Unbound Creations new game Headliner:Novinews debuted as many indie games do on the Switch these days: with a whisper. It charges players with the role of editor for a news conglomerate and with this title comes great responsibility. With little more than a ten-minute tutorial, players must become an expert in swaying public opinion, balancing corporate and social pressures, and keeping the lights on and the presses running.
The opening hours of this newsdesk sim wastes no time in challenging the player’s moral compass with interesting dilemmas. As soon as you sit down at your desk in the war room the papers start flying. You’ll be given a handful of articles to review, each with a headline and an author, and you can choose which make their way to the people. But these aren’t choices between running a cute picture of a puppy or a kitten, the choices before the player are nearly always complex and carry a heavyweight.
While the choice of what news makes it to print is always up to the player, there are typically external social, political, or corporate pressures that force your hand. For instance, the paper’s parent corporation may have another arm across the globe that’s responsible for a disaster. The consequences of running such an article could be your job, however, the decision not to print that news could anger the population at large and lose the paper readership. This is just an example of the kind of choice Headliner might offer the player.
Any game that hinges on player choice has to design those choices to have a meaningful impact though and in this area headline mostly succeeds. Every night after choosing the articles to run for the next day, the player will exit the office and walk the busy streets. Inevitably the public will make their voice heard, good or bad, along the way. Though it was oftentimes effective in swaying my decision about what news to publish, it was more effective at making me feel intimidated. While I never had any violent encounters with citizens, they won’t pull their verbal punches when making their feelings known.
With all of this concern about what winds up in print in the public discourse, you might imagine that Headliner is a game that has multiple endings and a high level of replayability. To that, I’d answer: yes and no. To the first point, there are multiple endings each with varying degrees of satisfaction. To the second, multiple endings do mean that seeing each of them requires replaying them game from the beginning but depending on the ending you get the first time you may or may not feel compelled to engage with the game again. Not to mention the fact that the gameplay is so simple that many players may not enjoy the mechanics of this title enough to play it again
The last word on Unbound Creations newest title is mostly positive with some mixed feelings thrown in. For those looking for engaging mechanics or otherwise great reasons to want to move your fingers around on a controller, you won’t find much here. If instead, you’re the kind of player that finds an interactive story engaging you’re in luck. Headliner gives the player agency in an interesting world where choices have consequences and there are many endings to chase with branching paths. If that sounds like your cup of tea then I can wholehearted recommend this game.
So get out there and generate some controversy, or don’t.