Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You

Orwell is a strategy/simulator game released on PC. The title references the Big Brother theme from Orwell’s books, and the internet surveillance of modern society in face of the threat of global terrorism. The title is the first serious commercial title developed by German studio Osmotic which previously created two adventure games (GroundPlay and Scherbenwerk) as part of their student project.

Plot

Despite the fact that the title of the game is an obvious reference to the works of George Orwell, the project isn’t a direct adaptation of any of his books. Orwell is the name of a modern computer system that enables the operator to surveillance the society through Internet and to detect people suspected of being terrorists and of performing other activities. When the fictional city of Bonton becomes the victim of series of terrorist attacks, the player assumes the role of an operator of the previously mentioned system. His task is to identify the perpetrators, thus protecting the law-obeying citizens.

Mechanics

Orwell for PC has unordinary gameplay mechanics. The player acts in the titular computer system and is tasked with browsing various files related to citizens. He must decide which ones he will keep for himself and which will he send to specialized forces. During the game the player is browsing various websites, tracking the activity of the citizens in social services and dating sites and he reads news and blogs. All of this enables him to find the perpetrators of terrorist attacks. Sometimes he will be forced to exceed his capabilities and check private data, mails, chat logs or medical files, hack into personal computers and even impersonate other people in order to provoke them to acting. During his work he must be very careful because, similarly as in real life, all actions can lead to unforeseen events.

Technical aspects

Due to its specifics, Orwell released on PC doesn’t offer photorealistic graphics. During the gameplay the player is accompanied by various windows of application interfaces and files obtained through Internet. The animations that rarely appear in the game were created by using an old school style and they offer vector-based graphics. The building and character models were build by using a small number of polygons.

Last updated on 21 January 2021