Orwell

Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You is more of a visual novel than a game. Longtime readers know that I do not like visual novels. This at least has some game elements and an interesting interface. It is a crime investigation story themed around government surveillance. On the whole, not bad. Your decision can affect the NPCs’ fates, but the story on a whole is on rails apart from the point where you pick which ending you want.

Orwell makes good use of having a game interface in that it makes you do some things rather than watching them happen completely passively. To take an example from a different genre, there is a difference between throwing open the gates of Hell and having the player open the gates. Even if the player does not have a choice (and you can hide that fact in the first playthrough), there is an impact to requiring the player’s complicity. This is difficult to do in other media; the movie Funny Games has a moment where it creates a viewer choice, as do occasional books that say something like, “stop reading here for this ending,” although it seems clear to everyone that quitting at that point is not the “real” ending. Orwell has several moments when you are the one to click events into motion.

There are only a few meaningful forks in the story, and you cannot derail the main plotline even if you actively try to fail. You can decide what happens to the NPCs as you manipulate information, but the main narrative is what it is.

In a story about trading privacy and freedom for safety and security, a game named “Orwell” is clearly going to come down on the side of freedom. The story is grayer than might be expected, with the “bad guys” pretty clearly in black hats but the “good guys” in ambiguous shades of light gray, where you expect that at least some of them are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unusually, the freedom-security trade off is actually somewhat of a trade off here, in that you can save NPC lives. This is kinder than many real life trade offs, where one gives up freedom and convenience for the appearance of safety but without significant benefits. This is more nuanced than you would expect from “Orwell.”

Occasionally made explicit in the story but not its main focus is how much extraneous and sometimes incorrect information gets swept up in the process of finding actionable data. Some of that is innocuous, like noting someone’s favorite color on her profile. Some of that is putting in personal information that has no relation to the case (but might, so hoover up everything!). The incorrect information is notable, for example taking a joke out of context and noting that someone engage in torture, or saving baseless speculation alongside true information. Less noted is the number of others brought into the web. While you are gathering information about targets of interest, you note their family members, romantic interests, co-workers, etc. The game keeps you focused instead of letting you create dossiers on every former college classmate of the suspects, but you notice a web of secondary names floating around the people you are following, and any of them could become subjects of investigation after a call.

I cannot quite recommend it because it is about as interactive as a good walking simulator (it uses the terms “episode” and “season” appropriately, like a TV show), but for the type of game it is, this is a good one. People who like this sort of thing will like this. It runs about four hours, about double that if you want to go back and re-do decisions to see how the story can play out differently.

: Zubon