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Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You

Orwell

We took the lives of others into our hands and plunged into the authoritarian state in Orwell.

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Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You

In Orwell, the player is an investigator, employed by a nondescript, ostensibly democratic nation to dig through news, intercepted communications, websites, and personal computers in order to unravel a mystery. Orwell is played completely in an in-game browser, with a growing list of data sources that contain both relevant and irrelevant information which you must sift through in order to present content to your adviser, who then coordinates actions with law enforcement. The game's story unfolds in five chapters, each ramping up the tension and the weight your decisions have.

It's not a simulation so much as an interactive story, with several routes to the end, and several possible fates for many of the characters. Boiled down to a sentence, the game's core gameplay is about what you tell, and don't tell, your employers about the people you're investigating. Your adviser is blind to the specific information you find, so it's up to you to transfer data you think relevant. All the transferable data in the game is highlighted in a few different ways depending on their relationship to other data. Some lines of text simply provide information on a given subject, which is then placed directly into their file. Others set up potential factual conflicts that the player must choose between, permanently cutting off the alternative, even if later it proves false. You are also given the option to temporarily ignore some data, which can be helpful later when trying to filter what is relevant. Placing information in someone's file can unlock new areas of inquiry, or persons of interest too.

As the game is story driven, some of these unlocks will immediately trigger new events, such as phone conversations or news updates. The phone conversations do play out in real time, but only when you begin to pay attention to them, and a given computer's connection status is also dependent on where the player's attention is. For the most part the game waits for you to communicate relevant findings and trigger new events, which can feel a bit strange given the urgency of the case. There are a few moments where quick decisions or efficient use of resources can result in serious consequences, though, which somewhat lessens the dissonance.

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As with a lot of adventure games, there are times when you think a piece of information says one thing, but it winds up being interpreted another way. You can look at a name as an alias, say, but it may be interpreted as the suspect's actual name. Your adviser will likely chide you for not sending information more relevant to the case, warning you about the dangers of data without context, although there are times the adviser can be lead to different conclusions than you intend. You can mouse over transferable information that will give you a strong clue as to how the system will interpret it, but especially when waiting for the plot to advance, you may feel forced into sending data you know is misleading or potentially dangerous in an attempt to get things moving if you haven't found the right clues or made what feels like uninformed decisions on certain conflicts. Even though all relevant information is highlighted, you may not see what the game designers intended, especially as the list of sources gets much longer. For the most part, though, this disconnect between the player's intent and the game's interpretation of the data is one of the core themes of Orwell: that well-meaning people can, even with the best of intentions, still cause horrible and irreparable consequences.

One of the game's strengths is its commitment to these consequences. Characters' lives are often in your hands, and it's a testament to the power of gameplay over simply reading it on the page when you know your actions, however much they are part of the game's plot, lead to someone's incarceration, or worse. Knowing why something had to happen doesn't diminish its gravity, or your agency in it. The game promises several endings, and several fates for various characters. It's probably best you don't look through the Steam achievements if you don't want to get them spoiled, but it's clear that Orwell puts more faith in its story than more linear fare. Since you are only allowed a single save per play-through, you aren't allowed to go back and try different things. The game is just long enough that it may deter some from replaying it to see other endings and character fates, and the story's main points may not vary a whole lot, but once you've completed a game the account you used only replays the ending you earned, so more than one game will be required to see how different things might have been.

Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You

In what seems to be a trend in games with multiple endings, at least some of them are telegraphed to the player at a critical juncture. This is probably to diminish the player's disappointment in having an ending being not what they intended, but it shows that Orwell's faith in its story seems to falter a bit here. The ending we experienced, while presaged toward the end, was still emotionally resonant, elevating the game above these faults.

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Even from the game's title, Orwell's inspirations are fairly clear. While the game's nation is fictional, its digitally interconnected reality is a reflection of today. The art style features multiple, colourful, pseudo-low-polygon portraits (which, in a nice touch, can be swapped out if you find a photo of someone you'd rather look at), and the music is ambient, with utopian, contemplative, tense, and panicked tracks depending on the situation. The personalities you encounter feel real enough, and although there are uncanny moments where dialogue and motivations seem off, or consequences seem to not quite fit, this lack of a perfect fit suggests that the player's access to the intimate details of these people's lives does not provide a full picture.

Orwell had a few bugs: there was a line that was highlighted but non-transferrable, there was a line in a news story that clearly reflected a possible alternative to what really happened, and there was a musical cue that was slightly delayed, undercutting the drama of a moment it was underscoring. Had the game perhaps given you more data to sift through early on, perhaps adding a subplot, the game may have felt a bit fuller, but it's hard to say if this would have just come across as filler, since the lean story has sufficient twists with significant story branches. The fictitious setting, the art style, the conflict between designer and player, and player limitations may bother some, undercutting the point the game seems to be making, though some distancing from reality is probably needed for others to allow themselves to feel invested.

Overall, though, the game's flaws and frustrations can't eclipse its noble, and perhaps more importantly, well-illustrated themes about security, surveillance, context, and consequence. It might benefit from a way to skip the slow beginning to allow players interested in seeing the other endings a way to do so, but perhaps some time away before playing again might be what such players need. Even if played only once, knowing that things could have gone another way adds a feeling of depth to your decisions, which is a hallmark of a good game.

HQ
Orwell: Keeping an Eye on YouOrwell: Keeping an Eye on YouOrwell: Keeping an Eye on You
08 Gamereactor UK
8 / 10
+
Chilling implications of player actions illustrate theme well, Special situations change the rules slightly, adding to suspense, Markedly different, intractable consequences to decisions.
-
Disconnect between designers and player intent is unavoidable, Player can put off supposedly live events, Data bottlenecks force seemingly arbitrary decisions to advance plot.
overall score
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Orwell

REVIEW. Written by A.R. Teschner

"The game's flaws and frustrations can't eclipse its noble, and perhaps more importantly, well-illustrated themes about security, surveillance, context, and consequence."



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