playingstory | Headliner and Headliner: NovaNews (Reply)

Name: Headliner (and its sequel, Headliner: NovaNews)
Status: Complete
Site: https://unboundcreations.itch.io/headliner and https://unboundcreations.itch.io/headliner-novinews
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Any/Any and Any/F
Description: Who knew being an editor made you this powerful?

This is a double review, because both Headliner and its sequel are very similar games. First is Headliner:

Headliner is a game that borrows some things from Papers, Please. You are an editor of a newspaper in charge of deciding which articles a paper runs with. You get about 7 rounds where you get a stack of potential articles to accept or reject, and when you're done for the day you go home to your family and have a conversation over dinner. Your boss tells you that you need to develop influence, and to do that you need to drive some reader reaction by taking strong positions on the issues.

The subjects that you need to make decisions on feel pretty black and white. The articles are just like you might expect a tabloid headline to look like. "Immigrants are taking our jobs!" "Immigrants should be welcomed with open arms!" "Unmodified people are being oppressed!" "Modified people are being burdened by unmodified people!" If you select an article taking a certain position, your walk home will immediately reflect that as people in the crowd talk about the latest news or start entire social movements based on what feels like a single article. Saying that unmodified people suck means people will boycott the grocery store run by unmodified people. Saying the country should take in immigrants means that your spouse loses their job to an immigrant (and yeah, that's as wince inducing as it sounds)

To make things weirder a lot of the "pro modified" articles are about how unmodified people are gross and susceptible to disease and are a tax on the government because they require more resources. But then it turns out that 1 in 5 modified people are suspect to rejecting their modifications, which can result in cancer! And your family subplot involves your spouse having modified rejection sickness and not being able to afford the treatment. So the arguments for unmodified people being some uniquely burdensome population doesn't make much sense to me at all, given the few facts you are actually given.

There is also a small conversation scene over dinner every day. This has some effect on things (such as whether or not you let your daughter attend a festival) but a lot of the choices were too binary. You often were given the option to either be an asshole, or not be an asshole, which are boring and uncomplicated choices.

Each run was very short, especially after the first when you know what all the little articles already say, so I did three runs.

On first my run I "sided with the unmodified" because the alternative seemed to be advocating for clear discrimination (Baring unmodified marriage, forcing people to modify fetuses). The result was that both I and some famous singer were assassinated by some modified thugs, but my daughter got a scholarship to go to school.

On my second run I became a hard modified advocate and removed all suggestion of nuance, except for the very last day when I let the foot of the gas. This seemed to save me from assassination, but instead of some singer being assassinated there was a full on riot, multiple people died, and my daughter went missing.

My third run I tried to run it right down the middle, which prevented all the crazy ass violence. No one died, the festival was fun, the end. But I guess my spouse might die because there is no money for his treatments.

I get the idea of the game but it is so short and the issues are so superficial that you really can't spend a second thinking about them without thinking it's all pretty stupid. There may be some entertainment in seeing what effects the choice might get, but there was no immersion. And for a game that seemed to be all about political manipulation, its own politics felt undeveloped and confused.

The sequel, NoviNews, is the exact same format, with everything updated. The setting is broadly the same, but takes place in a neighboring country. The topics are also similar, with the main themes being genetic modification and their effects, but the opposing positions are a little more nuanced and less "Are you a xenophobic genetic supremacist or no?" On the walk home you can actually interact with NPCs and have a short chat with them, instead of just passively listening in on their opinions of your job. Your boss is a little more interactive and responds to your choices more. In your first run there are three other NPCs, a reporter coworker, your older brother, and a local shop keeper that you can chat with, and all of them have their own stories that are a little more involved than your spouse from the first game, plus they often will have opposing perspectives on things. One might worry that nationalized health care will lead to long wait times, another might be excited that it will make that healthcare affordable.

NoviNews also introduces wages and a small inventory. Your pay will somewhat reflect your performance at the station, and you can use it to buy plot related items, cosmetics for your apartment, and treats for your dog, which is also a new addition. You can also adopt a military drone for some reason.

My big complaint with this format, which is something the sequel isn't really able to shake, is that as a decider you are still obligated to publish news stories without having any real idea of which ones are "true" or not. And while the positions are a little more nuanced in this version the reaction to your decisions is still immediate and rather extreme considering you're just adding a single article to a news show. As someone who likes to do their research before taking a position on something, this was frustrating. The sequel doubles the length of the game by making you play 2 weeks instead of one, which maybe helps somewhat. And it also helps a lot that the choices you make in the newsroom produce a much more satisfying character arc for the NPCs that you interact with. You can end up in a romance with your reporter friend, and you can help your brother overcome his anxiety and depression to start a career in comedy. More personal consequences for the news items you pick also gives another layer to the decision making that didn't really exist in the first game.

Another small complaint that felt a little worse with the sequel than the first game was that the pacing is a little slow. The walk back home is very long, and when you get to your apartment there are interactables where the dialog moves slowly. So I got a little impatient at times.

When you finish one run of Novinews a new NPC is unlocked that you will meet in subsequent runs, and you get a new game plus mode where the fact that you are playing again is referenced in meta fashion, which I'm tired of at this point. The fact that a new game will play differently is probably good for people who enjoyed this more than I did. I felt like the outcomes of my decisions made some sense and were interesting enough, but even the sequel doesn't quite manage to make me actually care about what's going on, and without that investment the game was interesting but not engaging. If you like these sorts of quick choice games with some wild and drastically different endings the sequel is solid enough. I would skip the first game though.