Nintendo has unveiled its latest, non-traditional gaming experience for Nintendo Switch, and just like with Nintendo Labo before it, we’re full of intrigue, curiosity, and have been left with several questions.

Yes, this is Ring Fit Adventure, something Nintendo has described as “a new type of adventure game”. It uses two accessories – the Ring-Con and the Leg Strap – to let players save the world using actual, real-life exercise routines. Nintendo has truly out-Nintendo’d itself once again.

Feel free to catch up on the lengthy trailer and press release info if you missed it, but for those ready for more, let’s take a closer look with these new screenshots and images. We’ll start with the lifestyle image collection, so that you can get a good look at what you’ll actually be doing with the thing when you pick it up next month.

As for the gameplay itself? Well, you can see some of the action right here, including a cameo from a bodybuilding dragon which, apparently, will stand between you and your goal of saving the world in the adventure portion of the game.

Finally, let’s take another look at what you’ll find waiting for you in-store. Both accessories come included with the game, all wrapped up in this neat looking box.

Are you liking the look of this? We’ve got to say, a lot of what we’ve seen does look like it should be good fun. Let us know in the comments below.

OK. When I started writing this Director’s Cut, I figured it would be an easy couple-thousand-word post. My plan was to rapidly look back at the past six months of Destiny 2 and lay out a simple outline of where we want to go this Fall. I think I still did that, but I ended up wanting to talk more about the “why”, the team, and share how we are thinking about Destiny. I remember following games when I was younger and being excited to dig in to the messages the developers put together, like Tigole’s posts on raids and dungeons back in my WoW days.

And I loved it. And I loved reading those posts.

Maybe this was all a love letter to long-form communication—a relic from a time before it was all hot takes, 140/280-character posts, and upvotes.

Let’s finish this series by looking at combat—where the action game and RPG collide—and begin the conversation about the “single evolving world” portion of our vision. (We’ll have more on the evolving world later this month after the feeling has returned to my fingers.)

Combat: The Inevitable Collision of Action and RPG 

We want the game to be an awesome power fantasy where challenge can push back on its players. As we discussed in Part I, the game started to bend in Year 2 under the weight of this Power and Destiny’s imperative that it ride the line between action game and RPG. This section is going to explore that collision across a variety of places: the UI, the player character, and of course PvP.

Part I: Damage Numbers and the 999,999 Problem

Destiny 2 was built with very different goals in mind than was the much-improved version of the game we’re playing today. Some parts simply weren’t meant to last for several years. One of those parts is the displayed-damage values relative to the player’s Power level.

This problem most clearly manifests to players as the frequency of “999,999” showing up in your HUD. As the post-Forsaken year continued, the curve that dictates the value of displayed damage sharpens into a hockey stick. The display values for Shadowkeep rocket off the graph and become almost vertical!

This inflation for damage is getting retooled this Fall. It will look like a UI numbers squish, but more crucially, behind the scenes we’re setting up the damage-display system to last. It’s important that you understand we are not nerfing your outgoing damage; rather, we’re refactoring the displayed number game wide.

We’ve also had something that, over the years, the team has come to call “The Immunity Wall.” This is a value where players cannot damage AI. In the game today, if you’re 50 Power below an enemy and you shoot it, you deal a big ol’ donut. Another change we’ve made for fall is that we’ve lowered (raised?) the immunity wall to 100. This means you can now deal damage to enemies you are up to 100 Power below. The at-Power (you and an enemy are the same Power) experience isn’t changing. This isn’t a nerf. This is a way for folks to take on greater challenges by fighting further below the Power curve.

Part II: Buffs, Debuffs, and Stacking Rules

You know it, I know it, and Gladd knows it: The way damage stacking works in the game right now is busted. Multiplicative damage combines with the exponential damage inflation above to send damage numbers to soaring heights of “we cannot continue this way.”

We’ve taken all the weapon damage buffs (these enhance the player’s outgoing damage) that can appear on the character and stack-ranked their damage effects (these are effects like Empowering Rift, Well of Radiance, Lumina’s buff, and top-tree Void Titan’s Weapons of Light). We’ve also overhauled the system under the hood, so the damage calculations use only the most powerful buff on a player at a given time. It’s got nuance to it, though: If you’re under the damage effect of something stronger than Well of Radiance, you will still receive the healing effect from the Well, but the damage bonus would come from the other buff (e.g., Lumina or Weapons of Light).

We’ve made some changes to debuffs as well (a debuff is an effect that weakens the enemy). We’ve touched the effects and durations of a number of them. These effects include Hammer Strike, Shattering Strike, Tractor Cannon, and Shadowshot (Shadowshot will now work on powerful weapons as well).

In general, only one ability buff can be active on a player at a given time, and enemies can be affected by only one debuff at a time. There are notable exceptions in the form of Exotics and weapon amplification perks (Kill Clip, Rampage, et cetera). The Exotics and weapon amplification perks will remain multiplicative increases to damage above the ability buff values.

Here’s a simple version: Buffs that apply to a single weapon (Rampage, Kill Clip, Exotics) can still stack. But buffs that affect all your weapons no longer stack. The most powerful of those buffs will be applied to your damage. I’m sure someone is gonna make a video that shows this in action on October 1st.

Part III: Supers Everywhere 

Masterworked guns. Super mods. Orbs everywhere.

Right now, for a pretty decent player running Super mods, the time it takes to gain a Super is under two minutes in PvP. If you compare the duration and damage of roaming Supers in Destiny 2 to roaming Supers in Destiny 1, you’ll see they’re more powerful now than ever before. We didn’t even have roaming Arc Titans in Destiny 1, but every time I play PvP, I get killed by one twice in the same Super. Similar to the way that deep down, we all know the damage-dealing capabilities of Guardians has gotten out of control, we know the Supers have too. Destiny 2 was overly restrictive at launch, but now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We’ll start bringing this back toward center in Shadowkeep.

On a livestream a couple months ago, I mentioned that we’re lowering roaming Super damage resistance. And we are. Seeing someone pop a Super should not instinctively make us want to run away, give up, or float off the map. We want Super kills to feel earned, and we want players on the business end of a Super to feel like they can make a big play and put down that Striker Titan. Being able to challenge someone in their Super is important, and right now, many of the Supers are very, very hard to challenge.

On top of that, more things than ever now contribute to players getting their Supers back, so we’re doing some tuning there as well. Supers will be just as powerful, but they will be a more strategic choice. As such, we’re reducing the effectiveness of orbs on refilling the Super meter and reducing the Super energy gained from kills and assists.

This isn’t just a PvP problem. Remember that series on the Reckoning in Part I? It’s all related. Supers are still very, very powerful in the PvE game—players will just need to be slightly more specific with their timing and positioning than in the past. This kind of tuning is a pendulum: We’ve swung it hard in different directions, and we’re all hopeful that these changes will begin to find a better middle ground for Destiny 2.

I know you’ll let us know your thoughts (once you’ve played it this Fall).

Part IV: Heavy Ammo Available

In Destiny 1, Heavy ammo became an in-match rally point in 6v6 matches. Once opened, players nearby would all get some Heavy ammo. In Destiny 2, Heavy ammo is a jockey-for-position speed-before-need looting game that gets played all the time. In Destiny 1, Heavy ammo felt metered, and in Destiny 2 you can defeat a team (but not an Arc Titan) multiple times with a brick for a Hammerhead.

See where is this heading?

We’re making some changes to Heavy ammo in Destiny 2: Heavy ammo will be communal in 6v6 playlists. We’re also reducing the amount of ammo per brick in PvP for certain 6v6 archetypes. It’s not exactly the same as D1 though—when a player cracks open the Heavy crate, other players have a window of time to interact with it to get their Heavy ammo.

Part V: Let’s Talk About PvP 

There has been a lot of conversation (internally and externally!) at different points during the year around the support Bungie provides PvP. On one hand, we have continued to tune the game each quarter, added pinnacle PvP weapons (that somehow ended up as pinnacle PvE weapons), tried out a ranking system in the Crucible, and returned the game to its 6v6 roots. On the other hand: We haven’t released a new permanent game mode, many game modes from Destiny 1 are nowhere to be seen, there isn’t a public-facing PvP team, and the last real thing we said was Trials is staying on hiatus indefinitely.

Let’s get some of this sorted out.

There were some really cool parts to the Emissary. Some of the gear was pretty potent (Sup, Darkest Before), but the theme felt weaker, the Trials card was less important, and the stakes felt lower. Trials of the Nine didn’t work the way we’d hoped, and Trials of the Nine is on hiatus indefinitely.

So why have we been so quiet about PvP? Well, we didn’t have a lot to say. We weren’t actively developing something to hype up. We knew PvP was going to be something everyone got for free in New Light, so it wasn’t really a part of the Shadowkeep core offering. What are we doing about PvP became a question we were asked internally, too. A bunch of folks on our team are passionate about PvP and wanted to know where it was heading.

PvP is in need of some quality-of-life improvements and restructuring. This Fall, with New Light (hopefully) bringing a bunch of new folks into Destiny and with our existing players looking for some updates to PvP, we will start by making significant changes to the PvP portion of the Director.

Today, it’s a fine balance between adding playlists and maintaining healthy populations when we’re looking at changes to playlist structures. We want to achieve a couple of goals: First, we want players to have some more agency with respect to “pick a playlist, play a mode.” And second, we want the playlists to drift back to the “everything is a factor of 3” that Destiny 1 used (and that the rest of the game mostly uses).

Player counts being based on a common number (like 3) is important. It enables a bunch of activity options for groups of friends to engage with. In Destiny 1, players could run a couple strike groups, team up for a raid, go play 6v6 PvP, split up and go to 3v3 PvP, et cetera. At launch, Destiny 2’s 4v4 PvP completely broke this pattern, and we want to reset that bone with PvP this Fall.

We’ve revised the playlists a lot, and here’s how it’s going to work:

We wanted to make sure we could test Elimination on some familiar maps, so we’ve brought back Widow’s Court and Twilight Gap. We want to play with you, and watch you play Elimination in this combat sandbox and see how it all fits together.

We’re also changing how we do matchmaking. With a bunch of potential new players entering Destiny via New Light, we don’t want PvP to feel like you’re being told it’s time to learn to swim as the helicopter door opens over the Pacific Ocean. So, we’ve made some changes to separate the new swimmers from the Olympians.

Additionally, we’ve also taken a longer look at matchmaking and overhauled the skill-matching system. In the game today, Quickplay is the only playlist that doesn’t have some version of skill matching in the game. We’re preserving that behavior (connection matchmaking) in the 6v6 Classic Mix playlist. Here’s what gets really annoying about skill match:

There’s much more complexity and nuance to an evening of PvP than those two statements above, but they do accurately capture the core problem: a lack of match-to-match variety. Sure, for a bunch of Terminators, a night of stomping might be a blast, but what about the folks on the receiving end of that business? This is where it gets tricky to improve matchmaking—people generally tend to focus on their own experience in their feedback.

We think variety across an evening of PvP is important. This Fall, skill match should ensure a wider variety of matches, regardless of player skill. Some matches should be tense and thrilling, while other matches should be stomps. This philosophy should also apply to the top players, so they don’t feel like every match is a sweatshow, either.

We’ve refactored how players gain Glory ranks with these skill match changes—we’re factoring in your skill value to Glory gains and losses, so that number can more effectively represent skill.

We’ve also made a number of quality-of-life changes to Glory, Valor, and Infamy to make losses less punishing to your streaks.

Once the above changes go live in October, we’ll be watching, listening, and reading as you check them out.

An Evolving World

There’s an aspirational vision for what “evolving” could mean for Destiny. Someday, Destiny could become a dynamic world, where the world changes each season. We want playing Destiny to feel like you’re playing in a game world with true momentum, a universe that is going somewhere. A game where things are happening—not just in terms of new items and activities but also in terms of narrative. It’s frequently seemed like Destiny was treading water in terms of moving the world’s narrative forward. We want to tackle this in Destiny 2’s third year.

During Season 8, a new situation will unfold on the Moon (I’m being cagey here only because I am reluctant to spoil anything). Over the course of the season, parts of the game will change before the situation culminates in an event that will ultimate resolve it, and its content will be exhausted. But this resolution sets up the events of Season 9, which again adds something new to the game and resolves it, something that too will go away, but not before setting up Season 10, et cetera.

This differs from last year’s Annual Pass, which permanently added activities to the game. This year will see events that last for three months and offer new rewards to chase, although at the end of that period, some of the activities will go away. For a time, the rewards will too. But we also acknowledge that part of playing Destiny is collecting all of the stuff, so in future seasons the weapons and Legendary armor associated with these seasonal activities will be added to other reward sites.

Technical limitations aside, we also don’t think making a game that grows forever is Destiny’s path forward. It’s why the second component of the vision is a single, evolving world (to clarify, that single evolving world doesn’t mean there’s only one destination on the Director—that’s not where we’re heading!).

You were there with your friends, got the gear and weapons to remember it by, made the memories, and changed alongside Destiny.

In late August, we’re going to talk more about the Annual Pass and how it’s continuing to evolve.

Closing Time

The Bungie team has worked incredibly hard, and we’re excited to get Shadowkeep onto your hard drives in October. Big thanks to them for their hard work and also for helping me put this together on a comically tight timeline. Many, many emails and work-related IMs were sent during the construction of this message.

Thanks for playing, reading, and being a part of this community.

See you soon,

Luke Smith

Mojang has pushed out 2 pre-release builds for 1.14.4. Below is the changelog. I would share more with you, but my eardrums are still ringing from the fireworks.

You can find the full announcement on minecraft.net.

• Fixed a few bugs
• Villagers now stock more items
• Villagers will now remember their gossip after becoming a Zombie Villager
• Improved performance of Villager pathfinding
• Villagers can now work without also restocking at the same time
• Gossip about players who converted a zombie villager will now last longer
• The Player Activity button on the Realm screen has been removed

• MC-136318 – Floatable mobs are unable to walk when in waterlogged blocks
• MC-151150 – Entities (Villagers) cause massive lag when attempting to pathfind
• MC-151376 – Villagers are not pathfinding towards their POI; POI detection range is too small
• MC-151810 – Mobs don’t try to avoid fall damage anymore
• MC-154214 – Chunks refusing to unload due to incorrect player ticket additions
• MC-155147 – Mouse acceleration with the new 1.14.3 update
• MC-155906 – Failed to save debug dump if the destination location contains a space

• Fixed bugs
• Suspicious stew made from poppies now gives you night vision instead of speed
• Some performance optimisations
• Added /debug report for getting more detailed information. Please include this while making bug reports about performance!

• MC-100946 – Bow with mending undraws when receiving XP while drawed
• MC-113968 – Zombies of village siege spawn despite gamerule doMobSpawning being false
• MC-113970 – Zombies of village siege do not spawn centered on a block
• MC-134964 – Unexpected error: java.util.NoSuchElementException
• MC-142037 – java.lang.NullPointerException: Initializing game
• MC-143755 – Arbitrary score/selector/NBT resolution using lectern without operator rights
• MC-143886 – Acacia leaves render improprly from a distance
• MC-146289 – Farmer villagers don’t stop to pick up their crops
• MC-147844 – Pillagers don’t pathfind around obstacles & out of water
• MC-152094 – End city/end ship generation gets cut at chunk borders sometimes
• MC-152636 – Killing a zombie right as it converts into a Drowned will drop the loot from zombie while still converting into a Drowned
• MC-153498 – Cyrillic letter Є is not included in the Minecraft font
• MC-153665 – Full villager inventory creates invisible items
• MC-153712 – Java using 100-200% CPU (MacOS)
• MC-153766 – Rabbits no longer need sand/grass in order to spawn in deserts/tundras
• MC-153892 – Mending slows down breaking blocks
• MC-154019 – Beacon deactivate sound not sounds when you break the base
• MC-154031 – villagers give away all food if they want to share it
• MC-154068 – parrots occasionally disappearing when you take them from a boat
• MC-154201 – Trying to trade with villager immediately closes trading menu for some villagers
• MC-154362 – Crossbow has to re-load when mending takes place
• MC-154509 – Bashkir letters Ҙ, ҙ, Ҡ, ҡ, Ҫ, and ҫ are not included in the Minecraft font
• MC-154668 – Invalid characters crash the game in jigsaw block input upon pressing enter
• MC-154830 – All wall signs use oak color on maps
• MC-155092 – Zombie sieges can happen on mushroom islands
• MC-155104 – when closing a menu while moving the mouse, the screen will move in that direction
• MC-155172 – Hostile Wolf AI has been broken. Wolves can no longer attack enemies efficiently.
• MC-155238 – Villagers picking up workstation through wall
• MC-155345 – ConcurrentModificationException when a player leaves an active raid
• MC-155571 – Silverfish & Endermite spawners no longer functioning

Starting at 6:00 PM PST today, members of the Xbox One Preview Alpha Ring will begin receiving the latest 1910 Xbox One system update (Build: 19H1_RELEASE_XBOX_DEV_1910\18363.7132.190829-1945).

DETAILS:

• OS version released: 19H1_RELEASE_XBOX_DEV_1910\18363.7132.190829-1945
• Available: 6:00 PM, August 31, 2019
• Mandatory: 3:00 AM September 1, 2019

FEATURE UPDATES:

Home (Experiment)

• Thank you all for the great feedback on the experimental home update. The first round of our home experiment concludes this week, and Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead users who have it will start to see the current dashboard again. This is in preparation for additional testing to the Xbox One dashboard. We’ll let everyone know when to keep an eye out for the next round of testing based on your initial feedback.

FIXES:

Dashboard

• Various fixes to UI and navigation.
• When the console goes idle, users can now navigate the tabs with a USB keyboard.

My Games & Apps

• Fixes to the download ETA timer reliability when downloading content.

Notifications

• Fixed an issue where some users would receive duplicate notifications at the same time.
• Users should no longer receive notifications while in a game asking for feedback.

Settings

• Fixed an issue where users are unable to access certain areas of System Settings pages.
• Fixed an issue where Users were unable to set their Home console in Settings.

Store

• When navigating to a product page, trailer playback will respect content restrictions.

KNOWN ISSUES:

System

• Some users have reported the console shutting down unexpectedly while using Netflix.
• Some users have reported the console shutting down while playing games.

Dolby Access

• Users are unable to complete the setup for Dolby Atmos in the app and the app is not recognizing Dolby Atmos headphones
  
  • Note: This is an issue with the Dolby Access app and the app developers are aware and investigating. 

Audio

• Users who have Dolby Atmos enabled and console display settings set to 120hz with 36 bits per pixel (12-bit) are experiencing loss of Dolby Atmos audio in some situations.
  
  • Workaround: Disable 120hz or set Video Fidelity to 30 bits per pixel (10-bit) or lower.

Gamertag

• Customers attempting to change their GT using the new Gamertag features on the console will not yet see those changes reflected on the console.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

Thank you for being part of the Alpha Skip Ahead ring! For more information regarding the Xbox One Update preview rings, check out our blog post here.

Nintendo has walked away from a UK lawsuit victorious, a win that ultimately means five of the country’s major ISPs are now required to “block or at least impede access” to certain websites that facilitate piracy on the Nintendo Switch.

The ruling, picked up by Eurogamer early this morning, specifically requires ISPs to shut off access to four websites that either distribute pirated Switch games or help modify Switch consoles to play pirated games.

“Today, the UK High Court found the sale and distribution of ‘circumvention’ devices for the Nintendo Switch unlawful. Nintendo is pleased that the UK High Court has confirmed that dealing in devices or software that enable piracy on Nintendo Switch systems is unlawful,” a Nintendo spokesperson tells Eurogamer.

Specifically, the court found that the websites in question targeted people within the UK, infringed on Nintendo’s copyrights, and had no legal justification for the modifications being offered.

The legal ruling is the latest in Nintendo’s saga against piracy purveyors, a battle that has tried to snuff out both Switch piracy and piracy of older classic games. Leading up to this lawsuit, the company moved to ban Switch consoles that took advantage of a hardware exploit found on older systems, and has been attempting to curb hackers’ efforts to crack the system since.

To name just a few of those legal efforts, Nintendo landed a win in a Canadian lawsuit against a site a few years back for distributing piracy-enabling flashcarts, filed DMCA takedowns against the parties behind the homebrew 3DS app Freeshop, and won a copyright and trademark infringement case against the emulation sites LoveROMS and LoveRETRO, all within the past few years.

Disney reportedly has plans to sell off FoxNext Games, the game development studio it recently acquired as part of a larger acquisition of the bulk of 21st Century Fox earlier this year.

A source close to the matter shared details of the discussion with Bloomberg, noting that there has been some closed doors back and forth on the subject between execs, but that ultimately Disney CEO Bob Iger wants out of the video game development business completely.

Though the publication notes that Disney declined to comment on the validity of those specifics, Iger has previously noted that he sees the Disney’s video game future as a licensing opportunity, rather than a company involved in the direct creation or publishing of games.

In those earlier comments from a February earnings call, Iger said that Disney has approached self-publishing and development multiple times, to little success. At the time, he noted that the company has historically “been great at the licensing side,” which he says also costs the company less in the long run as well.

Those comments came well after the 21^st Century Fox acquisition (which included FoxNext, among other properties) was first announced, but preceded the completion of the deal by one month.

FoxNext Games was founded in back in 2017 and is largely known as the developer of the free-to-play mobile game Marvel Strike Force. The studio itself acquired the then-fledgling dev ColdIron Studios in early 2018 and set the team to task on creating a game based on Fox’s Alien franchise.

Back in February we announced that Godot was a recipient of the annual Google Summer of Code.  Essentially this is an open source effort funded by Google where they pay students to work on open source projects.  This year the Godot game engine had 8 students working on various different projects.  At this point the GSoC is over and Godot released the results of this years efforts.

The projects consisted of:

You can learn more about the results of any individual project by clicking any of the links above or by clicking here.  If you are interested in learning how to use the Godot game engine, be sure to check out our complete tutorial series available here.  Learn more about the GSoC entries for 2019 in the video below.

GameDev News Godot

First, let’s dispense with genre. Telling Lies is a narrative game with a puzzling aspect. Though its creator insists the game isn’t voyeuristic, its whole spiel revolves around the player watching video footage collated from an intelligence archive. Although the central mechanic is not digging through dirty laundry, per se, it is nevertheless watching movies of people’s immediate and unfiltered lives. There is some perverse pleasure in breaking this taboo, in being a fly on the wall of someone’s life.

On the flipside, it provides an honest, unflinching look at their lives. Using all the raw footage, the player is meant to piece together a master account of the connections between four people and one final act, presumably extreme enough to merit all this surveillance. In pursuit of this final explanation, the game becomes a simple trawl across the videos to try to find every clip. Fortunately, the strength of the acting and individual scenes is compelling, even while the much-vaunted mystery falls a little flat. In a nutshell, play Telling Lies for the human element and scrambled story, not for the whodunnit.

Any conversation can be searched by its component dialogue, broken down into individual words. The very first keyword, ‘Love,’ springboards the scattershot search. To keep things from getting too easy, you can only see the first five results. This is the exact same method as used in Sam Barlow’s game, Her Story (review), and it’s no worse for wear from reuse. In a novel twist, many of the conversations in the videos are dialogues between characters, so the actor might be flirting or arguing with a silent second video component, which must be tracked down and mentally reconstructed to give a full picture. Splitting videos makes for a delightful exercise in conversational deduction and wit. Oh, and the ‘metadata’ of each video also includes date and time-stamps. Protip: use the rewind function to view the full video, start-to-finish. Those are all of the game’s technical tricks; the rest of its staying power comes from the story.

Said story is convoluted but not especially complex. The video clips cast a web that is finely woven, with clear connection and logical nodes. Piecing it together is disorienting, like being thrown into a whirlwind of memories, fights, inside jokes and backstory. Here’s a rough sketch of some of it. The wife back home is sometimes aggrieved, sometimes amorous, always tender to her daughter. A cam girl manages her clientele with expert discretion and finesse. A right mess of a man attends a poorly lit party and sways after a few. He’s coming on to a fellow activist, and she’d rather go home alone, thanks. These vignettes and many more besides function like brushstrokes building up the details of each person’s life and motivations. Suffice to say that all of the four central characters are under stress and laboring under some illusions. That’s about as generic a setup as it gets, so luckily Telling Lies has a strong, diverse cast of characters with competent actors bringing them to life.

The material they’re given to work with is stout. Three women whose lives are only connected by a man, his own life riddled with uncertain motivations and cutting half-truths. Most of the titular ‘lies’ involve omissions and incomplete accounts rather than outright untruths. Telling Lies is, true to its title, a perfect exercise in context and discretion. The player is wholly free and unfettered can experience every perspective without judgement or heavy-handed narration. Even while dealing with the heaviest of material, the game never veers into easy moralism. The most intense disputes unfold with their full intensity while the player sits mutely as a third party, though the player character’s identity is not a simple bystander. As more videos are accessed, the in-game laptop timer advances into the late hours of night and eventually the wee hours of morning. Reflections pass across the screen-within-a-screen. It’s a deliberately layered perspective, partially to justify the video-access gameplay through a story conceit.

The plot, such as it is, unfolds in a little over a year and has several huge events. National security, political activism, and ‘relationships’ make fodder for every kind of interaction. There are lullabies and come-hither crooners, fairytale tuck-ins and fairytale codenames. Because every player will view the archive in a unique order based on their search whims, the story is modular. Sometimes this means its emotional beats fall out of the usual rhythm, occasionally stealing thunder. If it were a less carefully constructed plot, or less interesting set of characters, the whole conceit would fall flat. Telling Lies mostly avoids this.

I’d talk details, for they are where the juicy bits are, but they are absolutely best experienced fresh. Suffice to say the game builds up its characters’ lives in the best way possible, including ordinary scenes as much as dramatic, emotional ones. Its tone is varied and generally well-considered. Unfortunately, each character’s appeal relies a little too much on their alluring status of strangers, like dimly scouting someone intriguing across a crowded room. Once they become a known factor, things start to look a little flat. The connections between them are shockingly direct and the final ‘gotcha’ is less satisfying than Her Story’s. This is largely quibbling: those who like getting inside the characters’ heads and stalking every last bit of a stranger’s life will take to Telling Lies like catnip.

By including a wide range of its character’s lives, Telling Lies mostly succeeds in telling a complete, compelling story connecting four disparate individuals. It coheres and tantalizes, but in its greater scope, becomes a little muddled in the final moments. That we’re witnesses a resurgence of FMV-style games is nothing short of a miracle, and Telling Lies remains an excellent addition. It falls short of perfection, but has all the hallmarks of a critical and commercial darling.