcast’s name is NOCLIP? We’re going to need to come up with
a better name. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! This time, for our
first episode of Mystery May, we’re going to be talking about
Telling Lies. This game is a follow up to Sam Barlow’s previous
game Her Story, and the two share a lot of the same DNA. Both are
desktop simulations that see you searching through a database to
find clips of people talking and use those clips to figure out the
characters’ stories. If that sounds exactly like Her Story, well,
you wouldn’t be wrong. The main difference comes in a higher level
of production value and a much different narrative that is less
about uncovering the mystery and more about learning about the
characters. Which, I know, Mystery May game doesn’t even have much
of a mystery, oof, etc. The mystery that is there, though, is
interesting and the characters are all extremely well-acted. It’s
hard to pin down exactly what it is that makes us feel so
differently about this game as compared to Her Story, but that’s
what we’re going to be trying to do over the course of this
episode. We’re going to be talking about how the game uses its
keyword system to create narrative threads to lead you along its
story, the new mechanical elements and design of the clips that
makes this game feel and play differently to its predecessor, and
we uncover the conspiracy that we agree isn’t a conspiracy. Thank
you for joining us this week! As Her Story is one of our favorite
games from the podcast or otherwise, we were excited to carve out
the time to finally play this. If you’re a fan of the original, how
do you feel about the direction this game went? Did the inclusion
of more notable actors enhance the experience for you or take you
out of it? Even after doing the episode I still feel kind of torn.
And that uncertainty will be the perfect emotional state for the
remainder of Mystery May, as for our next pocket episode we’re
going to be talking about Hypnospace Outlaw, so we hope you’ll come
back for that!