Further reviewage
Orwell (Osmotic / Fellow Traveller, 2016)
Orwell: Ignorance is Strength (Osmotic / Fellow Traveller, 2018)
For all that the game's tagline is "Big Brother has arrived - and it's you", Orwell's premise is...not really that Orwellian. The idea is that an approximately-democratic nation state has developed a fairly all-pervasive surveillance database and has, as a safeguard, appointed some carefully screened foreign nationals with no knowledge of the affairs of individual citizens to act as a screening layer between the database and the country's national security apparatus.
In other words, here the distinction between means and ends is still nominally important, and there's an acceptance that there should be limits to the power of the state. Oceania this is not. Still, it's an interesting idea for a game - the plot is that there's a (domestic) terrorist attack at the start of the game, and you're the foreign national in charge of screening the intelligence provided by the system to the security services, and the question obviously is how far into people's lives you're going to go in the name of national security.
Except...it really isn't. Because in order to actually make the game progress through the plot after the first two chapters, you're going to pry into every little nook and cranny you can possibly find, and throw all kinds of irrelevant tidbits into the mix as well. The game feels like it's fundamentally on rails, which is not the best look for a game that's supposed to be about moral choices. I didn't feel like a moral actor, I felt like an automation. Nice idea, bad execution.
Ignorance is Strength is a bit better, in that it's a game about fake news/government influence on media etc. In this game you're mostly waging an information war with a bunch of nationalists in a neighbouring nation who are trying to incite violence against the peacekeepers you have in that country. (It is unclear just how much peace they're keeping, and whether or not anyone else gets any.) This one's a much better puzzle game, but the set-up largely obliviates the moral challenge - you're waging an information war, as stated, the set-up has you working for your country's foreign intelligence services, and most of the people you're investigating aren't entirely private citizens. I'm not sure what your conclusion from either game is supposed to be; I'm also not sure if I'm supposed to think of myself as on the side of truth in Ignorance is Strength or not (I didn't).
Overall these games are kind of fun, but they're defnitely nowhere near as thought-provoking as they were trying to be.
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