External Drive: the stolen drive's four files on the desktop

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

Telling Lies starts one step earlier than Her Story: not in the database, but in the drive it was stolen on. The External Drive window is the game's whole premise laid out as four files, the Database Server app, the database itself (RTNANSA.DB), its documentation (RETINADOC.pdf) and one text file named with a kaomoji, '(•‿•✿).txt', a stranger's personality sitting among evidence files. Nothing here is a menu: the top bar simply changes its left-hand name to 'External Drive', the clock reads 12:00 AM, and the desktop underneath (Simple Memo, Trash, a file called 'Welcome To Castle') belongs to the person who took the drive. Investigation begins as snooping through someone's computer, and the interface never pretends otherwise. Frame at about 0:31 in the Telling Lies Trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the desktop segment is one held shot, and the scene-change pass fired only later, on the RETINA window).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

diegetic-controls icon-grid icon-rail

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Window Resource bar

Screen inventory

• top bar's left end reads 'External Drive', the bar names the active app, with 'Sun 12:00 AM' and '87%' at the right
• the External Drive window holds exactly four files: 'Database Server' with the RETINA eye icon under the cursor, a text file named '(•‿•✿).txt', 'RETINADOC.pdf' and 'RTNANSA.DB'
• the desktop around it is a borrowed machine after midnight: night-bridge wallpaper, a 'Simple Memo' icon, and a left rail carrying a card-game icon, a settings gear and the drive itself
• along the bottom, three icons sit on the desktop rather than in a dock: 'Trash', 'Welcome To Castle' and 'External Drive'
• a face is ghosted over the whole desktop, the trailer presents the screen as a monitor reflection, and it covers no icon label or filename

Top 3 colors

#684d6f 22%#241f21 21%#5b436a 18%

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-external-drive-31.png @ ~31s in the Telling Lies Trailer, MD5 a6064bb5b48ef2d8ec07b797a8bcf42b, 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 'External Drive' top bar and window title, 'Database Server', '(•‿•✿).txt', 'RETINADOC.pdf', 'RTNANSA.DB', 'Simple Memo', 'Trash', 'Welcome To Castle' and 'Sun 12:00 AM / 87%' all legible; the ghosted face is the trailer's monitor-reflection presentation and covers no UI text

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

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.