Read the original review here: https://www.serialgamer.it/2025/05/30/oceania-2084-le-storie-che-il-regime-non-p...

The text below is a translated version: 

Oceania 2084 – The Stories that the regime cannot erase – Review

There is a moment, reading Oceania 2084 – Surplus Edition, in which you realize that this is not simply a role-playing game, it is an act of narrative disobedience, a manifesto written with pain, ink and algorithms, a reflection on the present disguised as the future. Published in 2024 by Johan Eriksson with his independent publishing house Jocher Games – Symbolic Systems thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, Oceania 2084 openly proposes itself as an Orwellian legacy for a world that, perhaps, has already crossed the threshold into dystopia. You don't play to win. It is played to remember.

The beginning of the game, which corresponds to the introductory chapter, makes no secret of its intent. The tone is heartfelt and brutal, there are no heroes, there are no salvation, the world is governed by the Conglomerate, a fusion of post-democratic global corporations, which has dismantled the nation-state, abolished independent currencies and digitized every aspect of culture and identity. The ideal is no longer freedom, but compliance. The very idea of truth is the property of the system. “Everything is as it should be,” says the Big Brother. Everyone has to agree.

Seven Steps to Create Danger

The moment players create their characters, they go through a ritual that looks more like a confession than a playful construction. The creation system, which develops in the first chapters after the introduction, requires seven phases: from the choice of personal and corporate values, to the definition of dominant emotions (fear, guilt, apathy, love, anger, sadness), to identify the Deviation, that is what makes that character guilty. And we’re not talking about real crimes: wanting a proper name, keeping a diary, falling in love... any form of subjectivity is considered a crime.

The characters, divided into three classes, Proles, Bureaucrats and Conglomerate Officials, live lives marked by strict rules, within a typical day consisting of six phases: awakening, two shifts of work, pause, leisure and sleep. Each stage is an opportunity to perform ACTS, actions that may seem insignificant, talk to someone, ignore a notification, fix a wall too long, but that under the absolute surveillance regime are all potentially criminal acts.

The day is told, the night observes

At the heart of the structure of the game, as described in the chapter dedicated to shared rules, is the concept of distributed narration. There is no traditional Game Master: a player plays the Big Brother, the others are the Resistance, but everyone contributes to the narrative, the construction of spaces, bonds and suspicions.

The game system does not involve successful evidence for actions, you do not roll a die to see if you can lie or if you find an object. The dice enter the scene only in the “Value Tests”, tests that determine whether a character can contain an emotion or lets himself be overwhelmed by it. Emotional crises, the Outbursts, are a constant threat: crying in public, raising your voice, fleeing suddenly, every emotional stretch mark is a crack in control.

Meanwhile, the Big Brother observes and accumulates Suspicion Points and will spend them on activating Reactions: interrogations, searches, orchestrated betrayals, thought police raids. Each reaction has a cost, regulated by a precise system that behaves almost like an invisible strategy game: a punishment algorithm.

Resistance and pain that persists

The fourth chapter, dedicated to the rules of the characters of the Resistance, introduces mechanics such as Stress, Wounds, Memories and Notes. Stress grows when you suppress an emotion, the Wounds get worse if not cured, the Memories can be happy or traumatic and can re-emerge in the game, changing scenes and decisions. Each character is constantly threatened by emotional and physical attrition and death, which here is called Vaporization, can take place without warning, without trial and brings with it the total oblivion: that character is also erased from the memory of others, and his name becomes a forbidden word.

Each class has access to specific actions. Classes, described in detail in the fifth chapter, are alive with social tensions. The Prole are the last, survive between theaters converted to propaganda and working-class neighborhoods controlled by noise and hunger. The bureaucrats work in the ministries, they handle the lies of the system. The Officials are the elite, yet they live under continuous pressure: even a wrong smile can condemn them. Every action they do is linked to a tragic currency: hope. You can spend hope to grant privileges, hide suspicions, grant a day off. Hope, here, is a resource that is consumed and that does not always return.

The Big Brother never sleeps

In the sixth chapter, entirely dedicated to the Big Brother, the system shows its cruelest face: the player who interprets Artificial Intelligence does not act as a narrator, but more like an algorithm that records, catalogs and intervenes. The Big Brother has the power to choose forbidden words, to turn trusted friends into secret agents, to destroy lives with a procedure, but it is not omnipotent: its actions have precise costs, regulated by points and tables. The Big Brother is not a creative tyrant, it is a system and for this reason, it is very scary.

Its main weapons are Reactions: narrative actions that punish, distort, annihilate. Some cost little, such as stalking and threats, others, such as Linguistic Review or Preventive Elimination, can overturn the entire story. Every reaction is a mechanical, impersonal act, it is a kind of horror bureaucracy.

Campaigns that tells of slow extinguishing

The seventh chapter guides players through three campaign modes. Call to Rebellion is a classical narrative structure, with clear objectives. The Narrative Campaign is episodic, theatrical, centered on the themes. The Relational Sandbox is a tangle of bonds, narrative seeds and personal secrets. No leads to victory, but they all lead to telling something that deserves to be remembered. Every end is an epilogue, a collective moment to say: “It was all fruitless. But it was right to try.”

The world is a well-designed lie

In the ninth chapter, dedicated to the game world, you discover the architecture of dystopia. The city has no name, but it is recognizable: a compressed, depersonalized metropolis, where each neighborhood is controlled by a class. The world is immersed in the Unoverse, a system of augmented reality and virtual reality powered by a neuromorphic AI that filters, reinterprets, re-writings every experience. Houses are bare, made livable only through simulation, news is propaganda, and truth is a product distributed by the MiniTrue.

The Conglomerate ministries follow Orwell’s but updated for the era of technological capitalism: the Ministry of Peace runs perpetual wars to consume industrial surplus, the Ministry of Abundance reduces rations in the name of prosperity, the Ministry of Love tortures for the sake of truth. In Oceania 2084 everything is at the service of lies.

The stories that resist

In an age when surveillance has now become a silent backdrop to our daily, algorithmic, normalized and accepted lives, Oceania 2084 takes on an almost pedagogical role: it does not explain how to fight, but shows what is likely to forget. The real political core of the game is not in the revolution, but in the possibility that we can still tell a different story, even if condemned to failure.

This game does not console, but it is not cynical, it forces you to look in the face of systemic dehumanization and in doing so offers you the possibility to choose what you want to remember, what you want to resist and with whom. Empathy is not a resource present in abundance: it is a deviation, a conscious choice, a fuse lit in a place where light is forbidden. Oceania 2084 does not save anyone, but it reminds you that you can still leave a trace and that perhaps, after all, this is already an act of rebellion.

If you want to try with us Oceania 2084, in the coming weeks we will take him live on Twitch, write to participate!

*Physical manual copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.

SERIAL GAMER SCORE: 9.2/10