Clip player: a stolen clip at 04:24 of 04:25, three buttons only

About this game

Developer: Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid · Publisher: Annapurna Interactive · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Realistic 3D · Screen type: Encyclopedia / Codex

More Telling Lies screens in the Gallery

What to study

Playing a clip strips the interface almost to nothing, and what remains is the design's argument. There is no timeline to scrub and no progress bar, just two stacked numbers, 04:24 of 04:25, because in Telling Lies you are not meant to navigate footage, you are meant to listen to it and catch the word that matters. The only verbs offered are three round buttons: bookmark this, ask for help, close. Bookmarking is the player's one act of authorship inside the player, the counterpart to the keyword search outside it, everything you keep is either a word you typed or a moment you flagged. The footage runs edge to edge like a video call, with the cursor still visible: the game refuses to let you forget this is a stolen screen. Frame at about 1:09 in the Telling Lies Trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the player state is a held shot inside one long clip, so the scene-change pass never fired on it).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

diegetic-controls minimal-hud portrait-panel

Components

Parts on screen.

Subtitles

Screen inventory

• top-left, the player's whole transport readout is two stacked numbers: elapsed '04:24' over total '04:25', no scrub bar is drawn anywhere in the frame
• top-right, three round blue buttons are the entire control set: bookmark, '?' help and X close
• the clip fills the frame edge to edge, a bathroom video call, the speaker in blue scrubs, with the subtitle 'Alright, love you.' along the bottom
• the mouse cursor floats mid-frame, the only hint that a computer surrounds the footage

Top 3 colors

#574e49 22%#9b9482 20%#abab98 19%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid / Annapurna Interactive, Telling Lies screenshot: Telling Lies Trailer (Steam), Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Annapurna Interactive.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-25. verified 2026-10-25: manual extraction manual-clip-player-69.png @ ~69s in the Telling Lies Trailer, MD5 707de3db619dbcc2be3678ca0a7f77b2, from the pipeline download videos/steam-762830-Telling-Lies-Trailer.mp4 (86,216,359 B, MD5 927c60524dfad12531ed7c00656f0339; full decode to null wrote zero error lines, decode-trailer.err empty), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080); the '04:24 / 04:25' timecode, the bookmark / '?' / X round buttons and the subtitle 'Alright, love you.' all legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-25); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.