Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You

Great game that talks about important things. It's pretty short but your decisions really influence the gameplay and the ending, so I'm probably going to replay it multiple times to see how the story would've unraveled if I made different choices. The poly art isn't really my taste but the writing is great. Honestly I'd recommend this game to everyone to play at least once since it's pretty unique and makes you think, also I think the topics are getting more and more relevant.

Orwell is a detective Interactive Fiction game, where you assume a role of a goverment-employed ivestigator with an emergancy right to access citizens' devices and Internet activity. You are tasked with finding a person responsible for a terrorist attack in a fictional city of Bonton in a fictional Nation. The game has a really solid mechanic for gathering and sorting information, that I have personally not seen before. Your main power is collecting bits and pieces of the info in documents, on websites, in messges and voicecall transcriptions. You need to compare and analyze different sources that are often conflicting and rarely fully truthfull, keeping in mind context, biases, possible angles. The coolest parts is that instead of acting on the info, you only relay it to your supperiors who make all the calls. So in order to achieve the outcome you want, you need to basically socially ingeneer your bosses by spoon-feeding them the info that will shape their worldview. I feel that it's a powerful metaphor on how the perseption influences action, and how malicious forces may take advantage of the powers to shape perseption. Especially when they can control the information for the people in position of power — through media, narratives or implicit biases. This is the main win of the game — it explores an important concept via its engaging detective gameplay. I do have some criticisms, or rather some notes based on my own expectations. I first came into this game expecting it to be a mostly realistic tale with a bit of the antiutopic twist. And while it certainly presents realistic aesthetic, the deeper you go into this world and plot, the more outlandish things become. This is genre fiction through and through. Observing real totalitarian regimes as they implement digital survaillance, and seeing real opposition and its struggles in such countries... Well, simplifications and assumptions Orwell makes, they just shatter believability of the whole premise. Some things just raise questions (or eybrows) even with everyday logic, such as the game's fictional geography. It somehow includes a Central-European coated country, a Slavic Eastern-European and a (sort-of) Middle-Eastern or Central-Asian (?) countiry just neighboring each others — without the cross-influence that this fact might bring. It also includes references to real states such as Germany and South Africa. A bit of a tonal clash. But if you accept genre conventions and treat this as a pulp fiction detective story, it really opens up as a nice and fun exploration of some important topics of current society. All while being a pretty cool Interactive Fiction game.

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Orwell è un piccolo gioco che tratta grandi temi con un approccio molto raffinato.

Играешь роль хацкера-детектива в тоталитарном городе. Что еще для счастья нужно?

Too limited.

A must-play. This is a game unlike anything you've ever played. This is a game about power of surveillance. This is a game about digital age. This is a game about free speech.

Clean and nicely cut is what comes to mind when playing this game. The story is nicely written and so are the different interaction the character have. I would say that if you like social "investigations" and have few hours to spare you will not be disappointed.