Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (2016)

I've always been one to read all of the books/letters/e-mails in games, but they rarely do more than build the world or give character backstory. I also tend to agonize over decisions in dialogue trees, worried that the "wrong" answer will cut me off from more interesting story lines. Orwell is a game that completely commits to reading and interpreting as the primary game mechanics. It succeeds at telling a satisfying story, even if it sometimes trips on the complexities of these mechanics as storytelling tools.

There are issues: The interface isn't as robust as you would hope. For instance, you can drag pictures of people from the Web into their profile, but only certain ones. At one point I found pictures of two new "persons of interest" on their corporation's website, but I couldn't drag their photos into their profiles. The game also runs into the issue that we have expectations of what can be done on the Internet. For instance, when you get the ability to break into someone's phone and can see where they've been, you expect that the addresses will tell you what is actually at those locations, but Orwell doesn't tell you this, you have to either remember or infer what is there.

You can also get trapped when the story tries to funnel you to a certain plot point. In one part of the game there was nothing for me to do but to choose between two pieces of conflicting information: Which of two people organized a protest? The problem is that there was no way for me to make that call, it was pure he said/she said. I had a hunch, but it wasn't backed by any concrete information, and given what I had come to realize was the black-and-white nature of the Orwell system, I wanted to have something concrete before making this decision. Unfortunately, in order to progress the story I was forced to make the call based on nothing more than a hunch.

And sometimes it seems like you need to make the wrong choice when one set of conflicting information would clearly open up a whole new tangent and the conflicting data wouldn't, so you choose the first even though you know the second is just as likely to be correct. For instance, at one point a character was accused of being gay, but there was conflicting information that he actually had a wife and kids. Of course, these two things don't conflict at all, there are plenty of gay people who have been in heterosexual relationships and even marriages. In fact, this character left his wife and children and the accusation that he was gay came many years later, so clearly one could argue that he left his wife and family BECAUSE he was gay. But in order to progress the story and open up profiles on the wife and learn more about that part of his life, I had to choose the wife data over the gay data.

Sometimes the AI just breaks, especially that of your handler, Symes. For instance, one time I added the info that a certain character had a new girlfriend, that he wasn't with his old girlfriend, Juliet. Symes chimed in that he never knew that this character and Juliet were a couple, but I had put that information in both of their profiles a long time ago. And sometimes Symes is just clueless: At one point we discovered the name of a new character, one for whom we previously only knew her online handles, and he said something like "So she's been hiding her real name, eh?" Of course she was! Who always uses their real name for their online accounts?

It seems that there are probably multiple endings, but I only played it through once. There are no manual saves, so to get other endings you would have to play through the whole game again, which I'm not interested in doing. I wasn't entirely satisfied with my ending, but I still think that the journey was compelling and timely, probably more timely than the developers even realized when they started working on it. Orwell is a fascinating experience, especially if you are at all interested in our current information culture and the balance between government data gathering and personal privacy.