Games Like Telling Lies: Interactive Stories About Secrets and Deception

Games for players who loved Telling Lies' secrets, surveillance and deception, compared by how you uncover what people hide.

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished 16 September 2026Updated 16 September 2026

If you enjoyed Telling Lies, look for games where you uncover secrets by going through recordings, messages or private files that were never meant for you. The closest matches are:

Her Story: search a police database of interview clips, from the same creator.
Immortality: explore footage from three unreleased films to learn what happened to an actress.
Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You: profile suspects by searching their online lives.
SIMULACRA and Sara Is Missing: go through a missing woman's phone.
Scriptic: Crime Stories: the mobile app that Dead Man's Phone is now part of.
Do Not Feed the Monkeys: watch strangers through surveillance cameras.
Late Shift: a live-action crime thriller driven by your choices.

Upcoming Murder Book takes the deception theme in a different direction, putting you face to face with the people telling the lies.

Key takeaways

Telling Lies is about secrets, surveillance and working out who is deceiving whom from one side of a conversation.
Her Story and Immortality share its creator and its search-through-footage structure.
Orwell, SIMULACRA, Sara Is Missing and Scriptic swap video for private digital data.
Do Not Feed the Monkeys and Late Shift suit players who care most about the voyeurism or the live-action drama.
Murder Book is an upcoming interrogation game about unreliable accounts, planned for the end of Q2 2027.

What makes Telling Lies different from Her Story?

Telling Lies (Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid and Furious Bee, published by Annapurna Interactive, 2019) keeps the search bar from Her Story but changes what you are searching. Instead of police interviews, you have a stolen NSA database of secretly recorded video conversations. You type words and watch the clips where those words are spoken.

That shift matters. In Her Story, one woman is talking to the police. In Telling Lies, people are talking to each other in private, and each clip usually shows only one side of the call. Much of the tension comes from working out who is hiding what from whom, and from knowing that you are watching something you were never supposed to see.

A good "game like Telling Lies" therefore shares at least some of these traits:

Secrets discovered, not explained: you find the story yourself.
Deception between characters, not just a single mystery to solve.
A voyeuristic frame, such as a database, a phone or a camera feed.
No combat: the challenge is attention and interpretation.

If the interview-room side of Her Story is what you liked most, see Games Like Her Story instead. This page leans towards secrets, surveillance and private lives.

Games like Telling Lies at a glance

Game	Developer	How you uncover secrets	Format	Platforms (examples)
Her Story	Sam Barlow	Search a police database of interview clips	Full-motion video	PC, Mac, iOS, Android
Immortality	Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid	Match cut through footage from three lost films	Full-motion video	PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation 5
Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You	Osmotic Studios	Search web pages, chats and private files to profile suspects	Desktop simulation	PC, Mac, Linux, iOS
SIMULACRA	Kaigan Games	Go through a missing woman's phone and recover corrupted data	Phone simulation	PC, Mac, iOS, Android
Sara Is Missing	Kaigan Games	Search a found phone to reconstruct a woman's final days	Phone simulation	iOS
Scriptic: Crime Stories	Scriptic	Play interactive crime stories, including the former Dead Man's Phone	Interactive stories app	iOS, Android
Do Not Feed the Monkeys	Fictiorama Studios	Watch strangers on cameras and research them	Surveillance simulation	PC, Mac, Linux, consoles, iOS, Android
Late Shift	CtrlMovie	Make timed choices in a London heist	Full-motion video	PC, Mac, consoles, iOS, Android

Platforms were checked against Steam, official sites or official app store listings. Availability can change, so check the store before buying.

Her Story

Her Story (Sam Barlow, 2015) is where the format began. You search a 1990s police database and watch clips from seven interviews with a British woman about her missing husband. There is only one person to listen to, so every change in her account stands out.

Why it fits: the same search-and-watch structure in a story with a single interviewee.

Immortality

Immortality (Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid, 2022) is described on Steam as an interactive trilogy. Actress Marissa Marcel made three films that were never released, and then she disappeared. You explore the recovered footage, using match cuts to jump from scene to scene, and work out what happened behind the camera.

Why it fits: hidden truths buried inside footage, where the story you want sits behind the scenes you can watch.

Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You

Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You (Osmotic Studios, published by Daedalic Entertainment, 2016) casts you as a government surveillance researcher. After a series of terror attacks, you search web pages, social media, chats, emails and private files to profile suspects, then decide which information reaches the security forces.

Why it fits: like Telling Lies, it asks how it feels to read people's private lives, and what happens once you decide what to pass on.

SIMULACRA

SIMULACRA (Kaigan Games, 2017) begins when you find a missing woman's phone. You go through her messages, emails, gallery and apps, recover corrupted data and solve image and text puzzles. Steam describes it as an interactive horror experience with five possible endings, so expect a darker tone than Telling Lies.

Why it fits: a story pieced together from someone's private digital life, told entirely through a screen.

Sara Is Missing

Sara Is Missing (Kaigan Games) is the studio's earlier game in the same found-phone style. The App Store description has you searching messages, notes, emails, pictures and videos, unlocking protected files to reconstruct Sara's final days. It is free on iOS; we could not confirm a current Android listing.

Why it fits: a focused take on uncovering what someone was hiding.

Scriptic: Crime Stories

Dead Man's Phone, a murder mystery originally from Electric Noir Studios, is no longer a standalone app. The Google Play listing still uses the original "deadmansphone" package, but the app is now titled Scriptic: Crime Stories on iOS and Android, and its store text describes it as a collection of interactive crime stories. Check the current listing to see which stories are included before you download.

Why it fits: crime stories built for your phone, for players who want crime drama in mobile form.

Do Not Feed the Monkeys

Do Not Feed the Monkeys (Fictiorama Studios, published by Alawar, 2018) calls itself a "digital voyeur simulator". You watch strangers through surveillance cameras, research what you see on an in-game computer and decide whether to interfere in their lives.

Why it fits: it turns the uncomfortable watching in Telling Lies into the whole game.

Late Shift

Late Shift (CtrlMovie, published by Wales Interactive, 2017) is a live-action crime thriller rather than an investigation. The film plays without pauses while you make timed choices during a London heist. Steam lists more than 180 decision points and seven endings.

Why it fits: for players who loved the live-action performances and want a story that reacts to them.

Which one should you play first?

Want the closest structure? Her Story, then Immortality.
Interested in surveillance and privacy? Orwell or Do Not Feed the Monkeys.
Prefer to play on your phone? SIMULACRA, Sara Is Missing or Scriptic: Crime Stories.
Mainly here for the FMV drama? Late Shift, or browse Best FMV Detective Games.
Want to judge who is lying? See Best Games About Catching Lies.

Is there an upcoming game about uncovering deception?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia. Telling Lies lets you watch deception from a distance. Murder Book puts you in the room with the person whose story you doubt. It is inspired by real police footage and psychological interviews, and asks you to examine unreliable accounts: the gaps, the avoidance and the details that shift between tellings.

The press kit names behaviours such as Fabrication, Avoidance, Narrative Gaps and Emotional Leakage. Development screenshots show an evidence board that links statements to each other, so you build your view of the case from fragments rather than being told the answer. Cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions.

Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027. Read What Is Murder Book? for an overview.