Update Thirteen: 26 June 2017

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

This was a hell of a game. It’s one of an emerging genre of… ‘interface’ games, I guess. Like Her Story, you are literally your character in the game - what you see on screen is what your character sees, and you interact in the same way. Because of this, the game is incredibly immersive and therefore, at points, really tense!

Let me stop myself before I get too deep in here. In Orwell, you play as, ostensibly, yourself, hired as an ‘investigator’ in this new program called Orwell situated in a different country. In that country, a bomb has just exploded in a plaza, killing two and wounding a dozen or so people. Moments before the bomb went off, a woman was spotted crossing the plaza and getting on a bus. That woman had been arrested months before for assaulting a police officer in that very same plaza during a protest. Could she be connected to the bomb? Your task is to slowly collect information on her, and the people around her. What information you upload to the system cannot be taken back, and you get to choose what the narrative of what happened becomes. You can take an innocuous joke between friends and upload it, taking it out of a friendly context and giving it a sinister cast. You can shift a bias on a person by only uploading the worst of what they said, but not uploading good things about them. In this story, YOU are the faceless watcher, the cog in the wheel, that would be impeding the heroes of a more traditional story.

Holy shit, does it work.

I blasted through the game’s five chapters in one sitting, about four and a half hours on Saturday night. Nobody in this game is 100% good or bad, and there’s a lot of nuance around protesting for the ‘right’ reason in the ‘right’ way that is especially topical for me, right now, as a young woman living in an America I never really thought I’d be living in. This game doesn’t deliver any hard and fast morals at the end, it doesn’t take a definitive stance, and offers three different endings for the player to eventually pick. The game offers up a scenario and leaves it up to you to decide what you think is right… or at least, what you think is the least wrong.

The game isn’t perfect - it wears a little thin when you’re going back and achievement gathering. Like a Telltale game, once you see the constraints of the ‘world’ of the game, the illusion dissipates pretty quickly. There are a lot of real-time sections (text conversations, phone calls) that, while immersive the first time around, made me really wish I had a fast forward button for the fourth or fifth time I sat through the conversation. These are absolutely small gripes, however, and I would strongly urge anyone to pick up this game - especially while it’s still on sale.

I’m going to break with my normal ‘one in, one out’ mode of gaming for this upcoming update - I’m going to be playing Telltale’s Batman along with my girlfriend in the evenings over the next week or so, so I’ll pick up another game to play by myself. She also encouraged me to treat myself AGAIN and pick whatever game I want. She does spoil me. I’ve had my eye on this one for a while.

Next up: I AM THE NIGHT… but I’ve got a day job too.

See you soon!