Orwell

I found this game when looking for highly rated political style games. I saw some comparisons to Floor 13 and I decided to give it a try and I was very disappointed. The game is flawed on many levels, which I'll try to describe below. First, the game asks for your email address, apparently with the intention of registering you to a mailing list. This step is optional, but considering this game is called Orwell for a reason, I find it a bit disturbing. I consider this "game" to have been developed in the wrong medium. This could have worked as a class B book, but as a game it lacks choice. You're just on rails, no choice and no chance of losing (that I know of). The game puts you in the role of some sort of Internet snoop who gets into sites and devices and has to collect snippets of data and make profiles. However, this ends up being a chore, as there is little you can do but to add snippets, and whenever there is choice the game shows that clearly bu marking a "conflict". This conflict mechanism seems artificial: most conflicts are resolved by a judicious selection of information and are really not conflicts at all (just one snippet is not up to date, or it's a minor issue). Worse, the game will sometimes have a conflict with "unknown" data, which makes me wonder how the system knows and why it doesn't just tell me what the unknown data is, The investigation is also bizarre. The system is all-seeing, provided the "all" is just electronic devices and web pages. In real life there would be more reasonable mechanisms, but in this game you cannot even do a public records search. Moreover, the story is kickstarted by an all-seeing camera system, which if you could use, the case would be solve in no time. Worse, the initial suspect is actually someone with a police record but actually unrelated to the case. The feeling it leaves is that the case was solved by luck and grinding. Overall 1 1/2 stars.

This game seemed promising enough at first - you're an all-seeing invader of people's privacy whose excuse is public safety. This could work, but the game quickly devolves into a gotta-catch-em-all hot-spot hunt. After a while I simply stopped caring about the (not terribly original) story and just looked for the next piece of data to drag to the right profile, to unlock the next document containing the next piece to drag over, etc etc. It very well could've been just a PowerPoint presentation you click through and very little would be lost (mainly the music, which isn't bad at all). Finishing Orwell took me some 4 hours but it felt like a lot longer, as there is just so much unnecessary padding. For almost every bit of data you find there's a message from your coworker that doesn't affect anything but takes time to close. There are plenty of phone calls and chatroom discussions that go by excruciatingly slowly in "real time" and you're forced to sit through them to find the next clue. Orwell could be finished in two hours tops if it didn't waste your time like this. Early on you are told you should only pick the relevant data, but it makes no difference if you upload a photo of a dog to the notorious hacker's profile. You just upload all there is to find lest you miss something vital for the game's progress. There's no thought process involved, just mindless clicking on everything that's highlighted for your convenience. You're told that your decisions as to what constitutes relevant data matter, but they do not. I certainly cannot recommend Orwell in good conscience. There's a promising idea in there somewhere, but this particular game does hardly anything to explore it in a meaningful way. And that's a shame because it could've been quite thought-provoking commentary on today's technological landscape. But at least the music's nice.

Given that the title is named "Orwell" it immediately positions you to take a certain kind of stance toward the game, its content, and its overall commentary on 21st century digital culture. So if you already don't agree with the basic political leaning of the game you probably won't enjoy the game itself, as it is primarily motivated in positioning you as the "investigator" to take a certain stance against your own work. The game is basically a surveillance/spying simulator, with lots of reading, clicking and dragging. You start working for a different nation's governement eager to "protect the people" by spying on anyone they consider a "target". Your job as the investigator is to sift through all the data and upload whatever of them YOU deem necessary to different profiles, whilst an external "advisor" can read what you upload in order to make connections, but can't collect the data themselves. Your investigations take place over five days (the five episodes), during which the events occuring unfold and more intrigue is revealed. However, it was only when I got to the end (where you can make a clear choice one way or another), that I went online to discover that there are not only three endings, but multiple outcomes for the various "targets" you investigated and what happened/happens to them. And this is when I really appreciated this game as art. Yes, I can understand the argument that the game is (somewhat) on rails, but given that depending on what choices you make determine different futures for the targets you investigate, I think the game has achieved EXACTLY what it was aiming for by calling itself "Orwell". Part of the game is supposed to be fun and enjoyable, but you would have to be incredibly naïve to not understand that the game is attempting to make a commentary on the social and politcal landscape of a digital, post-Snowden-Revelations world. Now... on to the sequel!

A thought-provoking reflection on the nature of surveillance. Almost every government around the world (some more than others) is spying on their citizens right now. Could there be someone somewhere reading these game reviews and adding us to a 'dissenter' database list for liking this game? Or would the true horror be if there was no-one reading them at all? The overall story is on rails, but you have a lot of choice in deciding which data chunks to upload....and adding / omitting certain ones has some major differences in how the game progresses, leading to you being able to 'roleplay' the investigator in different ways (a strict rule follower, a renegade trying to destroy the system from inside, etc). The interface is annoying at times and the game bugged out on me a few times, but it was well worth pushing through.

A game where you invade personal electronic devices to try to find out who is behind a string of terrorist attacks. Not a bad concept, but Mainlining did it better. The Orwell aesthetic is pretty bland, and being forced to sit through chatlogs and phone calls in 'realtime' is boring. I hoped that the adviser that pops up with an inane comment after nearly every piece of data you collect was only part of the tutorial, but no such luck. I didn't play for the story, which is good, cause it wasn't exactly enthralling. Game was pretty short, and would have been even shorter without having to sit through those annoying faux chat sessions and phone calls.