A
“choose your own adventure style” game that attempts to expose the manipulative
nature of the media. Never has a review needed to be more unbiased. Newspapers,
please!
Developed
by Unbound Creations
Released
in 2019
“We
all lie. But some of us are better at it than others” proposes British author
Henry Hemming. “There are people who are so good at lying that they are
paid to change the minds of millions, using techniques few of us will ever
understand.” It is often said that we live in an age of “fake news”, and while it’s
a phrase that has existed since the thirties it’s never felt more
relevant. There’s been an explosion in the use of the phrase since
Donald Trump depended on it during his presidential campaign and election.
While Trump uses “fake news” to debunk his negative press, his team also
used the concept to glorify his inauguration. Infamously “alternative facts”
suggested crowds to see his debut as president were bigger than they actually
were. Immediate global distribution via the internet makes everyone a news
correspondent and they’re allowed to report “the truth” without citing any
credible source. It’s become practically impossible to know who to
believe. The concept of fake news has an unsettling and dystopian
undertone, and it prompts us to question the headlines and doubt the broadcast
news. It’s not just conspiracy theorists who now believe unseen forces are
trying to manipulate our minds and shift our beliefs toward their own agenda.
This
is the climate in which ‘Headliner: NoviNews‘ is set.
You
play the role of the chief editor at a large media outlet. For two weeks your
job is to choose between different news articles, either approving them for
publication or rejecting them. While the choices may seem binary at
first, the game alludes to more complex systems at work beneath the surface.
Evidently every decision made will sculpt the world around you,
something your in game boss eagerly points out. “Whatever we publish will
become the truth. We control the news, we control the truth”. Publishing an
article essentially means the newspaper agrees with it, influencing the
public either positively or negatively. After all if you “repeat a lie often
enough it will become the truth”. A dramatic shift in opinion will also have a
dramatic and sudden effect on the public. Similarly publishing or
rejecting everything will have consequence; the former making people think your
irrelevant the latter making them believe your censoring.
After
choosing the news from a first person view in your office, you’ll then have to
walk home. Now the perspective shifts to side-on, zoomed out so far that your
character is a dot in the crowd. It’s a visual reminder that you’re something
small in a big world that surrounds you. It’s a juxtaposition to the close up view
you have in the office, when you’re significant and all-powerful. Strolling
through the streets is reminiscent of ‘Oxenfree’, where speech bubbles will let
you know what others are saying. The people passed will be discussing the news
they have just read, passing comment on both the headlines and also on your
news agency’s relevance. More profoundly the environment may also change as a
result of your longer term decisions. As the game asks; “is the truth
always the best option when it leads to panic and chaos?” Citizens you
pass may exhibit signs of sickness, riots might fill the streets and buildings
may even lay in ruin in the worst scenarios. “The right message at the right
time can have profound consequences” the thoughtful convenience store clerk
points out. He’s one of three specific characters you’ll interact with most,
along with your brother and a female colleague. As you spend time with them you
inevitably build up a bond; something hard to forget when your headline
decisions could adversely affect them. They give a face to the main issues; a
personification of social problems. As such your choices feel like they have
even greater consequence: you’re not just going to change the lives of the
irrelevant majority, you’re going to affect your depression afflicted brother
Justin, the life of foreign reporter Evie, and the small business owned by
family man Rudy.
Set
during an unspecified year in the near future, Novistan is a nation obsessed
with genetic modification, on the brink of conflict with the neighbouring
country of Learis. Racial tensions run high, an epidemic is feared and drug and
alcohol addictions are commonplace. ‘Headliner’ may highlight the plight
of the everyday man, but they live in a world controlled by corporations and a
potentially corrupt government. But, how do you present these unseen forces to
your readers? Opinions on businesses and the amount you support the government
will affect your papers funding and reach. There’s merit to being unbiased
but becoming too radical makes your publication un-relatable to the masses and
vulnerable to criticism. Without advertising your media empire will
collapse, without government support you’ll be shut down. Like every decision
in ‘Headliner’ there’s no obvious right answer, it’s impossible to please all
of the people all of the time.
With
so much going on within the game world it’s useful that each news story has an
icon that identifies which topic it relates to. To spice the game play up
slightly, sometimes you’ll be presented conditions you must meet, for example
approving a set amount of articles that day. But that really is the extent of
what you need to do when playing. There’s money in the game, but spending it
didn’t seem to change what happens - the character will always eat and sleep
and who really cares what colour their apartment is? The limited gameplay
will be familiar to anyone who has played the cult hit ‘Papers, Please’ in fact
that game is even referenced in ‘Headliner: NoviNews’. It’s also comparable to
games like ‘60 Seconds’ and visual novels. You make decisions, see what
happens, go to bed and repeat until the narrative is played out. It’s not a
traditional game from a gameplay perspective, it’s more of a narrative
experience albeit one without explicit decision making. You never feel like
you’re directly controlling the plot or even your own fate. You are more a
guide steering towards an outcome you want to happen and watching the events
unfold, often in unpredictable ways.
For
such a technically simple game it is shocking that the experience is blighted
by loading though. Sometimes it takes close to a minute to start a new day.
This is incredibly jarring and takes you out of the game world for too long - a
significant short coming when the success of ‘Headliner’ depends on player
immersion. Selecting between two news stories is also flawed because your
A button (the one on the right of the pad) selects the left article, while B
(to the left of the A button) always picks the right news article. It’s all
very counter-intuitive and it’s niggles like this that should have been noticed
during QA. Perhaps more crucially you also have no way to change your mind once
you’ve approved or rejected a news article, even if you made a decision by
mistake. It’s always worth reading everything on hand before making a final
decision. Thankfully the game does auto-save at the start of each day, but
having to reload is a cumbersome solution to a problem caused by the controller
buttons being badly mapped. Touch controls do solve the problem, but this is
obviously only possible in handheld mode.
Outside
your office the technical problems persist. Your protagonist feels like they’re
moving on ice during the side-on street walk sections. They’ll drift along in
an unresponsive manner sometimes even heading in a random direction. I
initially thought I was suffering from the dreaded “D-pad drift” but the same
thing happened when playing with a pro-controller. It might have been that the
game was trying to guide me towards points of interest or it may simply be that
‘Headliner’ has just been badly ported to the Switch. This feeling is
compounded by the fact that the game is also, bizarrely, a huge battery drain.
I got less than two hours play from a complete charge. The graphics are hardly
system intensive; they’re functional but not really stylish. At one point you
can interact with a pet dog in your apartment an action that seems to have no
bearing on gameplay at all. During this section you see a close up view of your
in-game character and it highlights the low polygon count in a very
unfavourable way.
The character models are good from afar, but far from good. Thankfully for the rest of the time you see characters interacting through visual novel style talking portraits. These look much better, full of nuance and subtlety. The game’s music is also just functional, rather than inspirational. Tunes will bubble away in the background but they’re so inoffensively bland you’ll hardly notice they are there. Unlike the incredible aforementioned ‘Oxenfree’, there’s no speech in this equally wordy conversation driven game. Those who don’t want to spend two hours largely reading best look elsewhere.
The character models are good from afar, but far from good. Thankfully for the rest of the time you see characters interacting through visual novel style talking portraits. These look much better, full of nuance and subtlety. The game’s music is also just functional, rather than inspirational. Tunes will bubble away in the background but they’re so inoffensively bland you’ll hardly notice they are there. Unlike the incredible aforementioned ‘Oxenfree’, there’s no speech in this equally wordy conversation driven game. Those who don’t want to spend two hours largely reading best look elsewhere.
Many
may suggest ‘Headliner’ is a short game, but those engaged by the decision and
consequence gameplay will unlikely only experience it once. As the game itself
says “many timelines exist, this game was meant to be played multiple times”.
Therefore, the two hour running time feels about right. The big narrative
changes happen towards the end of a run and the repetition of news stories
would be far more noticeable were the game any longer. Later play through have
a wonderfully self-reflective tone to them, as characters note about having the
chance to do things differently and how repetitive life can feel. “History
repeats itself, maybe you can be better this time” notes a character when you
become reacquainted on a new timeline. Sadly there are no way the game tracks
which endings you’ve seen or the past choices made on a previous play through. On
other versions trophies unlock upon seeing a certain conclusion and the list of
other available achievements indicate what sort of route is best to take to see
something new. On the Switch you just have to consciously make different
choices and hope you’ve done enough to earn an unseen end result.
‘Headliner’s
dramatic narrative twists emphasised by the very different endings makes a
player realise that the choices made, even the smaller ones, have profound
repercussions. Unlike some Telltale style morality games when you feel what you
pick doesn’t really change much, every news article you publish seems to be
significant. Sometimes it’s a cumulative build up that alters public opinion,
other times a single choice will have an immediate consequence.
It’s
impossible to play ‘Headliner: NoviNews’ without drawing comparisons to the
real world. We learn that “Prime Minister Wolff is not exactly the picture of
open mindedness”. American and UK players will perhaps draw comparisons here
with real world counter parts. Considering the clear social agenda ‘Headliner’
has, it would be silly to think this wasn’t deliberate. The game features an on-going
debate between private and nationalised healthcare. It scrutinises the
expansion of corporations at the expense of local business. It doesn’t shy away
from conversations about drug and alcohol dependency, suicide, free-speech and
gay relationships. It’s an undoubtedly brave game.
As
your character casually remarks, “the media needs to be responsible” something
that’s wholeheartedly agreed with by the person they’re talking to. “Oh
definitely [...] they shape how we perceive the world outside of us”.
‘Headliner: NoviNews’ is an engaging game, which (like the citizens of the
game) will make the player re-evaluate their perceptions of print and broadcast
news. ‘Headliner’ may offer unremarkable graphics, generic music and control
problems but it also offers intrigue. It’s a game light on gameplay but heavy
on social commentary. The points it makes may be heavy handed at times, but
they’re points that need to be made.
If
you’ve noticed the irony of this opinion filled review you’re probably the
target audience for ‘Headliner: NoviNews’ and will enjoy the few hours you’ll spend with
it. But, if this article has persuaded you to buy it, perhaps you should be
questioning the motivation behind my words. I was provided a free copy of the
game after all!
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