Almost as if they want you to install their software as a backdoor to r00t your b0x0r and spill your secrets to The Man, Osmotic Studios are giving their dystopian surveillance ’em up Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You away for free for keepsies right now (again). Nab it on Steam to register it to your account within the next few hours and it’ll be yours forever. For free, absolutely get in and start investigating dissidents, citizen.

(more…)

Orwell is a cautionary tale that invokes the themes of 1984, and certainly sounds like nightmare material for the 21st century. I m pretty sure it resembles something from the mind of Charlie Brooker, creator of Black Mirror. An adventure game set entirely in the “Orwell OS”, worth playing right through to the outcome, whatever that may be.

(more…)

Yeah man, I love the 80s. Blasting Sisters Of Mercy out my boombox as I cycle round town on my Raleigh Lizard with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes reflectors on the spokes, doing the electric boogaloo in front of the telescreen like a good citizen, getting wrecked with the lads down the Chestnut Tree Caf , then waking up with my head strapped into a cage of ravenous rats. Hell yeah 1984 forever! If you’re well retro too, you might want to check out dystopian surveillance game Orwell, as being given away free for the next day-and-a-bit.

(more…)

The third and final episode of dystopian surveillance game Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength launched today, completing the follow-up to 2016’s Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You. As before, this series puts players in charge of an oppressive state’s wide-ranging surveillance software to pry into people’s lives, investigate them and their connections, and try to figure out what’s going on – and what you want the official record to say is going on. Ah, what the hey, I’m sure you’ll end up with your head in a box of rats either way, may as well try to do something nice for someone, yeah? (more…)

Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength is being released, for some odd reason, in three chapters over the space of a month. The first is out now, and so I put on my best spying monocle to tell you wot I think.

Orwell was a game I thoroughly enjoyed despite its ludicrously silly conceit – a day one appointee at a secret government spying programme being given the reins to investigate a serious terrorist attack. So, with the arrival of its sequel, I hoped it was at least in a position to move on past this daft premise. But, no! Amazingly, you’re yet again someone who’s applying online to work for Orwell, and that same day you’re given access to techno-spying abilities that shouldn’t be in the hands of MI5’s highest ranking operatives.

When I reviewed the first game, I realised I was in the odd position of having this arm-long list of things that made the game seem fundamentally silly, but argued for how I’d enjoyed it so much despite that. In playing the sequel just over a year later, I’d really hoped to be saying how so much of these daft problems had been addressed, and that which made it such a good idea be pushed to the front. Unfortunately, not a single aspect of its conceit has changed.

(more…)

Ignorance is strength, I’ve always said, though that never did get me out of doing my maths homework. Today it becomes our job to foster ignorance in Orwell: Ignorance In Strength, the follow-up to 2016’s Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You. Once again we play as an agent of an opressive government, spying on people through phones, computers, and social media then deciding what we want to record and present as the official record to influence how events unfold. Our John really quite liked the first game, so good, grand, let’s have more. The first episode launched today, and another two will follow fortnightly. (more…)

John enjoyed his time snooping around dystopian surveillance game Orwell, and if the bug I planted under his lapel can be believed, he’d be keen to play something else in a similar vein. Well he’s in luck. The second season of Orwell, subtitled Ignorance is Strength, is set to kick off soon. Putting you in the role of an officially sanctioned cyber-snooper acting for the greater good, Osmotic Studios’ episodic original could hardly be more timely. Season two will tackle “the rise of fake news, social media echo chambers, and the displacement of truth”, making it the first game in my knowledge to really grapple with our Trumpian age.

(more…)

We’ll soon get to slip on the jackboots of The Man again in a second series of interesting episodic big brotherer Orwell, developers Osmotic Studios announced today. While the first season gave us control of a digital surveillance system to investigate suspected terrorists, Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength [official site] will put us in charge of a bigger question: who decides what even is true, and what’s truth worth? (more…)

Hello, friends. Our podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, returned last week to talk about science fiction in games with a trio of Independent Games Festival awards nominees. One of those interviewees (Brendon Chung of Quadrilateral Cowboy) went on to win dat big ol’ prize.

In the second episode of our IGF special, we talk to the makers of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and Orwell about something called “politics”. You can find it below or stream it directly from Soundcloud. … [visit site to read more]

Top Secret [official site], a game about whistleblower Edward Snowden that you play in real time via email, was released at the weekend. It lurked on Kickstarter back in 2015, when Joe leaked his thoughts on it, delving three days into a demo where he met a cryptanalyst who made him genuinely encrypt all future emails he would send. It s all generated by clever machines of course, but the delay between sending a message and receiving a reply is there to make it feel real. … [visit site to read more]