RETINA: LOVE returns '5 of 34 records' as five dated clip cards

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

A search result in Telling Lies is a ration, and this frame shows the rationing. '5 of 34 records returned' is the game's central rule written as a count line: RETINA will show five clips for a word, never the 34 it found, so a broad word is a weak tool and a precise word is a strong one, vocabulary is the difficulty setting. The five cards themselves are pure archive: a face, a file code (P7FSQC17126, PAFSQC17133, PAFSQC17138, P5FSQC17170, PAFSQC17182), a 2017 date, a time, a duration, and on one thumbnail a small eye marking it already viewed. No titles, no summaries, nothing to skim, chronology and faces are the only metadata, so choosing which of the five to open is already an act of deduction. Frame at about 1:12 in the Telling Lies Trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the results settle inside the same held desktop shot the scene-change pass sampled only once, at 70.4s).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

archive-card panel-grid

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Tabs List Marker Badge

Screen inventory

• the count line is a sentence, not a badge: '5 of 34 records returned', RETINA returns at most five clips per search, so one word can never flood the screen
• five cards in one row, each a thumbnail over a file code, a date, a time and a duration: 'P7FSQC17126 / 8/15/2017 / 1:01:00 PM / 03:09' through 'PAFSQC17182 / 8/29/2017 / 8:05:00 PM / 03:43'
• one card's thumbnail carries a small eye icon at its corner, the viewed marker lives on the card itself, not in a separate list
• the cursor rests on the second card, 'PAFSQC17133' (8/15/2017, 10:05:00 PM, 04:25)
• the same RETINA chrome frames every state: 'LOVE' in the query field, the blue Search button, Search / Bookmarks / History tabs and the 'TOP SECRET // SI // ORCON // NOFORN' footer

Top 3 colors

#514061 24%#1a1414 23%#28272f 17%

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-search-results-72.png @ ~72s in the Telling Lies Trailer, MD5 7ec869b50d27a0cd455ecba431de3b0a, 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); '5 of 34 records returned' and all five card codes, dates and durations (P7FSQC17126 03:09, PAFSQC17133 04:25, PAFSQC17138 04:25, P5FSQC17170 07:00, PAFSQC17182 03:43) 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.