Orwell

The game is more a story getting told than a game with a lot of choice. This is a shame as the game tries to suggest that you should be careful what you do but in the end you mostly click and add every thing you find. The choices you are forced to make do not really feel like they have an impact. It is a story telling game and as such it is good just don't expect any deep mechanics in this game.

Game flow 4-5 hours, recommended discount purchase. A comfortable linear detective lightly decrypted dessert game, you play as an overseas employee who uses the world's most sophisticated surveillance system to pry into the privacy of others in order to solve a terrorist attack. As one said, I personally like this system, because my reality can be said to be basically no privacy, about equal to real-name online. Precise nuisance calls, customized insurance promotion, push mechanism of big data positioning, quick and convenient payment by scanning code, users who want to use mobile apps must agree to the user agreement which may be Bawang terms, etc. And I have to accept all this leakage in exchange for the most comfortable convenience, some small personal convenience stores now can not even change a large note. But in the end, it was worth it.

Orwell is a fun game, though I'd call it more like reading a novel. There's relatively little player interaction but a moderately developed world to peruse. I found the experience similar in many ways to Uplink by Ambrosia.

The idea that you can use a program to monitor people's activities and accounts is pretty great - in-game, at least. Some of the mechanics bugged me (like not being able to retract submitted data or solve conflicting chunks after one was submitted), as well at the story line. I get that the Nation is highly invasive and wants to control people, but the way Orwell does it isn't quite what I was hoping for. Checking webpages constantly for updates was a pain too. I was hoping for a little more story-wise, and the end, though dramatic, seemed a bit too much. Not to mention that throughout the game you're just submitting every datachunk you think could possibly be relevant, which is almost all of them. It doesn't feel like detective work, and it's very annoying. And the premise which the antagonist goes against you doesn't feel as deep as it should, either. Not to mention their tactics and reasoning. There could've been better ways of doing this. This certainly isn't a game for everyone, as every game is. I'd suggest reading other reviews too, as I might not be wording this concisely enough. But it was a decent experience for the sale price, at least.

I had been thinking of buying this game for quite a while, but there were so many bad reviews that I shied away from it. Now I did buy it and am delighted! It's a different kind of game - there is not so much action, not much freedom in what you can do. A lot of reading is involved and, as others mentioned, it's a bit more like an interactive story. One starts investigating a bombing, there is a suspect and through the system "Orwell" one can access all kinds of online information, listen to phone calls, read chats and search desktops. Most of these sourced contain so-called datachunks that need to be added to the profiles of people who are investigated. One starts with the basically empty profile of the first suspect and from there on, the scope continued to expand. Some datachunks open up new sources or suspects, other complete the picture, still others are not relevant. One review stated that it is impossible to decide which datachunks are useful - I disagree with this. Yes, sometimes it's not sure and there is a learning curve involved, but with an eye on the objectives, it is absolutely possible to weed out useful datachunks. I found this learning curve enjoyable because I could gradually understand the system more and developed an eye for what was relevant. The sources are delightfully varied and created with painstaking eye on detail. The different characters have their own voice, every website, social media timeline, photo gallery contains a lot of info that might not be relevant, but makes these sources seem so real. Little typos are built into chats when people are excited, even the !1 is used once to show how upset someone is. I was impressed by the work that went into creating this virtual world. As the story unfolds, one learns more and more details about everybody. It's a fun journey and I was immersed into it. There is quite a lot of room for thought about the topics involved. Fun game on many levels!