Orwell: Ignorance is Strength

Good game play. Little action but that has to be expected. A thinking game. Plenty reading and you really do have to read it all. Made it through day1 to find out that day 2 is being released on the 8th of March. NICE!

Thematically, O:IS is an update on its predecessor: Where the first game was about the post-9/11 surveillance culture many of us associate with the name Snowden, the second incorporates the European migrant crisis, and first and foremost the perceived rise of misinformation in a world where everybody has instant access to unqualified data and opinion broadcast by, well, anyone. Consistent with these themes, the focus of O:IS shifts away from the essentially private and easy to empathise with individuals encountered in the first title: Your main antagonist may be a traumatised refugee in a wheelchair, but by his social media presence he's also a major force in the politics of two countries. The characters by his side feel a bit perfunctory, but that's because you don't really investigate them- you just use the juicy bits you find to shape public opinion. Players of the first game will feel right at home. Phone calls have voice acting now, but the interface has mostly remained its familiar self, calm blue controls and tessellated pictures. Time is limited now and used up by uploads, so you're meant to be smart about them, though in practice I never felt limited. The last day gives you a new tool, the Influencer, which twists datachuncks you upload into hashtag friendly smear campaigns to spread across social media, ruining you opponent's credibility. I felt the Influencer took away from the nuance, and also the realism of the Orwell games: Apparently people who read blogs are all partisan to the point of being biploar. A clever hashtag can turn their opinion into its opposite within an hour. If you're a blogger, your wife's personal life can stop a civil war. There's no deftness to it, just aim below the belt and win. I expect real manipulation to be more subtle. Where O surprised me with the amount of player choice, O:IS at times feels like playing the blueprint of an over the top conspiracy theory. Still a good game, but not entirely as convincing as the first.

Let's be honest - who doesn't like spying on people? And imagine that not only can you gather information scrolling through somebody's Facebook but you can access their mobile phone or PC. Creepy but absorbing idea. And that's what's cool about Orwell. But in comparison with the 1st game, this one gets to be the boring one. Don't get me wrong - it's still a weirdly pleasant experience to dig up all that dirt on people, but the plot in the 1st game was much more gripping and engaging. Adding a timer and voice acting to the phone calls is a good improvement. Also, I recommend playing the 1st game before (even re-playing it) or otherwise you'll experience trouble understanding what exactly is going on. Nevertheless, I spent quite entertaining 4 hours and if you enjoyed the previous one, you might like it as well, but I'll wait for a sale.

I really liked the first game, but this one seemed to lack some refinement. It is quite shorter (only three chapters) than the first one and only focuses on four characters (one of which loses relevance after the first chapter). The story didn't instigate me and the characters were uninteresting. Also, the endings were even unsatisfying. One cool mechanic that debuted here was the feature of setting up and spreading fake news to tarnish the target's reputation. But it only appears in the last chapter and is used in a very shallow way. They could have developed it more. In the end, I got the feeling that this was a very expendable DLC of the first game instead of a sequel.

It's a slow paced, atmospheric cautionary tale focused on privacy issues in a digitalised society; particulary with potential abuses by government agencies in mind.