We’ll be attending LudoNarraCon this weekend, a digital convention for narrative games hosted right here on Steam from 10 - 13 May.
We will be ‘exhibiting’ at the event and streaming right here on the Orwell Steam store page. It’s being put on by indie games label, Fellow Traveller, and we’re really excited to be taking part alongside so many great games like Neo Cab, Cultist Simulator and Sunless Skies!
We’d be thrilled if you can join us this weekend, and be sure to check out the rest of the event for more behind-the-scenes content, demos and really cool panels. More info here: LudoNarraCon
6 More Games Announced for LudoNarraCon!
A whole bunch more games are exhibiting during LudoNarraCon!
Check out the full, updated list of games you can see behind-the-scenes content for during LNC, on ludonarracon.com 💖
16 Games Announced for LudoNarraCon
Fellow Traveller presents #LudoNarraCon, hosted right here on Steam on May 10-13. Come celebrate narrative video games from around the world with us!
We’ve announced 16 of the exhibiting games to be featured: Neo Cab, Boyfriend Dungeon, Mutazione, Heaven’s Vault, The Church in the Darkness, Sunless Skies, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Beholder, Genesis Noir, and more! Check out the full lineup on ludonarracon.com.
An initiative of indie label Fellow Traveller, LudoNarraCon is digital convention that aims to create a platform to showcase and celebrate interesting and innovative narrative games, replicating as many of the aspects and benefits of the physical convention experience as possible within a digital format.
Learn more at ludonarracon.com!
ANNOUNCING ⭐✨LudoNarraCon✨⭐
We are beyond thrilled to announce 📢 ⭐✨LudoNarraCon✨⭐
a new online-only convention coming this May, right here on Steam, celebrating
🎮narrative video games🎮 the people who make them, and the folks who love them. Join us for panels and other fun content with your favorite developers and influencers from the industry, as well as downloadable game demos that will be available ONLY during LudoNarraCon.
Want to come? IT’S FREE. Visit ludonarracon.com to sign up and let us know if you’ll attend, and to get updates on who’s gonna be there & what games you can play!
Orwell is coming to a language near you!
Hello all! We’ve got really cool news for Orwell fans!
Ever since Orwell Seasons One and Two released, we’ve constantly been asked whether we’d localize the game in other languages. Osmotic has always been interested in doing this, particularly since the game has such a strong narrative focus. What better way to ensure that players around the world can enjoy the game than to translate it into their language?
So what’s been stopping us? Well, Orwell is specifically designed and coded in such a way that we had to build out a unique method of implementing translations, from scratch—which added time and other challenges to this goal.
But—here’s the exciting bit! We’re now working through those challenges in a bunch of ways, one of which is hiring a professional localization service.
Soon we’ll be able to release Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You to multiple new languages, including German, French, Spanish, Russian, and Simplified Chinese. Wau! C'est génial! Hurra! 厉害!
However, we know this doesn’t cover every language spoken by our fans. So we wanted to offer all of you the opportunity to help us bring the game to YOUR language… and to achieve that, we’ve created a Crowdin project for Orwell, at translate.orwell-game.com. If you’re a fan of the game, and you’d like to participate in translating the game into Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, or other languages, let us know!
We’re really thrilled at the opportunity to bring Orwell to new players all over the globe, and we wanted to thank the community for their continued support—especially those who choose to dedicate their time to helping us localize more widely.
Since there is a lot of development work to implement localization, right now we are focusing on Season One but, once complete, we will investigate localizing Orwell: Ignorance is Strength.
This project is one of our top priorities right now. You can expect to hear more updates on continued development and timing, as soon as possible.
Thank you!! Merci! Danke! Спасибо!
Join the Crowdin project: translate.orwell-game.com/
We look forward to bringing you more news soon.
Keep travelling!
The Fellow Traveller team & Osmotic Studios
It’s time to recruit new investigators! Orwell is FREE for 24 hours
(Prospective) Investigators,
If you or your friends haven’t played Orwell: Keeping and Eye on You, you can get it free on Steam for the next 24 hours! To add the game to your library, click on the Orwell steam page.
For this week only, Orwell: Ignorance is Strength, season 2 of the series, is available at 40% off.
As always, we want to hear your feedback. Please share your thoughts or questions in the steam community forum where we, the dev team, will be there to answer your questions.
Team Osmotic
Surprise Attack Games is now Fellow Traveller
Today our publisher, Surprise Attack Games, is relaunching as Fellow Traveller.
To celebrate, Orwell: Keeping An Eye On You, is on sale along with the rest of their catalogue. Check out their publisher sale page for all the details - https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/fellowtraveller.
Here’s some more from the team at Fellow Traveller on what the change is all about:
EPISODE ONE OF ORWELL: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH IS OUT NOW!
Hi Orwell fans.
Season Two of Orwell: Ignorance is Strength is available to buy RIGHT NOW!
Fans who own the original Orwell will receive an additional 10% off Ignorance is Strength, which will be applied automatically. It's valid for one week only, so make sure you redeem it during launch week.
For any new players who have not yet played Orwell, the Seasons Complete bundle is highly recommended as it includes Season One and Season Two, allowing you to pick up both games during launch week at an incredible price.
Purchasing Orwell: Ignorance is Strength will give you access to all three bi-weekly episodes as they unlock, with Episode One: Thesis available to play now!
Here's the release schedule for when each episode of Season Two will go live:
Episode One: Thesis - Out now!
Episode Two: Antithesis - March 8 @ 8am PST/5pmCET
Episode Three: Synthesis - March 22 @ 8am PST/5pm CET
Be sure to let your friends and followers know about the discounts while these great deals exist. And we look forward to hearing what you think about Episode One in the Season Two Community Hub on Steam and via social media.
As always, we really appreciate your amazing support!
-Team Osmotic
Happy Anniversary, Orwell!
Today marks the one year anniversary of the full release of Orwell. As developers Osmotic Studios have written, it’s been an incredible year, and one full of profound changes as they diligently work on Season Two – Orwell: Ignorance is Strength. (Read more here).
But one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s the wonderful support the game has received from you, the fans. Thank you! Thank you for every recommendation you’ve made to a friend, for every tweet you’ve sent to Surprise Attack Games (@supattack), Osmotic Studios (@osmoticstudios) or the official Orwell account (@orwell_game), and for getting right into the lore and your role as an agent. This one year anniversary is for you.
We hope you look forward to continuing the journey with Orwell: Ignorance is Strength (store link), a whole new story, set chronologically concurrent with the original. Taking up a position within The Office, a secret department of Orwell with greater security access and more tools, you’re given the task of discovering the truth behind the disappearance of an agent in a world where truth and power are easily manipulated.
Once again, on behalf of both Surprise Attack Games and Osmotic Studios, thanks for being such awesome fans.
Stay watchful!
AS AN ANNIVERSARY BONUS…
The first five people to tweet to the @supattack account with an Orwell fan art or meme (created by you) will be sent a limited edition Orwell sticker and Orwell: Ignorance is Strength Pinny Arcade pin. (We will DM you via Twitter on Monday 20 November).
P.S. To celebrate the anniversary, Orwell is on sale today only at 50% off. Tell your friends!
BLOG POST: Orwell was released... and the world changed
In the first of a series of blog posts on Orwell: Ignorance is Strength, Osmotic Studios takes a look at how things have changed since the release of Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You, and the impact of those changes on the game, their studio, and the world.
- - -
On October 20, 2016, we released Orwell. After almost three years of development, and an unswerving belief in a game concept that had always been perceived as risky, our ‘baby’ was out the door, released as five weekly episodes. But, risky or not, from day one, we knew we had succeeded, attracting players who were looking for a new gaming experience, with a story to match.
A lot has happened since the release of Orwell. We’ve continually received many positive responses from both players and game critics, which has been wonderful. Especially since we felt like we’d been carrying around a huge responsibility: we were not only trying to entertain players, but also spark thoughts about highly topical issues that people may agree or disagree with. We always made a point about not wanting to impose opinions on people but instead give them the freedom to choose their side. Creating a gaming system where this was possible was certainly not easy. So, the messages we got from players about how Orwell had moved them emotionally (no matter which side they were on) were perhaps what fulfilled us most after the release of Season One.
But things not only changed for us as a studio; the world changed, too. The original inspiration for Orwell were the Snowden revelations, leaking facts about how the US government is collecting personal online data on a huge scale. In late 2016 through to early 2017, the US election campaign showed us that social media and the internet in general is not only an important tool to gain data, but also one of the most important forces to drive public opinion.
With that in mind, we felt that since Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You shows how powerful your online data can be, within an investigative context, it’s a logical next step to address what could be done with this data aside from deciding who is innocent or guilty. What if, as a player, you were able to reuse it and even spread new ideas through it? The discussion about fake news, alternative facts and the power of media manipulation inspired this and was the reason why we came up with the first concept for Orwell: Ignorance is Strength.
The central theme of Ignorance is Strength is the power of influence over the masses and the fight over this power. Compared to Season One, Season Two is more an open confrontation over this fight over influence and less about uncovering things. It asks the question, ‘How far can the power of fabricating stories and spreading them via the internet be used as a weapon?’. And, further, whether the ends justify the means. In addition, it questions truth itself and shows how easily it can be bent towards a certain direction, especially in the current digital information age.
Early screenshot of Orwell: Ignorance is Strength.
The story revolves mainly around the character Raban Vhart, who is an immigrant of the Nation's neighbouring country Parges. He owns a blog called The People's Voice that is very anti-government and also criticizes the Pargesian president. Raban does not hesitate to bend the truth towards his own opinion and his main goal is to free his beloved home land from the establishment that caused civil unrest and even war in the shattered country.
The player is once again recruited by the government in order to let justice prevail and ensure the stability of The Nation. After passing an aptitude test, they join ‘The Office’, a top secret government agency within Orwell. The player's job is to fight back against Raban, using the government's own ways of influencing the masses.
Since the player is part of a more secretive government agency than in Season One, they also have more extensive tools that not only allow them to submit information to the profiler, but also reuse this information to search websites, enter passwords, break into a wider range of digital devices, and more. We made these changes because players would then have options for interaction and it fit perfectly into the general concept as well. These additional options make the gameplay a bit more complex, but since our basic game mechanic is rather minimalist, we felt it would be great to build on this and increase the challenge.
Orwell: Ignorance is Strength is set chronologically parallel with events in the first game. Players who have experienced Keeping an Eye On You will know that its story is self-contained and pretty much comes full circle. It would have felt artificial to simply attach a new storyline to that. Additionally, the game had a few quite different outcomes at its end. If we had wanted to continue from there we would have needed to declare one of the specific endings canon, which we felt would have undermined the players’ previous choices. The choice to make the new story play out simultaneously with the previous one opens up the very interesting possibility to give some of the old choices new meanings from a different perspective, while at the same time giving background to some of the events in Parges that were only briefly mentioned in the previous game.
Once again, with Ignorance is Strength, we hope to spark thoughts and move players emotionally. Perhaps it will even make players more sensitive in terms of how they look at the authenticity of online news and data in general. But we still do not want to tell players what to think.
The game is certainly a reflection on what is currently going on in the world and how the tensions of public debates are increasing. Ignorance is Strength has a generally darker tone , which is more confrontational and more intense. The characters all have their own battles to fight with themselves as well. We hope that players will be able to reflect on the central themes outside of the real world and dwell on these ideas.
