One Thousand Lies is the first Kinetic Novel by Spanish developer Keinart Lobre, created in Ren'Py. This Romantic Comedy Slice of Life story revolves around Ciarán Endyein, a writer and Class Clown in his last year of secondary school. One day, he receives a strange email asking him whether figurines can truly come to life...
The email kickstarts a hilarious romp as he and his friends, the Handsome Lech Ausse and The Shrink Ziva, discover the meaning of the email...and perhaps make some new friends along the way.
The game is free on itch.io
and Steam.
This visual novel provides examples of:
- Animesque: One wouldn't expect the game to be originally written in Spanish with its anime-styled character art.
- Chekhov's Boomerang: Luce's gift to Ciarán on his birthday is an empty box, which at first seems empty, but actually has a false bottom containing a notebook as the real gift.
- Ciarán later returns the gesture, but this time it's just empty.
- Chekhov's Gun: Throughout the story, the Pygmalion mythos is alluded to, and even directly discussed about, but mostly to mock Ciarán's fascination with anime figurines. It is later implied that this was Ciarán's relationship with Claire, where Claire was nothing more than a figment of Ciarán's imagination for him to retreat to whenever he couldn't face reality.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Although Diniz appears to be a useless character that does little more than eat and sleep, the epilogue revealed that he narrated the prologue, was one of the three friends mentioned in Ciar's winning entry in the writing competition, and inadverdently triggered the incident that traumatised Ciar. As an unreliable narrator, Ciar never mentioned that Diniz was a childhood friend of his because he wanted to forget the incident.
- Meaningful Name: Everyone in some capacity. However, Claire, named after the Debussy song "Claire de Lune", or "Light of the Moon", is a reflection of Luce, who is named after a Gregorian Chant that translated to "Golden Light", referring to the sun. In fact, Claire later mentions this concept.
- Noodle Incident: The accident that created the scar of Ciar's leg. Subverted when Diniz eventually recounts the incident in the epilogue. Diniz, Ziva and Ciar never mentioned the incident because of the psychological trauma it inflicted on Ciar.
- Older Than She Looks: Claire, despite looking like a middle-schooler, is actually the same age as Ciarán and older than some of his friends.
- Precision F-Strike: Oh boy... And you thought the swearing was only there for comedy.
- The Promise: Ciarán frequently invokes this, along with the statement that he'll never betray it, especially if said promise is a bet.
- Luce later reminds Ciarán of his promise to commit to whatever four tasks she asks of him, with the last one being him to stay by her side. Cue the Happy Ending.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Ziva delivers one after hearing just how much Ciarán has been frustrated with her year-long efforts to cure him. A lot of angst is carefully put in this one."I'm done... I'M DONE, CIARÁN. I CAN'T CONTAIN IT ANY LONGER! Who do you think you are, speaking like that when you can barely stand up? Look at you! You're pale! Seven years! Seven fucking years and you're still the exact same! No, you're worse! What's your fucking issue?! I'm done with having to beat around the bush with you for everything, treating you like you're a fucking stranger! That's all we are after all we've been through together? Everything with you is a bad joke. You can't take anything seriously, always using that shitty, sarcastic tone of yours. I hate it! I hate it so much! And I hate you more! But don't let anyone bother that kid! He's sick, so be careful! And you dare to tell me that I'm acting like a kid throwing a tantrum? Fuck you, Ciarán! Fuck you, for real! Why won't you accept my help? Or anyone else's help? Keep your shitty-ass opinions to yourself and try to be God damned grateful for once! God dammit! It's a difficult situation for everyone, not just you! Don't you get it? Why...? I hate you, Ciarán... I hate you..."
- Shout-Out: A discussion between Ciarán and Ausse on the latter's "hotty standards" eventually leads to Ciarán listing several disabilities as examples, each referencing the disabilities the five heroines from Katawa Shoujo suffer from.
- Story Within a Story: Ciarán's story about the wolf. Also, the first, larger portion of the game titled "One Thousand Lies" is actually a story penned by Ciaran. The Nested Story Reveal, titled One Hidden Truth, ties up the loose ends. One can tell the difference by looking at the 'advance text' button; for One Thousand Lies it is a pencil; for the prologue and One Hidden Truth, it is a pair of circles.
- Tsundere: Luce is originally hostile towards Ciar, but slowly becomes closer and closer to him until it is finally revealed in the epilogue that she was in love with Ciar.
- Unreliable Narrator: Apart from the prologue and the epilogue, the game is written entirely by Ciar, who took many liberties with the details of the story, including the creation of an imaginary character. Lampshaded by the title.
