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Not For Broadcast captures the high-octane rush of managing a newsroom
K
Khee Hoon Chan
It’s an unexpectedly high-octane simulation of managing a newsroom. You play as Alex Winston, a janitor who was abruptly made the next broadcast engineer when his predecessor, Dave, decided to not turn up for work and party his life away instead. But being a broadcast engineer is no mean feat; to start, you’ll need to get familiar with a vision mixer, which consists of four screens and a whole lot of buttons, so you can choose which camera feed to broadcast. Three advertisements also need to be played during commercial breaks, which you pick out before your shift begins. And on top of keeping a keen eye across these four screens, you have to manage interference via a waveform monitor, censor profanity and unsavory information, all while keeping the broadcast engaging for your audience. That means switching and adjusting the feed at opportune moments to maintain or improve viewership.
But these are merely the tip of the iceberg in Not For Broadcast. Subsequent levels introduce more challenges, like a heatwave that causes power shortages and messes up your vision mixer, or a mob of naked protesters who disrupt live broadcasts—nudity is bad for the news, after all. Interspersed between these are brief text-based scenes that take place from Alex’s perspective. Through these vignettes, you can witness the impact of your programming, and how it has affected the population and even Alex’s own family.
These offer a brief reprieve from the sheer anxiety of overseeing live television, but the broadcast segments are undoubtedly the highlights of Not For Broadcast. Admittedly, managing the ebb and flow of the news can get a tad chaotic at the start. On top of all the screens, buttons, and levers you have to press and dial, curveballs are often thrown in your way that threaten to derail your efforts, such as an errant curse word from a drunk politician. Then there’s just the sheer hilarity of what’s happening on screen. In particular, the news anchor Jeremy Donaldson is a riot to watch, his snark and barely disguised contempt for some of his guests a real challenge to look away from at times. But as you grow increasingly familiar with the setup, managing the broadcast feels like a satisfying, even intuitive act. Your fingers become attuned to the controls, and your ears poised to pick up any dastardly details that need to be bleeped out. You become a refined censorship machine.
Or not. As a broadcast engineer in this game, you do have some room to decide how manicured the news should be. You can give a rapper, J-Zuss, free reign to debut his new song on the channel without censoring his political lyrics. Or portray the far-left government—one with supposedly authoritarian tendencies—as a party with deeply unpopular policies by playing clips of an unhappy upper middle-class riot. Regardless of your politics, Not For Broadcast nails the adrenaline of navigating the operations of a newsroom for a disenfranchised populace—one that’s set in a political climate with eerie parallels to our own.
Not For Broadcast is available on the Epic Games Store.