I wish this game was even half as good as the original. The original had this beautiful flow to it, and so many interesting characters and connections. Here there's like 2 characters and they all fucking suck. Also it's a denser connection of characters but not in a good way. It just feels super scaled back, especially when it's half the length of the original episode-wise. Sure there's more endings and all that but who fucking cares when you:

A. get a much more biased look at the whole situation, obviously there'd be bias with the Orwell system and the Nation but it's far too pervasive to the point where,
B. both the admin helping you and the main antagonist are so incredibly one note. In a game that actively admits how truth isn't black and white, it's a damn shame all these characters are.
C. You don't really want to root for anyone, not the govt nor the shitty revolutionaries. In the original you had reasons for Orwell existing (taking care of these more complex crimes) but also plenty of reasons for it to not exist (privacy matters and dystopia, among others), along with multi-faceted characters who supported one angle or another, or even bend the plasticity of the truth to economic or ethical gain. But here it's like, our main antagonist Rabha or whatever is so set in his ways that the only moment he even considers he's wrong about how he's going about his anti-govt activities, is the LITERAL same moment he blows his fucking brains out. Absolutely retarded. With the Govt it's so blatantly pro-Govt but not in like, the Orwell S1 way but in like a completely unironic copaganda way. Sure, that's part of it, but it's not the whole and sum of it; our handler this time was much colder than the one of Orwell S1 and had no room for error compared to Symes. Plus seeing Symes actually get Orwell turned on him humanizes him a bunch; absolutely NOTHING happens to Ampleland and she's much more static as a result. It's not like she's a higher-up or someone with actual power like the Chairman, she's just a lackey for the state that makes the story feel much more one-dimensional than it could've been.


Massively disappointing especially after the brilliance of the first game. Also there's a really cool mechanic, the Influencer one, that doesn't get introduced until the last minute and I think that's a shame. It really extends that idea of procuring context to shape the story, which was mainly limited to shaping the context for police. But with this new Influencer thing, you get to directly shape those narratives and present them to the people, and seeing it come in, in real time w/Babbler is super cool. Showing how the disintegration and recombination of truth through biases and agendas really worked, in a gameplay setting. It really feels like what the intro was going for, and yet they use it in not only a short, but incredibly lackluster way at the very end of the game? For shame. For shame.