Not for Broadcast Review (jexjthomas)
What an interesting--and ultimately somewhat frustrating--game. Not for Broadcast is an innovative take on the FMV and propaganda sim genres, putting you in charge of a broadcast room on the eve of political upheaval. It's at times quite clever, and often funny, and even more often absolutely strange in a delightful way. But it ultimately fails as a satire, I think, because the politics are utterly incoherent. It's unclear who its targets are and any possible attempts at having something meaningful to say are undercut by presenting a set of actors who are uniformly unsympathetic. Every idea is treated as ridiculous and worthy of ridicule -- and hey, maybe that's fair to some extent -- but the satire lacks teeth because it doesn't feel grounded in anything real. I can attempt to read it as a right-libertarian takedown of leftist politics, but it doesn't really even work as that. Or maybe it's meant to "make fun of everyone," I don't know. But it doesn't really work in that mode, either.
All that said, I really enjoyed playing the game. The mechanics are unique, sort of a mix of rhythm game and stress nightmare (in the best way), and the game is legitimately well-acted and, at points, really, really funny in its absurdity. I was consistently impressed by how good the actors were and how real the performances felt, even as the satirical bits felt unmoored. It's fun to run the vision mixer and twiddle knobs and censor swears and all of that, and it's clear that each play through can be pretty unique.
That leads to my last criticism, however, which is that with four different paths, each with 3-4 different endings, you end up with fourteen possible endings. And that's just too many. I just can't imagine wanting to play the game that many times to get to check out all the various epilogues. And believe me, I am curious about them! But, as fun as the game is, after finishing I'm not particularly excited to play it all over again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And so on ...
In all, a really cool concept that's well executed on most levels somewhat hampered by incoherent political storytelling.