Pictures for Truth is a game about human rights violations in China, and also the first game developed for Amnesty International, according to its developers. Created by a group of professional game developers and volunteers from Quebec in their off time, the game puts the player in the role of a journalist called to help a Chinese colleague detained by police. Somewhat like Global Conflicts, you must investigate via conversation and exploration to obtain enough information to write stories that publicize the problems at hand. like every game that takes the journalist's perspective, the player gets an outsider's sense of the situation rather than that of the actors experiencing the purported violations.

The game is the right length for one of this type and offers a compelling graphic novelesque visual style, a great way to apologize for not creating a complex, detailed world. The game plays fine, but decisions are few and relatively obvious, from the nearly branch-free branching dialogue to sets of choices and consequences. For example, each segment requires the player to compose a story both from facts gathered through eyewitness interviews and photographs taken with the provided camera. While the player has to choose the right photos based on the "amount" they represent the required topics, the story writes itself. Despite its simplicity, the game holds together and feels gratifying to complete. It's probably not teaching much new information or perspective, but I can imagine school-aged kids getting something out of it as a part of a larger conversation about the current state of human rights in China, especiallya s all eyes are poised to turn to that country as host of the summer Olympics.

Pictures for Truth was developed with XNA and thus runs on PC only and requires DirectX, but it also drives the developers' hope to release it on the XBox Live Arcade platform in the future.

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