Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You

I went in expecting a lightweight narrative curiosity and came out genuinely unsettled by my own choices. Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You is a five-episode investigative simulation set inside a fictional nation's freshly launched mass-surveillance program, and the whole thing runs on a mechanic that is almost embarrassingly simple on paper: find highlighted fragments of information called Datachunks, decide which ones to upload to the system, and let your unseen handler Symes act on whatever you give him. That's it. No inventory, no combat, no dialogue trees. What makes it land is the gap between you and Symes. You cannot add context or commentary to any piece of data you submit. Upload a chat log where someone sarcastically says a friend "tortures" them, and Symes files that friend as a person of interest. The system cannot distinguish nuance, which is precisely the point. The three information-collection tools are Reader (web pages, news articles, social posts), Listener (wiretapped phone and chat logs), and Insider (backdoor access to personal devices and medical records). Juggling all three across a growing network of suspects creates genuine triage pressure. The game drip-feeds new data mid-session, forcing you to decide what to read now and what to park. In practice this mimics the actual cognitive load of filtering information overload, and the discomfort is intentional. Osmotic Studios has said the design was directly shaped by post-Snowden conversations about how abstract surveillance feels until you are inside it. You stop feeling abstract about it very fast once a character's mental health prescription is sitting in your upload queue. The case itself spans five episodes, clocking in around five to six hours for a first run, with multiple endings driven entirely by which Datachunks you surface and which you bury. The narrative is genuinely unpredictable, and the characters are written with enough specificity that ruining one of their lives feels bad in a way scripted moral meters never manage. The world, a colorful modern democracy called The Nation rather than a cartoonish dystopia, makes the surveillance feel plausible rather than distant. Chapter titles pull directly from Nineteen Eighty-Four, Symes is named after a 1984 character, and the program's logo is an eye. The references are not subtle, but the story underneath them is more nuanced than the branding suggests. There are real limits to acknowledge. The ending branches are fewer than the rhetoric implies, with most playthroughs converging on two or three conclusive shapes. Players who push into later episodes report that progress occasionally stalls into arbitrary fragment-hunting when the narrative logic runs dry, which breaks immersion in a game whose entire feel depends on that immersion staying intact. The writing occasionally veers melodramatic, and some forced uploads remove agency at moments where the game most wants you to feel it. Anyone expecting the moral complexity of Papers, Please to land with equal force may find Orwell a step lighter, more entertainment than indictment. It is also a short purchase by any measure, so replay curiosity rather than replay depth is what justifies a second run. For strategy and systems players who typically live in menus and decision trees, this is worth a session. The decision space is narrow compared to a Paradox title, but the weight-per-decision ratio is genuinely high. Every Datachunk upload is a small policy decision with downstream consequences you cannot fully predict, which is a design principle I respect regardless of genre. If you have ever played a grand-strategy campaign and then wondered what it would feel like to be the intelligence analyst feeding bad data to your own war council, Orwell answers that question in about six hours and leaves you thinking about it longer than that.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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