I’ve been looking forward to writing this one, folks. Longtime readers of ours may know I’ve covered NotGames and tinyBuild’s satirical “brainwashing simulator” known as Not for Broadcast in several articles in the past since the game originally launched in Steam Early Access. I wrote about the game’s demo, Not for Broadcast: Prologue, shortly after it was made public in late 2019. I then covered its first full episode approximately three months after that. I humbly suggest checking out those articles if you’re so inclined.

NFB has been in Early Access since late December of 2020, and I’m pleased to see it has now officially left that corner of Steam as of about two weeks ago at the time of writing. On January 25th, 2022, the game’s third and final playable story episode was released. This constituted what I personally see as its rather triumphant exit from Early Access, and also saw Not for Broadcast launch on GOG and the Epic Games Store as well.

I suspect you might be wondering why I described Not for Broadcast’s departure from Steam Early Access as “triumphant.” That’s partially due to the prominence of both “Very Positive” and “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on the game’s Steam Store page at the time of writing. If nothing else, the sheer amount of such feedback indicates to me that I’m certainly not the only one who has an optimistic view about NFB as a whole.

I would personally argue that Not for Broadcast has earned all those glowing reviews. I would also say such reviews serve as a testament to the care that NotGames has clearly poured into this title over the course of its development. Not for Broadcast stands out to me as a game that has most definitely benefited from its time in Early Access, rather than merely languishing there.

I think it would be best if I start by establishing a bit of background about the game’s story, while simultaneously diving into my thoughts on its gameplay mechanics and a few other things I consider noteworthy. Not for Broadcast is set within an unnamed country in an alternate version of the 1980s. Your job, which basically constitutes the core gameplay loop, is to operate the various behind-the-scenes aspects of that country’s daily 6 PM news broadcast and keep things running smoothly.

The first day of the story’s events happens to take place on the night when that particular anonymous nation holds a monumental election. Your character, Alex Winston, only enters the broadcast booth of the so-called National Nightly News because they were hired to “clean the place up,” but they then wind up essentially (and involuntarily) promoted to their new position. This happens because Dave, the fellow who previously held Alex’s job, didn’t show up for work as he “got a bit caught up.”

Fortunately, good old Dave is an upstanding gentleman. He doesn’t intend to just drop you into the deep end of the metaphorical pool by expecting you to run the country’s leading news broadcast without some help. To that end, Dave calls you via the telephone in your new station and volunteers to talk you through how and when to do everything you’ll need to do during each news broadcast.

I’ve noted before that Not for Broadcast was first brought to my attention when Steam told me it was similar to a game I hold in particularly high regard, namely Papers, Please. If you’re familiar with Papers, Please, you likely know that the game prefers to ease you into its gameplay loop before it starts chucking more and more rules and bureaucracy at you. For example, during the first in-game day of its campaign, Papers, Please only gives you two rules to contend with, then slowly ramps up the difficulty almost every day thereafter.

In contrast, Not for Broadcast throws a lot more than two gameplay mechanics in your lap during your first broadcast. However, that’s where Dave comes in. With his help, the first election night broadcast essentially serves as your crash course on the basics. If you do your best to remember what Dave tells you and follow his instructions as best you can at all times, I’d wager that you’re significantly more likely to get the hang of things in hardly any time at all. That is, at least until things start getting more intense and complex, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

The first thing you’ll want to do before every playable broadcast is make sure all the various gizmos you’ll need to do your job are receiving power. You do this by pressing your left arrow key to face the array of electrical outlets, then ensuring that at minimum, the Vision Mixer, VHS rack, speakers, and sound desk are switched on. Finally, you’ll click on the so-called “master trip switch” to the left of all the plugs to power everything up. In most cases, you won’t need to mess with anything over here after you’ve done all that, so that’s one fewer thing to worry about once the news is on the air.

Next, you’ll need to load the advertisements for the commercial breaks that take place between the three segments of any given broadcast. Assuming you’re facing the center of your broadcast room, press your down arrow key to shift your viewpoint to the VHS rack. To the left of the VCRs sit the available tapes. You’ll normally be given free rein to choose any three of these tapes you’d like unless your boss happens to tell you otherwise. You simply need to select the tapes you want to use for the ad breaks and load them into the corresponding VCRs, which are helpfully labeled A, B, and C.

Once you’ve loaded the ad tapes, you can play them in any order you wish during the three commercial breaks. Dave suggests that playing the first tape (labeled A) at the first break, followed by B at the second break, and so on will help you avoid getting confused in the heat of the moment, but this isn’t strictly necessary. Powering everything up and loading the ad tapes are the main two things you have to do before each broadcast goes live, so I advise taking care of these aspects quickly and efficiently. That’s not to say this stuff takes particularly long to set up, but I counsel against wasting time just in case.

Shortly after you’ve had your time to take care of all that, you’ll get a broadcast signal from the news studio on your Vision Mixer. The Vision Mixer is the set of four small screens on the leftmost side of the center of the broadcast booth. The buttons labeled 1 through 4 correspond to these screens; you can switch between them at will by either clicking the buttons or pressing 1, 2, 3, or 4 on your keyboard.

When you first get the signal from the studio, the news broadcast won’t be considered “in progress” quite yet. Since you control the broadcast booth, you get to see everything behind the scenes that the audience at home should have no idea about provided you do your job properly. This includes the news team’s preparation for the upcoming program. So, you’ll still have a bit of time to prepare, but you should always remember to select Screen 1 on the Vision Mixer as soon as the signal starts to come through.

Why should you get in the habit of doing that even though the news broadcast hasn’t yet technically begun, you may ask? Well, because if you wait to select Screen 1 until the broadcast properly starts, the audience at home will see at least two seconds of a black screen depending on how long it took you to select that screen and begin transmitting the news program. You want to avoid that because your primary goal during each show is to keep the news program’s viewership figures as high as possible. Obviously, no one wants to watch a blank, silent screen when they’re expecting a news broadcast.

That “two seconds” figure I just mentioned is crucial to Not for Broadcast’s core gameplay loop for multiple reasons. Firstly, by controlling the four smaller screens that constitute the Vision Mixer, you affect what is seen and heard on the two larger screens. These bigger screens are known as the master screen (in the center) and the broadcast screen next to that. Only you can see what’s on the master screen, while the broadcast screen is what’s being transmitted to the audience at home. Everything shown on the master screen will be shown on the broadcast screen exactly two seconds later.

In case that doesn’t quite make sense, let me explain another way in which the “two-second rule” comes into play. You’re responsible for censoring (or “bleeping out”) every swear word uttered by anyone who’s part of any given broadcast. Since the broadcast screen is two seconds behind the master screen, you can count to two immediately after the swear is spoken, then either click and hold the red button marked “censor” or hold your space bar to bleep the offending speech.

Dave states this is his preferred way of timing bleeps because it doesn’t require you to take your eyes off of the master and broadcast screens. If you need a bit of extra help getting the timing down, though, the game has you covered. Right above the aforementioned “censor” button, you’ll see a scrolling waveform of the speech currently being played on the master screen. If you see any part of this waveform in red, you’ll know that’s what you need to bleep by holding down that button until the waveform returns to its normal white color.

As I said, though, bleeping profanity by ear is more efficient than doing it by eye because it isn’t as much of a potential distraction. That’s why I’d recommend weaning yourself off of using the visual waveform to censor speech as soon as you can, provided you use it at all. This mechanic definitely helped me learn to nail the timing of each bleep when I was first starting out, but I would argue it shouldn’t be relied upon too heavily beyond that.

Dave also offers some useful rules of thumb for when you’re tasked with broadcasting what are called “multi-camera sequences.” These segments are quite common and usually take the form of interviews between someone on the news team and at least one guest. As you might imagine, the viewers watching at home want to see who’s doing the talking as often as possible. That’s why Dave’s first rule is to keep whichever Vision Mixer screen contains the current speaker active for as long as is reasonable.

However, you don’t want to just set the Vision Mixer to stay on the current speaker without changing it, as if in a “set it and forget it” type of approach. That gets boring quickly, and anything your home audience considers boring tends to tank the program’s ratings. That brings us to Dave’s second and third suggestions for things like interviews.

Even though you ideally want to keep the camera centered on the active speaker, you shouldn’t do that for more than ten seconds at a time for reasons I’ve just mentioned. Instead, you can keep things interesting by periodically switching to a reaction shot of whoever isn’t speaking, or a “wide shot” of all the interview’s participants. When you do this, though, Dave advises against staying on these camera angles for more than three seconds before switching the main camera back to the speaker.

Thankfully, you have several means of keeping track of how long you’ve been on a particular shot. You can, of course, simply count the seconds in your head as time passes and switch up your camera angles when appropriate. The game does what it can to help out on this front as well. I recently noticed a certain useful gameplay mechanic relevant to this topic when I fired up Not for Broadcast again a few days before its third episode went live. More specifically, you’ll find some small, rectangular lights below each of the four screens within the Vision Mixer.

As far as I’ve discovered up to this point, these lights operate independently of one another and can either be green, orange, or red. When you switch to a screen with a green light, that seems to be the game’s way of indicating that it’s a good shot to stay on for the time being. If you stay on a shot for too long, that light will gradually turn from green to orange, as if to suggest that you switch to a different, preferably green camera angle for a bit.

Red lights generally seem to alert you to one of three scenarios in my experience. They appear to be the game’s way of saying any of the following things: “you’ve been on this shot for much too long”, “it’s too early to switch to this signal,” or, during select broadcasts, “there’s something in this shot that isn’t appropriate for television.” I won’t go into any detail about that last occurrence so as to avoid spoiling certain aspects of the story.

I can tell you that the second situation usually applies when you’re supposed to switch to a certain screen at the end of a segment. For example, you might be expected to play a clip from an upcoming movie immediately following an interview with one of the actors in said film. Now, if you think everything I’ve explained thus far is a lot to take in right out of the gate, perhaps it helps to know I would most assuredly agree with you on that. I did tell you Not for Broadcast will have you contending with a lot more than two rules at the start of its campaign, after all.

Having said that, though, I also want to emphasize once more that Dave has your back. His advice alone may not be able to help you nail the timing of everything you have to deal with (though he does try). As I said, however, the game uses his tutorial phone calls as a sign that it knows it’s asking a lot of you and is willing to do what it can to avoid overwhelming you. That brings me to what I see as another point in the game’s favor.

Let me put my next point to you this way: if the word “replayability” were in a dictionary and you looked it up, you would see a screenshot of Not for Broadcast as a visual aid representing the term’s definition. This game has so much content to offer that there’s absolutely no way you’ll see all of it in the confines of a single playthrough. What’s more, this title absolutely does not expect you to get through every playable broadcast without so much as a single mistake by any stretch of the imagination.

Even if you get through a broadcast with a decent letter grade after the fact, whether you think you screwed up somewhere or just know you can do better on a broadcast than your last attempt, the game encourages you to try as many times as you like until you’re happy with your performance. You can additionally pause the game mid-broadcast and restart from your last checkpoint if you wish. Not for Broadcast may ask you to juggle increasingly numerous gameplay mechanics, but it’s at least quite forgiving in exchange for that. I personally think that’s great.

Something else that makes Not for Broadcast so replayable is the story it seeks to tell. Though it may not always seem this way, you and your actions both on and off the job are crucial to how the story plays out. Just by making one decision that seems inconsequential at the time, the impact of your choice could veer the plot into a completely different direction than you might expect. Since you can replay any aspect of the story at basically any time you desire, you always have the ability to see exactly how making different choices when presented with familiar options affects the central narrative.

Speaking of Not for Broadcast’s plot, I’d like to tell you a fair bit more about it. I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, of course. It’s just that since I enjoy the game as much as I do, I’d like to try and pique your interest in it with this story synopsis. As I mentioned earlier, the game’s events begin on the night when the central, unnamed nation holds a vastly important election. This election is won in an apparently historic landslide by a radical political party known as Advance. Advance, in turn, is led by two co-Prime Ministers, Julia Salisbury and Peter Clement.

The lead anchor of the National Nightly News, Jeremy Donaldson, reports during your first broadcast that Advance has been accused by its critics of demonstrating “a severe lack of actual policies, and of being deliberately vague.” Within the context of the duo of Prime Minsters’ victory speech, they announce that they’ve used their newfound political resources to pass what they’ve christened the “Assets and Wealth Act.” By passing this law, Advance has officially revoked the passports of every citizen in the country whose net worth is over a certain amount.

The reason the new Prime Ministers publicly provide for doing this is so that the country can put an end to things like trust funds, offshore tax havens, and what they call “creative accounting,” in an effort to force the wealthy to pay their fair share. Those negatively affected by the Assets and Wealth Act can apparently get their passports returned to them, albeit with strings attached. To quote Prime Minister Peter Clement, “You want [your passports] back? You want to leave like you threatened before the election? That’s fine, but first, you’re gonna pay up. You’re gonna pay back.”

It is the shocking election of Advance into power and the subsequent passing of the Assets and Wealth Act that sets the game’s story into motion. Even though the Assets and Wealth Act doesn’t personally affect your character, as the game is more than happy to tell you exactly how broke you are at the start of the story, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the same can be said for those close to Alex Winston. That’s virtually all I can say on this topic without venturing into spoiler territory.

There are three more items on my “to-discuss” list about Not for Broadcast. The first of these is what I see as the welcome existence of what Dave calls “the archive.” This is where you can go to re-watch any aspect of any broadcast you’ve already completed. The reason the archive is so appealing to me is that it gives players a front-row seat to all the shenanigans they weren’t allowed to actually show during the relevant program.

For example, during the first broadcast on election night, you’ll be tasked with playing through an interview with a movie star by the name of Laurence Blunderclatch. Mr. Blunderclatch has a bit of a meltdown in the news studio before his interview begins, and the archive allows you to watch that as it happened. There may well be some hidden details of the game’s lore in the archive as well, so I’d say it’s worth popping in every once in a while to see what you might have missed.

The penultimate aspect of Not for Broadcast I want to mention is the game’s challenge mode. If you think you’ve mastered the art of editing a live news broadcast, this mode allows you to replay specific segments of certain past broadcasts with an assortment of added twists. For example, there’s a challenge that tasks you with getting through a segment while your Vision Mixer switches between its various screens at random without any input from you. There’s also a different one that makes it so your normal broadcast controls are increasingly likely to deliver a near-fatal electric shock to your character if you use them at the wrong time.

I think you get the idea. For what it’s worth, I’ve tried my hand at these challenges and found that I don’t particularly care for them. However, I readily admit that’s primarily because I don’t yet consider myself skilled enough at Not for Broadcast’s core gameplay loop to handle any significant deviations or additional modifiers. I get in a routine of sorts during normal gameplay, and I don’t tend to do well with anything that disturbs that cycle.

That brings me to the final component of this title that I want to discuss in some detail. I personally think Not for Broadcast has a brilliant (if somewhat dark) sense of humor. Granted, a lot of that does rely rather heavily on profanity and what I suspect most reasonable people would consider “obscenity” to a certain degree. If you’ve read any of my reviews of games like this or watched virtually any of the videos I’ve made for our YouTube channel, though, you know things like that aren’t an issue for me the vast majority of the time.

Your mileage may vary on this front, and that’s perfectly fine. I recognize that not everyone wants to hear the host of a DIY home repair television show turned co-Prime Minister announce on the evening news that having a few “celebratory pints” tends to make his demeanor so coarse that it reminds one of a certain part of a grandmother’s anatomy. I understand that a fair few of the things you’ll see onscreen in Not for Broadcast are too inappropriate for me to mention or depict in this article.

Of course, I can’t decide on your behalf whether or not you should purchase Not for Broadcast if those sorts of things don’t sit well with you. However, if you think you can handle more than your fair share of occasional F-bombs and several other surprises, I think you’d be doing yourself a massive disservice if you didn’t at least put this title on your radar. In my personal opinion, the game is worth its asking price for its more politically-satirical aspects alone, but it has so much more than that to offer you. I leave you with this quasi-cliffhanger to ponder: is Alan James right, or will society advance forward together?

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Not For Broadcast

$24.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Brilliant, if Dark, Sense of Humor
• Huge Amounts of Replayability
• Enthralling Story
• Core Gameplay Loop is Fairly Easy to Learn, Challenging to Master
• Numerous Accessibility Options

Cons

• Frequent Reliance on Profanity and Obscenity may be a Turn-off for Some Players
• Gameplay Loop can be Challenging to Learn at First, Even with Tutorials