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dkirschner's Not for Broadcast (PC)

[September 8, 2025 08:20:21 PM]

Funny FMV game about working in a TV news editing room over nearly a decade during a period of political change. First off, I read somewhere that this game has the most recorded video of any game (at least at its release). It's impressive how much video content is here to watch. Well, to edit. You WANT to watch the videos, but your job is to edit. It sometimes takes away from the watching that you would rather be doing.

The game reminds me of something like a cross between Don't Feed the Monkeys, Orwell, and Papers, Please. You watch people on the TV screens (like Don't Feed the Monkeys) but in doing so can influence the political direction of the country (like Orwell). And since cutting the TV footage is your job, and you have to earn a wage, there's a little Papers, Please in here too because your decisions at work affect your family, finances, and home life. That home life part is more of a simple textual narrative and serves to pass time, connect you to family, and add additional social context to the news broadcasts.

So you work at this TV station manning an editing board. The various buttons and things on the control board engage you while the TV show is being filmed. You can switch between four cameras, play commercials, cue sound effects (laugh track, clapping, etc.), adjust volume, and you have to deal with various other distractions or problems (a political group trying to hack the station, power outages, wiring issues, maniacal dolls [in a bizarre dream sequence], etc.). The goal is to effectively edit the live feed to increase viewership. You do this by switching to the correct camera (general rule: focus on who is talking), by changing cameras (general rule: don't linger too long on one shot), by minimizing interference, by cuing appropriate audio (e.g., don't cue the laugh track when something serious is happening), and so on. Doing well increases viewership; doing poorly decreases it. If enough viewers leave the channel, you lose and start the broadcast over.

The live news TV show that you'll be editing is so well done. The writing and acting are excellent, the stars of the game. It's so creative. There are news anchors, special guests, recurring segments, and more. The devs have really created a whole universe here, a parody of real-world news, celebrities, and politicians. My favorite actors were the first news anchor and the guy in the first DLC (which was my favorite chunk of the playthrough). In that DLC, the network is airing an old telethon from the mid-20th century. Your job is to edit the broadcast live. The telethon host is this horrible man who is inappropriate with the women answering the phones. They don’t play along with him. When he makes sexist remarks, they roll their eyes, don’t laugh at his jokes, and seem to revel in the fact that his telethon isn’t raising any money. All the guests for the telethon are stuck on a bus in traffic, and so guests are improvised from the telethon staff on hand, including a deadpan Indian performer, a Chinese worker, and a little person. A lot of the jokes rely on the fact that this is race- or body-based humor that we would find offensive today, but was totally normal for the 1950s. So you have fun with the censor button and watching the minorities, man with a disability, and women completely undermine the white male host.

Anyway, that is a DLC…the main game is set over like 8 years and has a political story; it’s not a single event like a telethon (which is, for the record, related to the political story, in a way that I guessed about 5 seconds before it was revealed!). Because of that difference, after the main game the DLC felt cohesive and concise. Broadcasts in the main game will regularly occur a year after the previous broadcast. I’d definitely be curious to buy more DLC when it goes on sale. Broadcasts were usually like 30-45 minutes long, so it’d be a couple bucks for a long episode of funny, interactive TV basically.