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It’s not often that I play a game that hooks me so completely, nor one that I buy (pre-order, even, against my usual policy) after playing the demo. Not for Broadcast, though, did both (the only other I can think of, had I known about it before it came out, would be The Stanley Parable). You play some schmuck who ended up in a television broadcast center after the previous editor decides to fly off somewhere and get smashed.
The influence of Papers, Please is obvious. You have a variety of tasks to perform, and failing means being fired – or worse, drop in the ratings. It’s up to you to edit the live TV, censor swear words, avoid interference, queue up stock footage, choose ads, etc.. What you show and how you show it influences public perception, and you have to decide whether to give more screen time to one figure or the other. The usual promise of “your actions have consequences” is here, though that’s yet to be seen (I’ve only played an hour of one playthrough).
The game pitch of editing a live TV broadcast is one that just feels obvious in retrospect, but actually doing it (and doing it well) is something I would never have thought of – much like Portal. There are some rough bits – the in-between broadcast segments go on a bit too long and have a habit of dropping you in to the middle of a situation you don’t really understand. This is fine for the editing segments (which is the premise, after all), but the roleplay can’t be accurate on a first playthrough.
So far, though, my experience has been almost entirely positive. Part of that is due to the campiness of what you’re broadcasting. Everything is just enough of a political parody to be funny or just wonderfully cringeworthy enough to laugh at while frantically avoiding interference or trying to live edit a music video.
Really, my only concern is that this game is still in early access and will likely need a lot more content to be entirely satisfying. The intro screen says that the final game will “fill up your SSD,” and I certainly hope they can pull that off. I could easily see myself spending hours upon hours just to see what other stories they can tell – but FMV of this quantity is likely going to be hard to pull off. Then again, if my biggest complaint is “I want more,” then perhaps it’s not so bad.