My relationship to the written works of George Orwell is, like many other Australians my age, “those depressing books they made us read in high school”. Sure, I respected the ideas behind his novels even then, but I simply had no interest in engaging with Animal Farm when I had Mass Effect 2 to play. 

It must be recognised that this point of view is evidence of the enormous privilege I enjoyed; to be given a book like Animal Farm to read and study. Co-founder of developer The Dairymen Imre Jele grew up in Hungary during the Cold War, during which many texts criticising the USSR were banned – including George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Adapting the book into a game has been a passion of theirs for many years, and with a partnership with Orwell’s estate, it’s finally been made possible. Orwell’s Animal Farm – the game – is a visual novel with light resource management elements, developed alongside the creators of Reigns. It features a simplified version of the story and even multiple endings to the game, so you can experience a “what if” style ending to the original tale. And while this is a great premise for a video game adaptation of such a classic novel, its implementation leaves much to be desired. 

A short summary of the novel for those who have never read it: The animals who live at Manor farm become sick of working all day while their human farmer reaps all the benefits. After chasing him away from the farm, they set up a society of their own and decree that from now on, all animals are to be treated equally… so long as they stand on four legs. They call this system ‘Animalism’, and are sure that their new way of life will be better for them all. Spoiler alert – it isn’t.

The game takes you through the events of the novel, starting from the revolution that evicts Farmer Jones from the farmhouse. Your task is to direct the farm animals in their daily tasks, managing their strength and morale, and ensuring they don’t die of hunger or cold. While it initially seems easy, it isn’t long before harsh winters and aggressive neighbours make keeping everybody happy impossible. Depending on what you choose to do, characters may die earlier – or live far longer – than their book counterparts, or the fate of the whole farm may change.

The decisions themselves are simple: the pigs – the allegorical leaders of the game – announce what needs to be done, and you click on the animal that proposes the best solution. Certain actions will affect the animals’ belief in Animalism, how much food and shelter there is for the winter, and how protected the farm is against human attack. 

While the choices regarding food and shelter have apparent consequences, Animal Farm is not always transparent about many of the choices you make.  You’ll need to employ some trial and error across multiple playthroughs, but after more than three runs of the game, I am still not certain I understand which choices are important. Purposefully changing up most of my decisions seemed not to have any effect at all, yet on one occasion I got a different outcome for a reason I still can’t determine. Part of me is sure that this is part of the point, that the game was showing me that my choices would not win out over Animalism’s fundamentally broken system. But if that is the case, I wish they made their point in a way that was more poignant and less vaguely frustrating.

The errors occurred too many times across my playthroughs for me to dismiss them. These included continuity errors – which is a cardinal sin for visual novels as far as I’m concerned – and plain old graphical bugs that made the character portraits act strangely.

In one instance, I noticed one day that Napoleon the pig had quietly died without so much as a peep. Strange, I thought, for one of the major characters of the story. It was stranger still when his funeral scene was suddenly triggered after a battle in year 3, as if he had been there all along. In other instance, several animals died in a battle only for the game to trigger dialogue for those characters as if they had merely been wounded. There are less grave errors, too, that involve lines of narration being triggered in odd places, and character portraits failing to appear. All things considered, it doesn’t look like the game’s structure is 100% solid.