Orwell

Playing the demo version of Orwell was refreshing. Fun enough to make me buy it on sale. At first I thought that it would be a more complex game, consisting of more episodes - not just one story that player is able to complete in 3.5 h. The mechanism of the game, cleverly implemented into "Orwell", is the greatest advantage of the game. One can enjoy themselves searching throught the various documents etc. Story lacks depth and sometimes takes turns that are unexpected - in a wrong way. Overally it is wort buying if you are ready to enjoy new style of storytelling and the price is not a problem.

Very immersive and seemingly brilliantly executed NSA simulator. Story is engaging and introduces multiple solutions and paths and might even invoke few ethical ponderings. The problem with the game is though that when it picks up steam and opens up possibilities it just ends abruptly. The seemingly complex relationships and possible endgoals are just dismissed and leaves slightly bad taste to mouth. At least the game seems to offer multiple solutions and paths so game has some replay value. Controls are nice and simple and very straight forward.

I just completed my first playthrough and I quite liked the game. I won't go into the obvious things here (gameplay, basic story, etc. - this is covered in the description and other user review), but here's my opinion on the whole thing: Assuming you're aware of the fact that this game is mostly about the story, the fictional events that happen, the uncovering of facts, then this can be a great game. Just try to >BE< that Orwell investigator in front of the screen, try to think the way he/she would. If you can achieve that, I think you'll enjoy the game. I agree, in chapter 3 and 4 (of a total 5), the task becomes a bit boring and there's no ovious consequence of submitting (or not submitting) certain data chunks, but chapter 5 quickly became interesting again when everything is revealed (and other events happen). Sometimes, however, the story and connections between the targets seem a bit artificial and I feel that this could have been done better, but, in a nutshell, I enjoyed it and decided to rate it a 4 out of 5. By the way, I finished the game in 7,5 hours and read through pretty much all of the in-game content. As such, I also wouldn't call it short.

This is a piece of "interactive" fiction. I'm not sure how much interactive it really is. Judging by the way it plays, not much. I'm not actually against this kind of thing in general, but this one also doesn't play well. The whole premise of the game is that you are a government worker in some surveillance/security program (think NSA) amidst a series of terrorist attacks. The gameplay consists of you looking through a series of pages, public or hacked, and conversation logs, looking for automatically highlighted pieces of data called "datachunks" (no relation to SCTP DATA chunks). Out of those datachunks you have to choose the relevant ones and add them to the "profile" of people under investigation, clicking away the super important opinion of your annoying boss on every chunk you add. Every chunk, every bit of data you add, however insignificant, NO LESS THAN A FEW PER PAGE, EACH ONE TRIGGERS A RESPONSE FROM YOUR BOSS CONSISTING OF MULTIPLE DIALOGUE PAGES, AND YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY CLICK AWAY EVERY !!! SINGLE !!! ONE OF THEM. And those responses usually consist of the boss's personal subjective opinions, including, ironically enough, his complaints that you add "irrelevant" data to the profile. Despite that you can't tell which data is going to be relevant beforehand. The only chunks you don't add are bogus and misleading chunks. Quite soon I was hoping that the terrorists would blow his office already. Would be a good ending in my view. Another "great" mechanic is conflicting chunks. When a set of chunks conflict each other, you can only add one. And since you can't remove chunks from the profile, you can't undo or redo the choice. At one point, there were 2 conflicting chunks. In one, a club member A proposed to organize an event at location 1; in another, a club member B proposed to organize an event at location 2. No commitments were made, only suggestions. Why the hell they were conflicting, I have no clue. The game's authors can't into logic apparently.

Your job is to gather information on people and connect them. Day 1-4 are pretty strait forward with a nice surprise at the end of day 4. In day 5 things get ugly and you need to make decisions as time is running out (counter in form of information stored, no actual timer). It is all about the story. Sometimes I felt dirty investigating someone, who then turned out to be the right person after all. You never know... The GUI is very pleasant and new data is highlighted, also data you can store is marked. You could just not read and browse through the texts, gathering all the information. But in context it may be wrong, this is why there is a human factor (you) in Orwell.