I’ve tried to write this rundown like six times so I’m just going to presume that the reader is familiar with the source material without doing much explanation. There are several playthroughs to watch on YouTube which will give you a general gist of the idea of the game.
I will be reviewing the main game and not talking about the DLC as I played the game’s PSVR version which is a little shoddy but apparently not the worst VR version.
Not for Broadcast is an FMV game where you play a TV station broadcaster cutting a live news broadcast and making decisions on the ads you play, what you show on the air. Between the video segments you make decisions on your family life.
One of the reasons I want to talk about this game and why I’ve been suffering over it is that it’s one of those games that people rate as better than it probably deserves because the concept is novel.
The game is kind of like Night Trap! If Night Trap! Was Papers, Please but apolitical?
I bought this game in part because there just aren’t many FMV games anymore and I like seeing weird experiment games. That said, experimental games get a lot of leeway because it’s interesting that they’re trying something different. Unless your experiment game is outrageously weird and difficult to parse you’re going to be getting good reviews.
Briefly, before I go into the important bits, I want to touch on the game’s sense of humour. The game’s sense of humour is British in the sense that it’s mean. Most of the recurring characters outside of the major political players are running gags.
You have a useless pretentious artist doing school plays who gets government funding to keep making his terrible plays, including getting a prime-time TV slot.
Later, there’s a theatre troup invited to perform at the capital who are all notably gay with a handful being quite flamboyant.
There’s a football player who’s very stupid and has a play made about his life, mixing real-life retellings with high fantasy. You decide the course of his life by selecting what headlines to run.
There’s a rapper who presents himself as having come from the streets and growing up homeless, when in actuality he’s a prince from a foreign nation who falls back on his father at the slightest nudge. I think he’s meant to be Kanye before his Nazi shit, this game is from 2020 remember.
One section has a pop star composite of Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus who innocently talks about what her management says about her and is I guess too dumb to notice it’s fucked up. She performs a song which is infinitely more explicit than anything on the pop charts (more so than WAP or Anaconda) which I suppose is what the developers feel pop music by women is like? The song is notably more male gaze-y than actual pop music is.
Early in the game, the National Nightly News has two hosts, Megan and Jeremy. Megan is a news presenter and Jeremy is a miserable bastard. I think he might be more funny if you’re British, but he’s perpetually a downer or actively taking shots at the subject matter in a way he doesn’t have the charisma to pull off.
The game starts ramping up when the not-UK is sanctioned and blockaded by neighbouring nations in response to their left-wing policies, which quickly begins to cause shortages of all kinds. The news focuses heavily on fluff pieces despite this, mentioning the blockade and ongoing effects of the sanctions only at the start of the program.
Jeremy snaps after having to interview a group of people with silly diseases, taking a gun from the on-site not-cop and causing a hostage situation live on air. He does this in protest of the media focusing fluff pieces over the Advance party’s increasing grip on power and the military blockade. He attempts to talk about some underground bomb tests and unusual laboratory tests too, but is cut off. He tells the player to play a tape on-air, or he will kill fucking everyone in the building, including coworkers etc.
Playing the tape will unveil the organised resistance movement against the government is lead by not-Alex Jones, and Jeremy chooses to basically self-immolate in protest, immediately disillusioned with the organised movement. If you don’t play it, he won’t kill anyone, woohoo, but he’ll be taken away and won’t be present on the news anymore.
The game from here will give great weight to Jeremy’s name and self-sacrifice For The News, his self-immolation is to protest the media’s choices on what to report on, not even in protest of the government. The game spends a fair bit of time foreshadowing Jeremy’s death/disappearance, there’s a psychic lady in the lockdown bonus episode who gives a vague but distressed prediction.
I don’t like Jeremy, though, he sucks. He should try being a more positive person. Also talk about the government directly instead of bitching that your news agency isn’t reporting on the right things. It’s the 80s you can probably start your own newspaper.
The politics of Advance don’t really resemble an actual political party or position, because something you fundamentally need to understand with Not for Broadcast is its politics are video game moral decision based instead of politically based.
Advance is (supposedly?) anti-free speech and anti-personal freedoms. Criticising the government can (apparently?) get you disappeared, and reporting your neighbours to the government for anti-government thought is encouraged. Nursing homes are also quickly replaced by assisted dying centres where elderly or terminally ill people can go or be sent to by their family for a week of five-star treatment before being euthanised.
Advance also provides free healthcare, easy to access funding for arts, free access to theatres and art galleries, free food and water for all, an immeasurably improved youth care system, rehabilitative justice as opposed to punitive justice, reformed police, and is socially progressive for the 2020s, let alone the 1980s. They’re in favour of people remaining child-free if they wish. They instate queer rights, and equal rights for women.
The two paragraphs above probably look a bit contradictory to you!
In contrast, the organised resistance movement lead by not-Alex Jones Disrupt is pro-free speech, but pro-capitalist and pro-”job creators”. They more or less advocate for a return to the previous government structure and previous status quo with wealth inequality, a significantly weaker social safety net, and implied fewer civil rights for marginalised groups, but with protected speech.
Different endings of the game reveal different secret agendas and conspiracies about either side, but I’ll talk about those later, because many of the endings directly contradict each other and would make discussing the politics of the two factions impossible.
The Big event of the game is when in response to the military blockade, the not-UK detonates nuclear devices in three major cities in Europe and demands that all countries involved in the blockade agree to be annexed. All countries immediately accept the terms to avoid nuclear annihilation and become ‘territories’.
As the game progresses, you’ll hear that Advance has been able to create programs to feed every person in every territory/western Europe three meals a day. You hear from a foster teen who grew up pre-Advance and recounts the system as being neglectful, uncaring, and rife with sexual abuse, and the immediate changes to make sure they were cared for and protected.
You will also hear that the prime minister Julia Salisbury killed fifteen million people in the nuclear attacks in response to the military blockades.
You have a government which is able to feed hundreds of millions of people three meals a day for absolutely no cost, and the same government is also responsible for killing fifteen million people in bombing attacks.
Again, this comes back to the game’s politics being based around video game moral decision logic rather than coherent politics.
There are like three billion endings so I’m just going to go through some notable ones.
In one ending, Advance is revealed to have put birth control into their free food due to overpopulation concerns. In most other endings, this wasn’t deliberate, it was because of the nukes. I want to point out here that overpopulation is broadly not a left-wing concern and to give Advance a major drawback they have to give them a quality broadly attributed to the right.
In another ending, footage will be aired of Disrupt’s leadership, consisting of former right-wing leaders of annexed countries discussing how to regain control, involving re-taking power and setting up death camps to purge intellectuals and ethnic minorities.
If Disrupt regains power, they’ll re-take the territories of Europe to presumably carry out said purge. They can also end the National Nightly News broadcast and replace it with Rapture Bioshock style propaganda.
There’s an ending where Advance announces a program where the government will pay you cash if you have children, in order to combat the fertility crisis.
The most optimistic ending the game presents is the ending where a new centrist political party Accord looks to win the next election. Accord of course means agreement between several parties.
What are the developer’s politics exactly?
It’s weird to play a game as ostensibly political as deciding whether or not to comply with an authoritarian government’s request to censor the news. Watching one playthrough I saw a comment asking if the game was made by ‘paranoid Thatcherites’ and, yeah that’s the impression I got too.
There are some parts that don’t fit with that, though, like the protagonist and your spouse have gender-neutral names and are referred to with they/them pronouns throughout, presumably so you can better project onto the protagonist regardless of your gender or sexuality. I just do not think conservative developers would do that.
The developers responded to a Steam post mentioning the decision to make the authoritarian regime liberal-left was because they felt it would make the most interesting story, and are more sympathetic to Advance than some of the game might make you think. So the developers are probably liberal and/or centrists.
Living in Paradise
The game’s theme which plays on loading screens goes
I’ve been living in a paradise
It’s awfully nice
if you don’t think twice
… I’ve been living where the food is free, a sanctuary, for all and sundry, I’ve been living in an allegory, ever since you made Advances on me
It is a nice little song, but with how the world is going this game has started to frustrate me more.
When I played the game initially and had a mull over the game’s politics being flavouring for the video game moral decision gameplay it became frustrating. The game is novel being FMV-based, but as a story it just comes down to just “centrism good” and absurd moral extremes. Again like, prime minister who feeds all of western Europe three meals a day for free but also killed 15 million people with nukes.
I made myself finally write this review concisely because the US is looking increasingly Germany 1930s what with deporting legal residents for protesting the on-going genocide in Palestine, sending migrants to off-shore detainment camps, putting a statement out for National Child Abuse Prevention month describing gender affirming care as ‘mutilation’, and intentionally tanking the economy and risking a recession.
This is authoritarianism.
I am frustrated by Not for Broadcast’s “this is a horrible government regime because free speech is restricted, even though the cost of living is almost nothing, food is free, people have reproductive rights, queer rights are enshrined in the government and unquestioned”, like, damn the reduced free speech sucks but the actual bar for punishable speech in this regime seems fairly high from what they show.
We see their rehabilitative programs genuinely working to help people. People who talk shit on the government are taken to them too though, and if Jeremy lives he’ll be brainfucked but they don’t shoot dissidents in the back of the head or put them in camps? The reduced free speech doesn’t feel that much more extreme than current Europe countries, either, is the thing.
There’s an element early on in the game where the government introduces an Advance membership card which allows holders to access government services quicker, and the game is greatly sceptical of this because it’s a new form of ID which quickly becomes mandatory, and that sounds spooky and authoritarian. But it isn’t applied that way, it’s not like you can be arrested for not being able to present one to a not-cop from the looks of it.
There’s a contradiction between the personal freedoms offered by the government like reproductive rights for women and queer rights versus the government’s supposed totalitarian control of its citizens to further the state.
I don’t have a clean wrap-up here, just that overall I find the game frustrating for depicting a weirdly lenient weirdly left-wing regime and going “this is bad because we don’t have this philosophical free speech freedom” when we’re seeing fascism rising worldwide which does actually make people suffer.