This game was something special.

It was made by Will O'Neill, who entered the game dev scene with Actual Sunlight a few years ago. If you've never heard of or played Actual Sunlight, it is a dark, deeply affecting "game" about the creator's experience with depression. I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone currently going through depression, as it is not a tale of hope or solidarity. I'd go ahead and say it's actually somewhat dangerous to anyone in that state. Nevertheless, I talk about the game fondly because it resonated very strongly with my own experiences. It had a brutal honesty that was unlike any other depression narrative I'd ever seen (and haven't since).

Little Red Lie is a follow-up to that game. The two share nothing in-universe, but they're clearly cut from the same cloth. Both are adventure games that are little more than visual novels, told in engines that mimic the visual style of 16-bit JRPGs (think To the Moon). Both feature short interactive sequences broken up by passages of on-screen text. And both are very, very heavy -- so much so that they strain the limits of the word "game" as that conjures up associations of "play" and "fun". There is no play or fun to be found in these games.

Little Red Lie deals with social class, finances, the economy, generational wealth, labor practices, mental illness, modern detachment, and a whole slough of other relevant, topical talking points. It's uncomfortably real and unflinchingly pessimistic, and is in the unique position to actually gain significant relevance with its commentary, as we begin to encounter the economic and social fallouts from the coronavirus epidemic.

Lying is the focus of the game, and it's integrated everywhere. Your action button is labeled as "Lie" and when you approach objects you can interact with, you'll see the dialog "Lie about ______" with the blank being filled with whatever is relevant about that particular item. Interacting with these triggers your character's inner monologue, and lies in their disclosure show up in bold red text in the game. They'll happen in your character's thoughts, and they'll happen in dialogue, and, without getting to spoilery, elsewhere as well. The lies might be big lies, like a character saying she lost her job recently (when really it was months ago), but most of them are, like the title, little ones -- those myriad and often invisible fictious reassurances or spins we always give ourselves. Sometimes the lies are cheeky. A character picks up a business card and then says, the sentence fully red: Always great to have another business card!

Each scene has lots of these little lies peppered throughout, and each scene is anchored in a "big" lie that conveys the motivations for your characters, each one avoiding or circumventing some key truth. In one scene you might be told to "SUCK UP TO YOUR FUCKFACE BOSS". In another you might be told to "EVADE INTIMACY".

It sounds gimmicky, but the game's focus on and integration of lying works really well. Ultimately the game is just a story that you're playing through and the red words help you identify when your narrators are being unreliable (which is almost always). It's also used in some thematically compelling ways that I won't go into for the sake of not spoiling things.

All told, I was very impressed by this, but any recommendation I can give it comes with some pretty strong qualifications. If the game sounds interesting to you, make sure you're okay with the fact that there's no real gameplay to speak of. It's basically a visual novel in which you can sometimes walk around. Furthermore, make sure you're in a place personally where you're okay with diving into something that wallows in a sad and at times disturbing darkness. If you're willing to go there, the game has a lot to say and yields much to think about. In all honesty, I'd actually recommend starting with the dev's first game, Actual Sunlight, which only takes about an hour to complete. If it resonates with you, then Little Red Lie's longer 6 hour story is probably worth your time.