Producing 🌌live television is one of the most stressful jobs imaginable. Everything that happens can’t be edited or stopped, and if something goes wrong, there’s a good chance that you’re the one who takes the blame. It’s your responsibility to make sure the show goes well, that every cue and camera angle is perfect, and that nothing offensive or unintended makes it to air. It’s the kind of career path that seems like a sure-fire way to develop an anxiety-induced ulcer.
Sounds like🦩 a great idea for a video game, doesn’t it?
Going Live In Five
Not For Broadcast is an incredibly interesting game currently in Early Access on Stream. You play as a ꦆjanitor who suddenly inherits the position of producer and editor for a nightly news program on what’s essentially a parody of the BBC. You need to make sure that the program goes off without a hitch, which is difficult considering the bumbling buffoons in front of the camera. Oh, and as if that doesn’t sound horrendous enough, a new British political party has just been elected and things are starting to look a wee bit dystopian.
This is a game that lives and dies on its writing and acting. It’s made up entirely of hours upon hours of video footage of actors reading the news and being generally unlikeable people. So if the jokes don’t land or the performances aren’t up to snuff then the whole game falls on its face. Thankfully, from what I’ve played so f💃ar, this seems to be a well-written game with some extremely entertaining characters. The humor is very British – especially a segment about the first-ever Sportsboard championship – and the vast majority of the gags were quite funny and absurd. Depending on how awful you are at running the show, your inept editing might even add to the hilarity that ensues.
Freddy Fazbear's Friday Night News
When it comes to the gameplay, Not For Broadcast strangely reminds me of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Five Nights At Freddy’s. Ther♒e’s even a guy at the start who gives you instructions over a phone call. The big difference here is that the emphasis is being put on the camera work instead of jump scares.
You’re given a big control board with four video screens and a whole bunch of buttons, levers, and dials. Each screen represents a camera, and you need to choose the right shots for the broadcast. That means focusing on who’s talking at the time and changing up the shots. Lingering on a single shot for too long or cutting to the wrong camera can lead to viewers tuning out, and that’s the last thing you want. As the game progresses there’ll be other complications, like having to censor swear words, preventing signal interference, choosing the right commercials and headline🔜 pictures, etc. It starts to get hectic pretty quick.
However, I found it to be surprisingly fun. You basically get to be the director of the show and determine what the theoretical viewers at home get to see. It was exhilarating having to switch angles and make sure the ratings stay consistent. I could even see the potential for replayability as there's a grading system that determines how good of a job you did. There's also so much going on that you can miss little things that happen in the video clips. The developeౠrs included a section where you can watch all your broadcasts so you can see how it would actually look, or you can just view the videos and commer💞cials without having to worry about any of that gameplay hogwash.
There’s a second part of the game that involves your character’s home life during the transitional period of the new government. You get to do a little choose-your-own-adventure style text gaming to make tough decisions like whether you should or shouldn’t loan your brother-in-law your passport so he can flee the country. I’m not sure how important these choices are to the overall plot just yet due to Not For Broadcast's unfinished state, but it’ll be interesting to see if this part of the game affects the video pro🧸duction portions.
Funny, Sad and Scary: Just Like The Real News!
One thing I’m fairly curious about is how Not For Broadcast is going to handle its subject matter. The game seems to be all about the new Advance Party💞 that has been elected to power in the UK and is making radical, sweeping changes to the country. They’re redistributing wealth, relocating families, taking passports from th๊e rich until they pay back taxes, and in their most dystopian move to date, opening up centers for the elderly to “unburden themselves from their families," which is a fancy way of saying commit suicide.
From what I’ve played, everything is light and amusing, but some of the 🍒clips from upcoming levels paint a grim picture that seems to be at odds with the goofy tone the game has set so far. Things are going to get significantly d﷽arker as we go deeper into the Advance Party’s regime. Based on future events, it feels like there's going to be a huge tonal shift. The game will seemingly pivot from having silly segments like the one that involves a stereotypically awful high school play to reporting on mass genocide. It's intriguing, but I hope it doesn’t feel like two halves of two different scripts stapled together.
There's also a few things that I hope get tidied up before🎐 the official release. If you let the ratings fall and you fail a segment, you have to do that entire part all over 🔯again. In a game that's about watching video clips, having to go through the videos from the start is a bit tedious. It certainly makes you not want to lose, but considering the extensive lengths of these clips, it's pretty rough to have to restart them. A better checkpoint system would be a huge improvement. I also hope the text portion of the game is going somewhere narratively as right now it feels kind of bare.
Real Fake News That's Really Good
Not For Broadcast has already impressed me with its concept and gameplay. Iಌ'm excited to see how it is once it's finished because what I've played feels very unique, challenging, and funny. The story seems to be trying to say something cogent about British or even worldwide politics and the writing has been strong enough that I feel like tꦓhey'll stick the landing.
This might be a bit of a niche title if you don't have an interest in video production or working in the media, but I'm fully invested. If you want to see the anxious behind-the-scenes turmoil of producing the news, Not For Broadcast is shaping up to be a h🐲ilariously 𒀰satirical yet frightening experience.
A copy of Not For Broadcast was provided to TheGamer for this preview. Not For Broadcast is available in Early Access on Steam.