FMV games have gone through something of a redemption, haven’t they. I remember back in the 90s when FMV stood for Fuzzy Mammaries and Violence and the gameplay of FMV games chiefly involved clicking on the bloodstained tits to look at some different bloodstained tits. Also the games either came on enough CD-ROMS to construct a functional soapbox derby racer, or the videos were so massively compressed you’d have better luck masturbating to an image of a fully dressed softcore porn actress holding up an embroidered picture of a fruitbowl. But in more recent years FMV games, while still having file sizes that sit atop your solid state drive like an overweight St. Bernard on an unprepared lap, have gained a certain amount of prestige, thanks to games like Her Story and… Her S- oh I already mentioned that one. Um. Maybe I should’ve thought about this before I started talking. In any case, here’s a second one for the list: Not For Broadcast, just out of early access, an FMV title that gamifies the experience of being a live TV news broadcaster creating an edit on the fly, set in a satirical alternative version of contemporary Britain whose most bizarre and otherworldly quality is that people still seem to give a shit about TV news.
Gameplay takes place on a few layers. At the top is keeping the edit interesting enough to stop the audience switching over to the fucking bake off or whatever – keep the camera on who’s talking, cut to a noddy shot if they drone on about pies for too long, hit the bleep button whenever someone swears because I guess every single audience member’s maiden aunt is visiting and they’re all going to slam the off button at the very first utterance of bugger. So that’s the equivalent of the document checking in Papers Please; the moment to moment challenge of reflexes and attentiveness that game overs you if you fuck it up. On the next layer down you also have to make choices, choices that matter if you will. You have to decide if you’re going to follow the instructions that come in from the increasingly totalitarian government to bleep out dissenting voices, or support the burgeoning resistance by airing their tapes and bleeping propaganda. During certain breaking news events you have to decide if you’re going to keep the camera on the dear leader looking heroically defiant or on all the juicy shots of protesters being police murdered.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Oh boy another Not Tonight Watch Dogs Legion type plot about near future dystopian Britain that wants to get its I-told-you-sos in early before the post-Brexit UK finishes shrivelling up and disappearing up the angrily flaring anus of modern history. Actually while the plot kicks off with an upset election win by a radical populist party with an agenda that clearly isn’t thinking in the long term, headed in part by a blue collar man of the people type spokesman whose off hand is permanently groping for his next pint of brown ale, the politics swiftly get fairly broad. Some might say a little too broad. Some others might say the satire’s so lacking in subtlety it’s blotting out the fucking sun. So we have a conservative politician talking about the importance of moral integrity as his personal gimp attempts to escape from a cupboard in the background, which is one of many gags that keep going on way too long after the actual point has been made. And as one must expect of a choices matter game there’s a slightly obnoxious both-sides-ism at play that with one breath decries the government’s unwarranted seizure of inherited wealth and in the next portrays rich people as braying twats complaining about having had to give up their eleventh pony.
So the tone tends to wobble up and down like an erection in a unisex bathhouse when the serious chin stroking about government accountability switches over to facetious song and dance routines about how great it is to live in fascist autocracies. Honestly, though, despite all that I was gripped. It might be unsubtle but you can still get invested in something that’s beating you over the head. Because you probably don’t want to get beaten over the head and if you pay attention you might be able to dodge the thing that’s beating you over the head. The humour does land somewhat often enough but more importantly I got invested in the characters. As the government becomes stricter and stricter and the news is forced to cover less actual events and more cats sitting on celebrity’s heads, I really felt for the presenters as they either disintegrate or become dead behind the eyes. Honestly, the character I absolutely cared the least about was myself, for all the game’s efforts. When you’re not working in the control booth there’s these visual novel segments that detail what’s happening in your home life and how you’re personally affected by the changes you’re facilitating, but I honestly couldn’t give that much of a shit.
Probably because I and my family were purely hypothetical entities from the world of plain text. And the newsreaders have actual faces that make big sad eyes at me when the revolution is exploding outside and they’re only allowed to report on how a popular footballer helped an old lady down from a tree. Not For Broadcast’s peers are games like Papers Please and This War Of Mine, and how those games work is by threading the moral aspect through the core gameplay challenge and making it hard to be a good person. You don’t want to contribute to the enshittening of your society. You don’t want to burgle old people or send blameless immigrants to the mysterious shed with the big chimney, but you’ve got your own life and main gameplay tasks to worry about so let go of the fucking doorframe, grandma, I’ve got to atomize two more of your family members before I can so much as break even today. And Not For Broadcast just doesn’t pull that off. The choices you make don’t actually affect your moment to moment experience much. You can select what ads to play and that might boost the value of stock you own, but your financial situation doesn’t seem to matter; it’s not like you can spend the money on gameplay effects like upgrading your knob twiddling stats.
Some of the gameplay challenges, like twiddling your knob to keep the sine wave happy or editing to a rhythm during music videos, just feel like asinine busywork to give you something to do while the game makes a point. As for whether our choices actually matter in this choices matter game, I’d put us at around a 7.5 on the matter-o-meter. Some of the plot hairs have a pretty explosive case of split ends, and there’s a princely fourteen possible endings. Fourteen endings, Not For Broadcast? Wow, that’s the sort of detail that could really drive replay value, isn’t it. Welp, see you. What? You’re interesting, but you’re not fourteen rewatches interesting. Especially not when the interesting bits are buried under several hours of midgrade Youtube sketch comedy. And as for the gameplay, I don’t feel terribly invested in beating my knob twiddling speed record. But hey, I might feel inclined to Google the other endings at some point and that counts for something. Googling the endings of things is an underrated practice. Certainly saves a lot of time. If Hitler had thought to google the end of the second world war it’d probably wouldn’t have been as much of a pisser.
