One broadcast lets you put together a segment speculating on the policies of the Advance Party, the far-left ruling party. While the oppressive atmosphere of Papers, Please is a constant reminder of the discomfort of sacrificing your humanity so you can earn a basic living as an immigration officer, Not For Broadcast chooses to lean into its zany, slapstick humor to skewer its dystopian world, at times highlighting the absurdity of politics and daily life. There are already a couple of games that depict life under a totalitarian state-Papers, Please, Beholder, and Westport Independent are just a few of them-but Not For Broadcast opts for a different approach. These are usually time-sensitive-sometimes split-second-decisions that will influence not just your viewership, but also shape the opinions of the viewers and even the television crew working on the show. Other times you'll have to select what sort of content to broadcast, such as choosing specific pictures that would showcase the autocratic ruling party in a more favourable light. Later levels will toss in more curveballs, like making sure you censor cuss words like “bollocks,” peppered liberally in the country's new-and very drunk-Prime Minister's speech. Eventually these will become a lot more intuitive, as you settle into a comfortable cadence of video editing on the fly. The original producer-yes, that guy who skipped town and asked a janitor to take his place-will run you through the basics of broadcasting: interjecting the show with ads when necessary, switching cameras, dodging interferences, and bleeping out swear words. You begin by putting together news clips with a simulacrum of a switchboard, outfitted with a perplexing number of buttons, sliders, and dials, as well as multiple screens. It may seem quite chaotic, but Not For Broadcast doesn't overwhelm you with all these details at the start. Should you fail to maintain or increase your viewership, the grim alternative is losing your job and a steady income-an income that helps you support your family, and lets you purchase a variety of knick-knacks that helps you perform your job better. That means you'll be scrambling to splice together the evening news, your eyes frantically darting across multiple screens, buttons, and levers, as you attempt to patch together some form of live entertainment for a demanding television audience. One who decided, on a whim, that he would rather be partying on a yacht than do his job. Take one interview with an excessively polite and charming actor, who's revealed to be a grade-A douchebag when he is seen cursing at his host off the camera-a revelation you could have missed if you're fixated on the bright, gaudy ads playing on a separate monitor.Īnd your role in this madcap scenario? Turns out you're just an incredulous, agreeable janitor standing in for a producer. By putting you in charge of the studio's production control room, the game is a high-intensity newsroom simulator that divulges its story in bits, all while distracting you with a multitude of ridiculously juicy scenes. Likewise, Not For Broadcast keeps you blinded from pivotal details-such as what goes on behind the scenes in a studio-by bombarding you with information to manage. As the scene is rather frenetic, keeping count of the passes requires the utmost concentration, which leads many viewers into missing an obvious visual gag: a gorilla sauntering past the players, cheekily thumping its chest, and leaving the scene. In the experiment, viewers are tasked to count how many times three basketball players-who are dressed in white-have passed a ball to one another. It reminds me of a real-life experiment, involving an invisible gorilla, which illustrates this perfectly. Here's how Not For Broadcast, a game about manipulating what gets broadcasted from the newsroom, gradually unveils its narrative: through perceptual blindness.
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