Opera Omnia
Opera Omnia is part of an indie trend where the crudest-looking games often have the most lasting emotional impact. Within an austere Apple II-era facade, solo developer Stephen Lavelle builds an unsettling story about Machiavellian politics and the slippery nature of history.
The game plays out as a dialogue between a manipulative government official and your character, a historian who specializes in migration patterns. The statesman visits you with an assignment—say, wouldn’t it be nice if that holy city happened to be our ancestral homeland?—and you finesse a computer simulation until you “prove” that the past happened just as the state wishes it did.
The centerpiece of Opera Omnia is a simple interface that’s deceptively tough to understand. Players may stumble through half a dozen levels before they grasp what’s going on. The difficulty comes from the game’s unique concept: The object is not to create a better future, but rather to craft a more convenient past. Once players accept the idea that history is fungible, Opera Omnia eases into darker matters, uprooting the history of an entire race (the “Others”) in the name of patriotism.