Not for Broadcast

I’m writing this review for one reason and one reason only, I’ve seen many people complain that this game is propaganda for one side or the other, or that the narrative is too confusing and hard to keep up with. I feel like the people who make these complaints haven’t played through the whole game. As getting all available endings will reveal both Advance and Disrupt to be untrustworthy, Alan James being taken advantage of by the leaders of the group and Peter Clement essentially being taken out by Julia Salisbury for sympathising with Disrupt and getting angry at her for killing over 14 million people. I understand that not everything is clear at the very beginning of the game but it’s not supposed to be, but playing through the whole experience will reveal that this game is not a piece of propaganda for any political party or agenda. Rather, it’s about how corruption plagues every corner of the world, and how the causes you support are all susceptible to it, no matter how safe or right it may seem.

Not For Broadcast is a game that moves its story through the gameplay. And in that matter, NFB resembles "Papers, Please". In NFB you work as a live tv master control and use the choices you make to what show on tv influence the viewers. The thing is, the story is centered around this news broadcast program and how the jornalists are impacted by this new left-wing government that just won the elections.

It starts by just how they portrait the left-wing politicians as complete morons, who gives their first interview after the elections completely drunk and in a way that they clearly don't know what they are doing. The game also has a weird 1984 inspiration (starting by the protagonist's name, Alex WINSTON - the protagonist of 1984 is called Winston Smith) that goes by an authoritarian dictatorship where the government always says something but they're clearly lying and trying to censor free speech.

The game also forces you to make weird "moral" choices that makes you feel right about choosing individuality over coletivism. It's like coletivism is always government brainwash, and invidiuality is thinking for yourself outside the box.

Anyway, at some point it became clear to me that this game was clearly anticommunist propaganda bullshit and I dropped it. Which is a shame, because I was really liking the gameplay mechanics.