Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You

A smart take on surveillance and a focus on player choice makes Orwell exciting, engaging, and discomforting.

A novel perspective on totalitarian surveillance. Orwell may not make you think, but it should keep you entertained.

Orwell grabs the problem of how we balance our own liberty and our safety and turns it into a thrilling adventure. It unfolds complex debate points into a dazzling satire, that neatly presents all the relevant arguments as a series of moral problems, dressed up in a frighteningly convincing world.

Orwell is a lukewarm interactive thriller with several moments that hit hard, but it’s inconsistent and some of the writing is laughably bad

There is no deep understanding here, you won’t have your mind changed, and it certainly doesn’t have any of the emotional impact of Papers Please. But within its own barmy universe, it works! It’s a good chunk of fun, and easily survives at least a second play to see how much you can mess with people’s lives.

Good for contemplating the line between security surveillance and invasion of privacy.

While extremely timely for this moment in the world, and conceptually it explores what can be the arbitrary nature of the surveillance state, in terms of gameplay it’s a bit thin

Games like Orwell recklessly attempt to work backward from the lies used to justify surveillance, rather than recognizing that we have to fight the concept itself. It is a game decades too late to matter and does more to legitimize its target than it does to take them down.

Is total control a price worth paying for safety? Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You has some flaws gameplay-wise but overall the game tells a very interesting story and presents it in a thoughtful way. You're spying on people and feeding the machine with information. Try out the free demo and decide afterwards.

Orwell takes place in a country called the Nation, led by a modern-day authoritarian government known as The Party in the capital of Bonton. In 2012, the Party passed the Safety Bill, a law expanding the government’s ability to spy on its citizens in the name of national security. As part of the bill the Ministry of Security, led by Secretary of Security Catherine Delacroix, commissioned a covert surveillance system code named Demiurge (later renamed Orwell). Orwell allows investigations into the private communications of people of interest, but doesn’t allow any one person full access. Instead, Orwell’s operation is run by two groups; Investigators, persons outside of the Nation working for the government who search through the communication of target persons and upload items of interest (represented as “datachunks”), and Advisors, people inside of the Nation who use the received datachunks to determine the course of action and to recommend actions to the authorities.