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.
