Case File 083 · Narrative and Game Design

How Games Use Unreliable Narrators

How games turn untrustworthy accounts into something players search, question or create, and why an unreliable story is not always a lie.

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

Games use unreliable narrators by giving the player an account of events that cannot be taken at face value, then making the gap between that account and the truth something to play with. In literature, the reader simply notices the gap. In a game, the player can often search, compare, question or even create it. Four common approaches are:

A suspect who narrates: Her Story builds the whole game from one woman's police interviews.
Fragments without context: Telling Lies hands you secretly recorded conversations and asks you to decide what is true.
The player as the unreliable source: Overboard! makes you the murderer who has to mislead everyone else.
An investigator you cannot fully trust: Disco Elysium casts you as a detective who has lost his memory.

The shared idea is that unreliability becomes a mechanic, not just a twist.

Key takeaways

The term "unreliable narrator" comes from literary criticism, popularised by Wayne C. Booth in 1961.
Games can make the player the one who detects unreliability, the one who suffers from it, or the one who causes it.
Interview footage and fragments are a natural fit, because testimony is already partial.
An unreliable account is not the same as a lie. People misremember, omit and simplify without intending to deceive.
The design challenge is to make distrust productive, so the player investigates instead of dismissing everything.

Where does the term "unreliable narrator" come from?

The concept is associated with literary critic Wayne C. Booth. The University of Chicago Press credits his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; second edition 1983) with introducing now-standard critical terms including "the unreliable narrator".

In a novel, an unreliable narrator is the voice telling the story, and the reader learns to read around it. Games complicate this, because "the narrator" might be a character on screen, a set of documents, the game's own interface or the player.

Model 1: What happens when the suspect tells the story?

Her Story (Sam Barlow, 2015) is the clearest case. Its official site describes a police database of live-action footage in which "a British woman is interviewed seven times about her missing husband". There is no neutral narrator. Everything you learn comes from her, in clips you find by searching for words she speaks.

In a Game Developer interview, Barlow said he "watched a lot of video footage of police interviews", and the interview describes the player's task as figuring out how and when to trust the central character. His GDC 2016 talk on the game centred on writing for "the player's imagination".

Our analysis: the search mechanic matters. Because you meet her answers out of order, the player has to hold earlier answers in mind and notice for themselves when a later one does not sit comfortably beside them.

Model 2: Can fragments make a story unreliable?

Telling Lies (Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid, Annapurna Interactive, 2019) extends the idea to several people. Annapurna's page describes "a stolen NSA database full of footage" covering two years in the lives of four people, and calls it "a game where you decide the truth".

Our analysis: here the unreliability comes as much from the format as from any one speaker. A recorded conversation strips away context, so even an honest statement can mislead. That is a useful reminder for anyone designing testimony: missing context can distort an account as much as a lie can.

Model 3: What if the player is the liar?

Overboard! (inkle, 2021) flips the arrangement. The official site calls it "a highly replayable detective game where you're the one whodunnit". You have eight in-game hours to make sure "someone else takes the fall", and other passengers "remember everything they see and hear — and everything you do".

Jon Ingold of inkle discussed the game's deduction system in a GDC 2022 talk, The Burden of Proof, describing how the player assembles a solution "from evidence and speculation".

Our analysis: making the player the unreliable narrator teaches the mechanics of a false account from the inside. You learn how a story has to hang together, and what happens when a witness saw something that does not fit.

Model 4: What if the investigator is unreliable?

Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) casts you as a detective with amnesia, and its 24 personality skills speak up during conversations. ZA/UM writer Justin Keenan's GDC 2021 talk, Meaningless Choices and Impractical Advice, covered the team's approach to the game's branching dialogue and narrative design.

Our analysis: when the lens itself is unreliable, the player has to question their own information as well as other characters'. It is a different kind of detective work: less "who is lying?" and more "what do I actually know?"

Is an unreliable account the same as a lie?

No, and this distinction is where many mystery stories become more interesting. A narrator can be unreliable because they are lying. They can also be mistaken, confused, stressed, protecting someone, or simply reporting what they believe.

Deception research supports caution here. People perform only slightly better than chance at telling lies from truths: a meta-analysis by Bond and DePaulo (2006) put average accuracy at about 54%. For the psychology, see Why Truthful Accounts Can Still Be Inconsistent and What Makes a Statement Unreliable?.

Our analysis: a game that treats every inconsistency as proof of guilt flattens this. A game that lets inconsistency mean several different things gives the player a more interesting problem.

Comparing the approaches

Approach	Example	Source of unreliability	What the player does
Suspect as narrator	Her Story	One person's interviews	Searches and compares answers
Fragmented record	Telling Lies	Recordings without context	Assembles and decides what is true
Player as liar	Overboard!	The player's own deceptions	Builds a false account that holds up
Unreliable investigator	Disco Elysium	The protagonist's own mind	Questions their own information

How do designers keep distrust productive?

Drawing on these examples, our view is that unreliable narration works best in games when:

There is something solid to test against. A clip, a witness or a fixed event gives distrust somewhere to go.
Unreliability has texture. Omissions, errors and lies should feel different, not interchangeable.
The player notices it first. Pointing out every inconsistency removes the discovery.
The game respects ambiguity. Some stories are stronger when the truth stays partly open.

For a list of games built on these ideas, see Mystery Games With Unreliable Narrators.

Is there an upcoming game about unreliable accounts?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds in Zagreb, Croatia, built around the Model 1 situation: a suspect telling their own story. The game is positioned around examining unreliable stories, and its press materials name behaviours such as fabrication, avoidance, narrative gaps and emotional leakage. Development materials show an evidence board where fragments of a statement are linked to one another, and a case select screen that includes a "not guilty" result, a sign that questioning a suspect does not have to end in a guilty verdict.

Cases are designed for 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 more in Designing Unreliable Stories for Murder Book.