Not For Broadcast is a unique game that gives players a chance to experience what it is like to be a TV broadcaster, while Live & Spooky brings more chaos that comes with it.
Ever wondered what it would be like to walk in the shoes of a TV broadcaster? Well, Not For Broadcast, a game developed by NotGames and published by tinyBuild, is a game that will let you experience exactly that. Take a closer look into the madness behind the TV broadcast.
You begin your new career through the eyes of Alex Winston, a janitor at a TV studio who happened to make the mistake of answering a ringing phone on election night. The Advance party, a political party with all but sane views on governing a country, has won the election by a landslide in votes. It’s now your job to take over and keep the audience interested; from switching cameras to bleeping out curse words, you’ll feel the stress that embodies TV broadcast.
The best way to describe Not For Broadcast is if you took the original Five Nights At Freddy’s, got rid of the malicious animatronics and random jump-scares, then instead replaced them with the beeping cues of broadcast screens and somehow made it four times as stressful. It gets a lot more difficult when weather and temperature play a part too. Avoiding electrocution during a lightning storm or burning out your equipment in a heatwave. You’ll have to jump through every hoop to make sure your broadcast goes smoothly.
You do this in various ways. You see, in Not For Broadcast, there is one thing you’re going to have to get used to and that is micromanaging. In your broadcast room, you will have to do a wide variety of tasks. All of these tasks play their own important role in broadcasting, such as switching to various camera angles.
Depending on what camera angle is chosen to be the focus, this will dictate what is being broadcasted to viewers of the channel. You cannot stay on one camera forever though, so you need to choose between four screens showing different camera angles and pick one to be your focus for the sake of keeping your viewers interested.
A good rule to keep in mind is to make sure you focus on the person who is talking, and if, for example, they are being interviewed, you make sure to capture the other person’s reactions. If you find only switching between two angles feels incredibly dull, another option is to switch to a camera that gives viewers a wide shot of the audience because if you find your camera angles dull and boring, then your audience definitely will and that’s the last thing you want.
The main goal in Not For Broadcast is to make sure you keep the number of viewers watching the programme program going up, which is easier said than done. Switching between camera angles isn’t the only thing you have to worry about, as you will also need to manage the broadcast signal frequency.
This is easily handled by ensuring that the channel frequency stays within a certain margin even when it fluctuates. Maintaining frequency is just as important as maintaining an audience because it’s well and dandy that you have excellent cinematography skills, it. It will all be for nothing if your audience can’t see it.
Making sure that the show goes smoothly is just one piece of the puzzle. In Not For Broadcast, you’ll also have to choose what happens between show segments by choosing everyone’s favorite part of cable television, advertisements. Before every show, you will need to pick up to four adverts that will play between show segments.
Now usually, what you pick doesn’t really matter, but in some cases, you will need to pick wisely. For example, it’s not the best idea to play an ad showing off a cute toy, that in the previous news segment was revealed to be responsible for a considerable amount of murders.
Now you’re probably thinking to yourself – “wow, that sounds a bit complicated but manageable”, oh but it is far from that. Juggling the responsibility of managing camera angles, broadcast signal frequency, viewer count, and advertising is all well and good in the beginning but as you play through more and more shows, the game adds more and more mechanics. One of these mechanics that’s introduced is censorship.
Despite the many incredibly adult skits and jokes in Not For Broadcast: Live & Spooky, you are working for a family-friendly news station. You can’t let those rude and yucky words slip through because it’ll upset your sensitive viewers and in turn, affect your viewer count. You will need to act fast, as you are only given a 3-second delay to censor words before it gets properly aired.
Also, depending on what you censor, you can make it seem like whoever is speaking is saying something incredibly inappropriate, such as a politician saying “I want to protect your children” can become… Well, you get the idea.
Besides censoring swear words and other rude phrases, the game also introduces weather effects. While trying to manage everything is already stressful as is but Not For Broadcast has decided – “What if players are locked out of half their controls and we up the difficulty?”. During weather effects, such as lightning storms, you will not be able to switch between certain camera angles as the buttons have been electrified, and if you press them too many times, you will die. That’s right; you can die in this game!
Not For Broadcast is not an easy game, not because of clunky controls or vague and enigmatic writing but rather because the game is just incredibly overbearing. In the game’s pursuit of trying to achieve as much of a realistic, albeit rather exaggerated, experience as possible, it has sacrificed being fun. You start to feel less like you’re playing a game and more like you’re working a shift at the BBC, just without the pay.
The game Isn’t for everybody, especially if you suffer from auditory or sensory issues. Because if you make a mistake, the game will hit you rather obnoxiously with a variety of loud beeps that are incredibly distracting and will cause you to lose your focus, causing you to make even more mistakes.
That’s not to say these loud, overbearing moments last forever, as after every broadcast, you will be able to get some downtime before you move on to your next shift. During these times, you get an insight into Alex Winston’s life and get to make decisions that will carry on to the next downtime segment, along with having an effect on how he responds to the people in his life. However, these quiet moments don’t last forever, and you’ll soon have to head out for your next shift, possibly fighting off evil teddies that want to take over the world.
Not For Broadcast: Live & Spooky DLC
Much like the weather effects, Not For Broadcast: Live & Spooky DLC also adds various effects that you will have to deal with during your broadcast. You will have to air a ghost-hunting paranormal investigation show known as Live & Spooky. During the show, some sort of entity or entities will try to interrupt and cause havoc during your broadcast. The entity will mess with your control panel, in particular the newly implemented Ghostjammer, which is meant to keep our ghost hunters safe from spectral dangers.
But unlike the weather effects, Live & Spooky adds a Saw-styled death game. Where you no longer need to worry about swear words and adverts and instead need to appease the entity by choosing which of the ghost hunters live or die. The DLC makes the game far more fun and interesting and swaps out the painful realism with silly and campy paranormal film fun.
Not For Broadcast is definitely one of a kind. You will experience what it is like to be a news broadcaster and all the stress that goes with it. While the game does have its fun moments, you don’t get enough time to appreciate them, and the game ends up feeling more like a chore to play.
However, the Not For Broadcast: Live & Spooky DLC throws away the dull and monotonous gameplay and replaces it with over-the-top spooky gags that actually make the game fun, even for a short while. Definitely give it a try if you’re slightly masochistic or just really love British Television.
