Date: December 18, 2020
Getting into George Orwell’s 1945 Story
Back in 1945, George Orwell published a storybook called Animal Farm. The book takes place on a farm where the animals are fed up with their farm owner and want to rebel against him and all other humans, to hopefully create a well-made society that no human has ever been able to do. Coming back to current times, the developers over at Nerial wanted to bring the story of Orwell’s Animal Farm into an interactive story, and what a year to do so, as 2020 has been a time where we’ve all looked at our different societies and wondering what it would be like if we put more rules and thought into them in the beginning.
Nerials release of Orwell’s Animal Farm game has you, the gamer, take control of what decisions the farm animals will take to ensure the animal farm becomes a society that all animals are welcome and enjoy, to a point. Knowing the full story of Orwell’s Animal Farm after reading it in school years ago, I know myself that there are a few different endings that can happen down the bath of the decisions that got made in the story, and seem to be made most of the time in the game too. While there are a few different endings the Orwell’s Animal Farm game can have, it’s important to note that this is a decision-making game that you want to think about your choices a little more than what is just said on the screen at times since things can go off the wagon quickly. And as our great Napoleon once said, “Four legs good. Two legs bad.”
Creating an animal society
Jumping into the mechanics of Orwell’s Animal Farm game story, you will start with a group of animals on Mr. Jones’s farm that are fed up with their farm owner and want change. Planning for years to take over the farm, they get their opportunity one night when farmer Mr. Jones leaves the farm door open when he’s drunk. With quick thinking, the animals come together and take over the farm, chasing off the humans on the farm. After taking over the farm, you will lead the animals around the farm to see what the humans have that animals don’t, such as beds, beer, and clothes. The animals will then come together for a meeting to make their society rules, that you don’t have much say of, but that will start your journey.
After taking over the farm, the animals have their main leaders: pigs named Napoleon, Snowball, and their sidekick Squealer. After this, your main goal of the game will be to keep morale up on the farm with your sheep army that will read the rules of the animal farm every day to grow in numbers. You will use the other animals to build defenses around the farm from the farmers around that want to take back the farm, and you will also need to pick which animals will gather the hay food and do the crops on the farm. These decisions matter to a point, but with not much of a tutorial on how your decisions will affect your animals, it’s easy to say that you will make them tired quickly if you make the same animals do the same job each day.
Orwell’s Animal Farm doesn’t have many settings to choose from when making your animal society; it’s interesting to choose wisely when talking to the animals to see how things pan out. There is an X amount of animals that you can invite to your farm. There are X amount of human farmers that you can meet on your journey, so you may think you’ve hit the ending quickly after meeting all the animals and farmers, but with a few different endings, as said earlier, the game will ensure the player thinks about their choices to a point.
After playing for a few hours, I was able to get two different endings of the game. The first being all my animals died because I wanted to see what would happen if I made them leave one by one because of the dictatorship role, our great Napoleon pig leader was showing. My second ending was I gave the farm back to the human farmers because I saw that the pigs once again were becoming a communist society. It was an interesting thing to follow how that came about because I thought I was making some great decisions to ensure that Napoleon didn’t have too much power, but it seems that’s how most of the endings need and want the player to see.
What does the story teach us?
After playing through the story of George Orwell’s Animal Farm for a while and getting a few different endings, I was pleasantly surprised how well the developers over at Nerials’ could bring back the memories of reading the book and watching the movie back in school. Knowing how things go down in the story is how I first wanted the story to go, and it did. So knowing that I was ready to give this game another run to see if I could alter the ending a bit, while I was able to a bit, it was a little difficult since the game seemed like it wanted to drag a few of the animals I wanted to keep away even though I was trying not to. While I didn’t want to give the dictator role to Napoleon’s main leader, it seemed as though that was the path the game tried to place each time.