Intro

So, normally I am not into those kinds of "text-based simulation games". I am so very interested that I believe I might have ignored all of the games like Orwell. However, thanks to my Storytelling assignments, I finally had the chance to experience a new genre that I mostly overlooked. Surprisingly, when I decide to give Orwell a shot after the assignment has announced, I have not recognized that this game was already on my Steam library! I believe it is obvious how I viewed these kinds of games in the last couple of years. I am a guy who is naturally interested in many things, and I always try to experience as many -and different- things as possible: from books to movies, to games... But somehow, I did not apply this point-of-view of mine to the different genres in games. Visual novels are also one of those genres, with simulation games, that I constantly ignore -or heavily uninterested in.

But, Orwell proved to me that this ignorance could prevent me to experience various feelings that I have not experienced with other games. It proved to me that there are games out there which is not consist only of shooting, jumping, and running. I realized that I need to expand my radar, and look for games that normally would not interest me. Because from now on, I believe those overlooked games could surprise you more than you thought.

Orwell Trailer

Usability/Playability

In Orwell, you are an "investigator" who is working under the government program called "The Security Bill". I will not get into the specifics here, but your main mission is to investigate potential targets and prevent accidents to happen. You gather information from various people, and you reveal relationship networks between those people. As an investigator, you intertwine citizens' personal lives: you get into their social media accounts, blogs, dating profiles, etc. But how you actually do those actions?

So you will find yourself reading a lot in Orwell. After all, it is a text-based game, what you would expect to do? But you are not just reading stuff passively, or reading unimportant things. Each article, each blog post, or each news report would tell you something about the world of Orwell. The information is your weapon, it is the most important key in Orwell. Information affects how you progress, information decides how things will go on. Because of that players need to "interpret" those pieces of information as they progress in the story. They need to "upload" the information that they have found about potential criminals/threats to conclude their investigations, and hopefully to find the real criminal who is behind some of the accidents that happened in the country.

The game will highlight the relevant information and underlines the sentences as you read several documents (websites, messages, emails, etc.). And the players need to decide to pick which information is important or which is not. After deciding on that, they need to drag and drop those pieces of information in the Orwell system.

That's, it! This is the single action that players would do in this nearly-6-hours-long game. It might sound boring but believe me the "deciding on information" would probably engage you more than you ever imagine. I lost myself and my surroundings as I play this game, I so hooked up on investigating and reading stuff that I lost the track of time. When the feeling of being an investigator gets you, it gets you! There no escape from that, it is addicting.