Five games to play if you liked Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

#4. Telling Lies

As I mentioned previously, FMV games got a really bad rap (somewhat deservedly) after a slew of terrible games in the 90s, most notably on PC and the Sega CD. With such “notable” games as Night Trap, Double Switch, Sewer Shark and so on, it’s no surprise the genre was essentially dead for a while. But it wasn’t the ideas of the games themselves was bad.

It’s been proven over and over again that you can tell a compelling story in the format of video games with something that is focused mostly if not solely on the narrative aspect. Those games in the 90s just almost all had incredibly poor acting, writing and production values. Make an FMV game that features good production values, acting and writing and there is an audience for it.

Sam Barlow proved it with Her Story several years ago and proves it again with the recently released Telling Lies. All you re really doing in Telling Lies is searching keywords and watching clips of people. That doesn’t sound particularly compelling on its surface. But the mystery of how these clips and the people in them are connected and what that means makes for an extremely compelling experience where you’ll want to unravel every detail and find out how it all connects. Much like Return of the Obra Dinn, if the mystery is what you enjoyed most out of Man of Medan, Telling Lies is a game you should check out.