Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You is an investigative adventure game developed by Osmotic Studios and published by Daedalic Entertainment, released in 2016. Casting the player as an operator of a government surveillance system called The Orwell, it has you read only a suspect's online traces, their social posts, chat logs, private files, and news, and drag fragments of conflicting evidence into a profile to decide who they are and what they did. By building deduction out of reading public and leaked information and choosing which excerpts to submit as proof, it defined the OSINT-style investigation adventure, the lineage of games where you solve a case from someone's digital footprint alone.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
Demons' Timeline Buried gem
A Japanese SNS-puzzle deduction adventure in which you play the net detective El and solve supernatural murder cases using only the timeline of a fictional giant social network called Parrotter. The criminals are superhuman beings called Akuma, and each paradox case is cracked by reading posts for clues, gender, age, occupation, relationships, then linking public accounts to their secret alt accounts, recovering deleted data with passwords, citing the right posts as the grounds for your reasoning, and finally fitting a hashtag to complete the deduction. It is OSINT-style investigation, nine stages in all, with no time limit and no game over: the core is your power to read, to filter signal from noise, and to think logically. Made by the Japanese doujin indie team DigitalCats and released April 2026. Very Positive at 276 reviews and 98 percent, yet with only about 21 English reviews (7.6 percent) the wider West has barely found it. It already supports English and Japanese, and at 1,300 yen it is a paid, fully released game.