Written between November 2025 and January 2026

Intro

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I didn’t do much game related writing last year, mostly focusing on political topics, but behind the scenes I have actually been writing a lot about games, working on 3 lengthy articles on some games that I really wanted to talk about this year, Far Cry Primal, Watch Dogs Legion and Cyberpunk 2077, the problem with these though is they tend to lapse into very lengthy talks about my playthrough, going over all or most of what I did in those runs so I can then talk about them in depth, how I felt, what I liked, what made the games stand out.

There’s nothing wrong with that on the surface but it tends to get very frustrating, that first step of writing about what I did can be really tedious at times because I’m not writing anything really new or explaining any views, just retracing my steps, and it can get really time consuming as well, I spent 20 hours with Primal, 80 hours with Legion and just shy of 190 hours with Cyberpunk, we can shave about half the time off for Legion and Cyberpunk since the first half of those hours were old playthroughs I’m not talking about much in the articles, but even so it’s a lot of time spent and things that happened to summarise.

It’s not like I have to write that way, my Crime Boss article definitely didn’t do a play by play of every run, my Saints Row article doesn’t go over every mission, every cutscene, they focus on fundamentals of mechanics, story bits and then some missions/gameplay moments as examples, making it much easier to write, but it’s just a pattern I keep lapsing back into, making full on articles for individual games very tough to finish.

So lately I came up with the idea to do something different, one article for several different games that I wanted to write about but didn’t want to dedicate an exclusive yapfest to, either because they didn’t need that much or for the sake of my own sanity.

So this article will be a bit more broad in its commentary, but will include spoiler sections that discuss large stretches of plot or my playthroughs, with light spoilers being marked with spoiler tags and heavier ones being hidden behind drop down menus you have to actively click to see, so where I wanted to get into those subjects I could without ruining these games for people who haven’t played them and might be interested.

Time Travelling

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The first 3 games I want to talk about have a running theme of time management, but they use it in very different ways.

Dead Rising

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Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is a game I played through over a few days in October 2024, around a month after it came out, as the name suggests it’s a remaster of the original Dead Rising that came out all the way back in 2006, when I was the ripe old age of 3.

It was a very successful game that spawned a lasting franchise, until that train was killed off by 2016’s Dead Rising 4, which was blasted for being tonally off and just mechanically poor, sending the series into a hiatus until now, something I learned about from one of my favourite YouTubers, Tehsnakerer.

The premise of the original game is this: A zombie outbreak has taken place in the U.S. town of Willamette, you are photojournalist Frank West, and you want to uncover the mystery behind how this happened. Your pilot, Ed, flies you into Willamette’s mall and gives you 72 hours to uncover the mystery, after those 72 hours are up he’ll be back, and if you’re not on the helipad by then, he’ll leave you stranded there.

This kicks off the game’s main mode, 72 Hour Mode, which spans across 4 in-game days. Time doesn’t pass in real time, with every real world second counting as 12 in-game, meaning that each day actually lasts 2 hours and the full time you have is 6 hours, with time being shown on Frank’s watch that you can view in game and a big digital clock that appears whenever you enter a different area.

If you want, you can wait out that whole time on the roof then go home, but if you actually want to play the game you can delve down into the mall and face the horde.

From there there are 2 forms of missions you can do, the Main Story, known as the “Cases”, and the side content called “Scoops”, which involve rescuing survivors trapped in different parts of the Mall by bringing them to the security room, a safe room next to the roof, these usually involve just getting them past the zombies, but sometimes they can also involve human boss enemies called the Psychopaths as well.

These each have their own timers as well, only being available in certain hours of the day with their availability timers being shown by sliders, and once they’re gone, they’re gone, if you miss the deadline for a Case, the entire main story is cut off, if you miss the Scoops, the survivors featured in them will be dead.

But interestingly, both of these are completely optional, even if you miss out the main story you can still keep playing until your 6 hours are up, with 5 endings ranked A to E being included based on whether you were at the helipad on time and how far you progressed in the story. (Plus an extra F ending for starting then fumbling a specific case)

You also have the ability to fast forward time at save points, which include the security room’s sofa and the various bathroom toilets you can find throughout the mall.

In terms of gameplay you can fight zombies with your bare hands, guns, and a variety of melee weapons ranging from proper tools like knives to improvised objects you find throughout the mall, and thankfully these are zombies of the slow and stupid variety.

But the game compensates for that by having them appear in large numbers, where they can become tough to plough through especially if you’re trying to keep survivors alive, the zombies also have a fast killing grab attack you have to button mash to release yourself from, which can be an especially big threat in large hordes.

As you kill zombies and rescue people you earn (don’t laugh) PP, or “Prestige Points”, an XP system with 50 total levels, increasing Frank’s health bar and inventory space and unlocking new skills, these levels carry over if you start a new game, acting as a kind of built in New Game + system you don’t even have to finish a run to take advantage of.

Another way of earning PP is photography, Frank’s background isn’t just for show, with scores being awarded based on categories: Horror, Brutality, Outtake (Humour) and Drama and just how much you can get in your shot, with frequent photos being a great way to earn Prestige.

It all adds up to make for a solid, fun experience, although there are moments of downtime (especially useful for hunting for secret weapons caches and stocking up on things like health items and skateboards to get around the mall quicker) much of the game makes for tight time management as you have to balance catching up with the main story in order to not lose it, and rescuing survivors before your chance is gone forever, if that’s what you want to do anyway.

And it’s one I didn’t get right on my first run, where even though I wasn’t running blind I was far from an expert, managing to beat all the Cases and finish the story, but failing to rescue the 7 survivors out of 48 total¹.

It’s not a gameplay loop without flaws though. Technically there are 8 cases, with the cases being split into up to 4 sub-branches (for example 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, 8-4), with 20 of these cases total. The thing is that number is a lie, only 10 of them involve any actual gameplay and the others are just cutscenes, 2 of the cases (Cases 3 and 6) are just cutscenes and have no gameplay at all.

Now that’s not to say there isn’t enough mission content, that’s not the problem, the problem is, remember what I said before about deadlines? If you miss a case, that’s it, you lost the entire storyline, so you can lose out on the entire story just because you didn’t watch a cutscene on some arbitrary timer that doesn’t have a very good plot reason to be there, I learnt this the hard way on my first run.

Case 2 has you working with Brad, a Homeland Security agent, to rescue a scientist called Dr Barnaby, who gets kidnapped by the mysterious Carlito, Case 2-1 has you heading to reach Carlito then 2-2 has you fight him and rescue Barnaby. In the battle, Brad gets shot, needing medicine to survive, so Case 2-3 has you go to a store to grab some, having to fight a Psychopath on the way.

I got the medicine and as the timer ticked down I went to grab some survivors too, although this cost me some time when it came to helping Brad I didn’t want to lose the chance at rescuing them, leading to a tense nailbiting section where I arrived at the Security Room just on time to get Brad his meds, with the timer bar so low it had disappeared entirely.

But I didn’t fail, managing to rescue the survivors and return the meds, earning the thanks of Brad’s colleague Jessie. I then promptly failed the next Case, 3-1, because I arrived too late for its start time.

This forced me to go all the way back something like half an hour or more, prioritising the Cases and then rescuing the survivors, and what was Case 3-1 that was so time sensitive? A cutscene where Barnaby grumbles, mentions something called Santa Cabeza, then refuses to say anything else.

That’s it. There’s really no way Brad or Jessie couldn’t have just mentioned his mumbling at any other time? It was just so crucial that I be in the room to hear him mumble this in person that the entire plot depends on it? Yeah, the time management is normally a great source of tension and engagement in the game, usually easily justified by the fact that if you’re not there for the story beats you can’t intervene in key moments, and if you’re not there for the survivors, they can’t survive on their own devices, but a moment like this where the justification was a lot more flimsy left me unimpressed.

The other annoying problem the game has in this department is something called the 8 survivor limit, it works like this. Most survivors you need to rescue in the Scoops don’t appear on the map naturally, instead you have to wait until Otis, the mall’s janitor and now designated rescue coordinator, calls you to tell you about them, then and only then will they spawn in the mall for you to save them.

Normally Otis will call you about a survivor as soon as they’re timed to appear, revealing their associated Scoop and the amount of time you have to do it, but if there are 8 survivors already spawned in he’ll refuse to call you about any more. Those unspawned survivors will still have their timers ticking down, and will die if you don’t get to them in time, but until you can clear the backlog of the 8 you won’t be able to save them or even know they exist.

This again artificially meddles with your time management, because a lot of Scoops actually give you quite a lengthy chunk of time before they expire and their associated survivors die, but you need to get to them anyway so that you don’t hit the limit of 8.

8 survivors might seem like a lot but lots of Scoops have multiple survivors involved, for example early in Day 3 the quest A Strange Group has 5 survivors and another, Gun Shop Standoff, has 3, so if you don’t attend to these early you won’t know about any of the rest of the day’s survivors or how long you have to reach them.

Like I said, I only lost 7 survivors in my first run, and I wasn’t really trying to rescue everyone in that run anyway, so it’s not like making all the timings add up is too tough of a job or anything, but these stupid quirks add some unnecessary difficulty to the task.

Even so it’s a formula that stood out to me for its freedom, time will just tick by without you, and though the game will warn you about the consequences of not bothering with the story, it also won’t stop you, how many other games do that?

The only one that comes to mind is Morrowind, the old Elder Scrolls game I haven’t played and don’t know much about, just getting some bits from Massi who’s a big fan and random wiki browsing, but one of the well known things about it is how if you kill an “essential” (aka story critical) NPC, the game will warn you that you’ve just fucked yourself, but it won’t force you to go back, unlike later Elder Scrolls games which force your hand by making essentials invincible. Morrowind is much less transparent about how to beat the game when you dropped the main quest, though, all Frank has to do is wait for the helicopter.

This leads me on to Dead Rising’s extra modes, since they’re a surprise for after you beat the main story I’m going to make this a spoiler section but to be honest, it’s not like Dead Rising has the most shocking investing plot in the world, I’d recommend you read this next section anyway, but I’ve kept it hidden in the drop down so if you want to be surprised, you still can be.

Spoiler Section (Dead Rising Endings and Bonus Modes)

Your reward for completing all Cases and being back at the helipad on time is Ending A, which isn’t really an ending at all, but your gateway to an epilogue. Ending A sees Ed get bitten and crash his helicopter, stranding Frank at the mall and leading him to give up as a horde surrounds him, this leads straight into Overtime Mode where Frank is rescued from that horde, but told he’s been infected, leaving him with 24 hours (or 2 real world hours) to travel through the mall evading the remaining zombies and the Special Forces troops while collecting resources for an antidote.

This adds 2 extra endings, Ending Z where Frank fails and becomes a zombie, and Ending S, where the ingredients are collected on time and Frank manages to escape, which also unlocks the game’s final mode, ∞ Mode.

Infinite Mode is what it says on the tin, its an endless survival mode, to make that a real challenge where it normally wouldn’t be as much of one thanks to the slowpoke zombies there are 2 main tweaks to the game’s formula:

• First, there are no survivors to rescue, everyone you meet is an enemy, though that also means everyone is an opportunity too, since they drop resources on death.

• Second, Frank’s health drains automatically after enough time has passed, meaning you have to keep hunting for healing items to survive

So after finishing Ending S I looked into how best to do Infinity Mode, where there’s an achievement for surviving 7 Days, it’s tough to do since you need to make sure you’re very powerful so you easily win battles, because the more you need to heal back from combat the less health items you have to outlast the automatic drain.

What I found was a 2 step plan, rescuing all the survivors in a 72 Hour Mode run (the Saint achievement) unlocks a special magazine that while in your inventory gives you infinite ammo/weapon durability, so I went back to the main game and did a Saint run, opting for Ending B where you cut the story off early but make it to the chopper.

A much easier run since I wasn’t playing semi-blind anymore, knowing exactly where to go to arm myself to the teeth and stock up on skateboards (the game’s prime mobility tool) and what all the Scoop/Case timings would be in advance, making for a much less tense resource management type experience (not that Dead Rising was ever a real vulnerable horror game or anything).

Step 2 is completing Zombie Annihilator, where you kill at least 53,594 zombies, unlocking a powerful new weapon called the Mega Buster, basically Mega Man’s gun.

That’s a very very high kill count, much higher than you’d get in a regular run, I killed 2494 on my Ending A run and 3370 on my Ending B run, add in Overtime Mode for Ending A and the 2 counts were probably about the same, but yeah, about 50,000 less than that achievement demands.

In the original game what many did was keep running over zombies in the mall’s maintenance tunnels, but that’s a very slow unreliable method, with Deluxe Remaster adding in another, in Overtime Mode near the very end, as you escape the mall, you go through a tunnel section with an insanely large swarm of zombies that respawns once you’re not near them, so all you need to do is grab the magazine from Saint, a military rocket launcher, then keep blowing the bastards to kingdom come until the achievement drops. Admittedly a very slow, tedious process, but I got it in the end and earned my right to larp as Mega Man.

Infinite Mode is a million times easier in the Remaster than the original game, allowing you to save your game and come back later (though your progress is still lost if you die) and fast forward time at save areas, where the original forced you to actually play in real time in one sitting, with the full 7 days lasting 14 real life hours, good luck with that shit.

There was still a bit of challenge in that you have to make sure the zombies and other enemies can’t catch you and drain your health before the timer does, and that you scavenge for enough resources to last, and in one way the Remaster is actually harder, since survivor spawns are randomised instead of fixed, meaning you don’t know who you’ll be fighting in survivor encounters or what they’ll drop, but after a few tries I managed to get a winning run, with clearing enemies mostly easy thanks to the infinite ammo Mega Buster and getting health items made much more simple thanks to the Wiki offering a list of where all the food items are in the map, which for the ones not dropped by enemies were still fixed like the original game.

I did most of the winning run in one go, before realising that I had a train to catch for my day out, where I went off to watch Joker 2 (which later made it into an article of mine) and then go to a gig, returning soon after to finish the last 2 days of the run, marking the completion of the game.

Anyhow, since I had a lot of fun with the game it seemed natural to play 2 and 3, since I own both alongside 2’s spinoff Off the Record, Dead Rising 3 is actually one I know a lot more about, having seen a Snakerer vid on it years ago and a few others showing off the endings, but so far I decided not to give them a shot since I’ve heard that Capcom are considering making more “Deluxe Remasters” for the later games, so I figured it would be better to wait for that rather than playing them in their original form with much more dated visuals.

Having not played the original game I can’t say for sure what’s best, but from my POV it does seem like the Deluxe Remaster is definitely better, thanks to the nicer visuals, better controls, more save slots and improved AI (the survivor AI was notoriously bad in the original game, still sometimes being dense and tedious now but still manageable in the end).

It has courted some controversy though for various censorship changes, the Erotica photography category, which was rewarded for pervy stuff like panty shots in the original game, was totally scrapped, and I can’t say I see that as a bad thing, some other changes seem overly sensitive or stupid like war veteran Cliff having his Vietnam themed dialogue replaced, and the changes were also just kind of not very thought through, despite the Erotica removal another Psycho still refers to Frank “shooting porn” and a survivor has a quest asking you to take sexy pics of her, which the game awkwardly labels as “drama” or “no genre” instead.

But none of these are particularly big or gameplay impacting changes so I can’t bring it in myself to give much of a shit. One other big change they did make though is massively boosting how quickly you level up, with the PP requirements being far lower than the original game until you get to the very last, with me reaching max level just before the end of my second playthrough, but I don’t see this as a bad thing, levelling up unlocks more combat moves and health bars so faster levelling just gives you a wider moveset and more survivability without having to do constant playthroughs or restarts.

Put simply, DRDR seems like a real success story of how to bring back an old game, so I hope Dead Rising 2 gets the same treatment!

The Longing

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For my next game of interest I have The Longing. The Longing has you playing as a creature called a Shade, created in the depths of an underground cave system to serve its mystical King, at the start of the game the King tells you his powers have weakened, asking you to wait for 400 days inside the caves while he gathers his strength, then wake him up, where he promises to bring an end to fear and longing.

You begin the game in the Shade’s home, next door is the King’s chamber and next to that is a staircase leading up to the rest of the cave system.

Like in Dead Rising you have a choice, you can sit around and wait out the timer if you like, or you can go and explore, but unlike Dead Rising’s “72 hours”, that 400 days isn’t an exaggeration, it really is 400 days.

Time passes in real time and once you’ve started the game that clock will keep counting down even when you’re not playing. On top of that, basically everything about the game is slow, the Shade walks slowly, the camera moves slowly and takes a bit of time to catch up with him, and there are many paths where you have to wait for something to happen before you can progress, and those waits can take days, weeks or even months.

This basically makes the game the polar opposite of Dead Rising, Dead Rising’s timers are a short leash, a test of skill and sometimes a source of stress, where you have to figure out how to get all of your conflict jobs done before the chance to do them is lost forever, The Longing’s timers are a test of your patience and your memory, Dead Rising is always reminding you of its times with all of those sliding bars and the level clock, but in The Longing you only have one timer you’re constantly reminded of, your 400 days, for the others the Shade will tell you with a dialogue box, but he’ll only tell you once.

But like Dead Rising, the game does also have a number of mechanics to make this system less harsh.

When it comes to traversal:

• You have an auto walk system where clicking a spot, as long as it’s visible on screen and reachable, will have the Shade walk to it

• You have a memory system where you can “remember” areas via a menu, which takes a screenshot of the spot and gives you an option to have the Shade auto walk back there, no matter how far away it was

• Lastly, you can also tell him to walk to a random place, which can automate some of the exploration if you like

These auto walks will also continue even when the game is closed, so you can pick a spot, go do something else, then come back and Shade will be there.

And when it comes to time management, you can make things go a lot faster through the Shade’s home, where decorating it will increase the timer’s speed while you’re in there, reading books makes things go even faster, you can read manually or tell the Shade to auto-read and leave him to it, though you only get this bonus the first time a book is read, so you have to go out and find more of them if you want that help passing the time.

So slowness and patience is at the game’s core, but it’s nowhere near as harsh with this as it might initially seem.

The game gives you some hints at things you can do in a book called Thoughts, the Shade’s journal, some being more cryptic than others, leading you towards exploration, home renovation and even potential alternate endings.

That mystery was lost on me, since I read up on the game a lot after first hearing about it in a video about game design and how games use time, learning about how to get around the cave, the consequences of waking the king and what the alternatives were, so I spent around 19 hours with the game, with 60 days passing in my run, I was exploring the caves, renovating Shade’s home and working towards one of the endings, and I actually got very close, but then I made a big mistake.

I travelled to the Halls of Eternity. The Halls of Eternity are neverending room where the clock stops ticking, I left my Shade there so I could take a break from the game without any consequences, telling myself I would come back soon enough… I didn’t.

I’d thought about coming back a few times but never actually gotten around to it, but back in 2023 Studio Sigh, the game devs, released a plush of the Shade as merch, which I decided to buy, he’s been resting by my bedside ever since.

After I finished Mafia 3, which is featured later in this article, I was lost for what to play next, and one night that plush came into my eyeliner and I just thought, yeah, I’ve left the poor guy waiting long enough.

I guess eternity doesn’t really feel like anything, because when I booted the game back up again he didn’t seem to mind, or notice, that it had been so long. So I set about continuing from where I left off.

Spoiler Section (Playthrough Summary and Ending Info)

I visited the very top of the cave, the source of 3 of its 4 main endings, using a big mushroom I’d grown, my last step towards the ending before leaving the Shade to eternity.

Crawling through a progressively darker and darker passage ominous music began to rise, where I reached a large cliff edge, used for the suicide ending. I stood by the cliff for a while to take in the view, but not its plunge to the bottom, sending the Shade back to fetch a glow in the dark mushroom that would show the corner’s alternate path, a stairway towards the surface.

I was only taking incremental steps, knowing what would come next, genuinely scared as hell even though I knew what would happen. Eventually the mushroom died out, returning me to pitch black, and as I walked forwards I came across it, Angst. A pair of eyes just like the Shade’s, if you get too close, he jumps you, sending you back home. I knew he couldn’t actually harm me, but the atmosphere, that music, it was working its way through me. I got closer, and closer, and closer, until we were almost right next to each other, and it happened, a simple bit of text appeared on screen: 

I CAN SEE YOU…

And then the Shade woke up, back at home, feeling like he’d just had an awful nightmare. This makes up the “Overcoming the Darkness” puzzle of the game, mentioned in Shade’s journal, Angst will always be there to kick you back down, unless you learn how to get rid of him.

After bringing the Shade back to the top of the caves, I left him be for a bit, returning to find he’d opened a dialogue box on what to do, become the darkness, to stop Angst seeing him, or bring light, to scare him away, I knew what to do, but the fact that the mushroom’s light dies out is also a pretty good giveaway on what happens, “become the darkness” unlocks the ability to close your eyes.

I ate the now dimmed out mushroom, which actually knocked the Shade out and sent him into a dream where he sees the surface, with an old blind man reaching into his water well, then starting to walk away, a child with him gets spooked by a spider crawling out of the well, while the old man just laughs. Then, the Shade woke up, with the “close eyes” box missing, so I waited a little for it to come back then clicked it, walking by Angst as he had nothing to see, then continuing past him on the long path to the surface.

A very long one, so much so that I wondered if I was even getting anywhere for a while, but eventually I went far enough to move onto the next screen, emerging into a mine with a view of the surface above, the exit blocked by huge rocks, suddenly the old man came with his bucket to fetch water from the well, so I rushed down from the top of the mine to get there, thinking that I’d have to dig through the wall between the mine and the well to reach it, not having enough time to make it, but there actually was no wall to break, the old man dropped the bucket I got in and he lifted the Shade up to the surface, where he enters the family’s home for his new life, leaving the king and his caves to freeze in time forever.

This was the ending I’d been shooting for the whole time, and I was surprised it only took me just over 2 hours to get there, I’d been planning to spend much more time with the game, with 340 days still left I had plenty of time for all the options, I was going to save the surface as a memory point then go back home, especially since from what I’d read at the late night hours I was playing, no one was supposed to come to the well.

So I was going to go back, read through the books, maybe renovate the home even more, explore every nook and cranny of the caves, basically keeping the game as a kind of recurring comfort to just sit back and relax with, but on the way up the Shade mentioned that he didn’t feel a need to turn back, and the old man showed up to fetch his water, so I respected my Shade’s wish and got my ending then and there.

I thought about playing the game again, because if you’re patient enough to wait 10 minutes on the ending screen, you do get an option to restart, but I don’t really feel like taking away my Shade’s happy ending.

The other endings, just for the sake of clearing that up, are another surface ending that you get if the child comes to fetch the water rather than the old man, where they panic, drop the bucket and the Shade dies, something the dream and a few other hints in the game warn you about, and waking the King, where he finally explains what the End to Longing really means, destroying the entire world and leaving nothing but himself and the Shade. A fifth secret ending can be found through collecting several glowing crystals hidden throughout the game, but that one is a much more abstract one that I honestly don’t think is any good.

So if I was to retrace my steps, I would go for the same ending again every time, where the Shade gets to live above the caves with his newfound family, but in that case, why not just leave him with that already?

And that was where when I finally finished the game, after, depending on your point of view, either 21 hours, 60 days, or just under 4 years (I first started my run in late December 2021), and even though my return to the game was brief I was quickly reminded of its appeal, the beautiful drawn artstyle, the soundtrack and ambience that captures the different sections of the cave really well.

To be honest, I did rob myself of a proper experience with the game through the spoilers, where I don’t know if I would’ve gotten the same ending I eventually did had I been playing blind, it has plenty of hints but many of them are cryptic enough that I might not have made sense of them.

The thing is though, you do have literally over a year to figure things out, through random exploration, hearing out the Shade’s internal monologues, reading his journal, randomly exploring, watching his dreams and getting hints fromcertain books, where if you read to the end the Shade sometimes writes a little hint at the end (something that’s easy enough to come across by just whacking on auto read and letting him get to it) and [The Face, a face you can find in one of the cave tunnels that will actually talk to you and give you lots of hints in exchange for different currencies, including blatantly giving you the answer to the “Overcoming Darkness” choice and strongly hinting the secret of who to choose in the Well and the apocalyptic fate of the world if the King is woken up](https://the-longing.fandom.com/wiki/Blue_face_cave).

And overall that slow pace is very much a benefit rather than a weakness, some people just won’t like having to wait for everything, and that’s fine, but I didn’t actually find it a problem at all. I just accepted that this would be an experience in the slow lane right from the get go, so rather than finding it aggravating as I easily could’ve, often being an impatient person, I found it relaxing instead.

To be fair, impatience for me is often as much about expectations as it is speed, if I don’t really know someone well I won’t care much or at all if they take a long time to reply to me, or don’t at all, if I do though, slow replies, unless they’re explained beforehand, can get tedious.

I can get very picky with myself about following through on promises I’ve made, because I’ve gotten so exhausted with people making them and then not following it through, and embarrassed by my own experiences of doing that myself, those kinds of promises usually take the form of saying something will get done at some time, and that time just passes by with no results.

I wouldn’t like hearing that a job will take 2 months to get done, but that’s much better than being told it’ll take 2 weeks, getting that early boost in enthusiasm, then it actually takes 2 months, and all the time between when it was said to be done and when it was is a big vacuum where my energy gets sucked out.

I basically never yell, if I get really angry with someone I’m more likely to show it with blunt text or silence, but I’ll happily berate my PC or yell COME ON with some combo of swear words any time it chugs, like programs freezing up or taking ages to load, or Discord taking its sweet time sending messages and especially images, where mobile Discord has a miserable failure rate that constantly forces me to turn it off and turn it off again to get it to play ball. My patience for that stuff is very thin, but is that so unfair? You expect these programs, apps, bits of hardware and software, to just do as they’re told, and do it competently, that’s a pretty reasonable expectation.

It’s not all expectations mind you, sometimes it is just inconvenience, when I’m walking round London slow walkers can quickly lead me towards murderous rage, not because they want to walk slowly mind you, everyone has their own pace, but because they almost never leave a path free for people who aren’t slowpokes, forcing me into their sluggish speed when I have places to be.

But The Longing is none of these things, it never puts you under any illusion you’ll be living life in the fast lane, and thanks to the amount of its busy work you can automate, the fact that time always passes, whether you’re in-game or not, and the speeding up you can do with your home renovation, it’s not a chore at all, if anything I wish I could’ve spent a lot more time with it. But I’m happy that I’ve finally given my Shade his ending.

Deathloop

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Deathloop is another game that I recently finished in a split playthrough, with its first half happening years ago and its second just now, for very different reasons though.

Deathloop is a game I really wanted to stick with, I tried really hard even, but it just became impossible. I preordered it back in September 2021, 10 days before release, and started playing as soon as it came out, and it was really fun gameplay wise, but performance wise it was a disaster, crashing on constant intervals every 10-30 minutes, making it extremely frustrating to play.

But because I really did like the gameplay I kept going, until I was forced to stop. At one point roughly 11 hours in, half way through my playthrough, the game just started crashing in the first few seconds, constantly. Every time I would enter an area, a cutscene would start of me coming out of a tunnel door and then just before I got through to start playing, bam, crash. Every time, without fail.

Soon after that I gave up, later writing a short scathing review of the game and eventually including it as the first example in my article “Never Meet Your Heroes”, where I talked about how bad dev behaviour killed off my sense of brand loyalty.

That loyalty had been built up by the Dishonored games, which still hold the title as my favourite games of all time. They tell the story of an alternate Victorian style world, inspired by Steampunk, set in the Empire of the Isles, a collection of 4 islands called Tyvia, Morley, Serkanos and Gristol, influenced by a spiritual realm called the Void, where its God, the Outsider, watches over the world and nudges events along, particularly by bestowing his mark to those he deems worthy, giving them supernatural powers.

Dishonored 1 features Corvo Attano, Royal Protector to the Empire’s throne, going on a revenge quest after a group of conspirators contract an Assassin called Daud to murder the Empress and kidnap her daughter, Emily.

This story was continued by a 2 act DLC taking place concurrently with the main game, featuring Daud, rescue Emily from the supernatural influence of a Witch named Delilah, and her coven.

Dishonored 2 featured the return of Delilah as she overthrows Emily from the throne, with either her or Corvo working in exile to undo the new conspiracy. It was finally followed by Death of The Outsider, a DLC length standalone release where you play as Billie Lurk, one of Daud’s Assassin acolytes, who he tasks with ending the Outsider’s reach on the world.

Dishonored 1 and its DLCs were set in Gristol, mostly centred around its capital, and the capital of the Empire, Dunwall, while 2 and Death of the Outsider featured Serkanos and its capital Karnaca.

Each game is linear in its progression, with a fixed chain of levels to pass through, but otherwise acts as a highly free sandbox in what Arkane called “Play your Way” mechanics. Numerous ways to deal with your targets, numerous ways to reach them through large open maps with different infiltration methods, side quests, and a sizable toolbox to play with.

Conventional weapons including your sword, a Flintlock Pistol, Crossbow (or in the DLC, Wristbow), Grenades, the Barbed Wire tangled Springrazor mine, various ammo types and upgrades, and the powers, oh, the powers. Teleport, slow and eventually freeze time, summon rats, link targets so they share each other’s fate, the list goes on.

Combine that with a highly reactive world and you have an infinitely replayable thrilling series of games, first capturing my attention 11 years ago and spanning numerous runs across PC, PS3 and Xbox One.

Since Death of the Outsider the series has lied dormant, with news of a planned Dishonored 3 being leaked in 2023 but being unheard of since.

But then there’s Deathloop. Deathloop is the closest thing to a Dishonored 3, very much steeped in that DNA and in its universe too, but it certainly has its own tricks up its sleeve, making it right up my alley. 

Deathloop is set on the Isle of Blackreef in Tyvia, some time around the 1960s of this universe, the Empire is long gone and without the Outsider to control the influence of the Void and its power, things have become erratic.

Blackreef is the site of an anomaly that can be used to create a timeloop, when a day ends, everything goes back to how it was at the start. So a corporation called AEON has set up there to establish the timeloop, creating a new society manned by the “Eternalists”.

For some the loop is a place for innovation and research, for others a place of fun, when every day is the same as the last, you don’t age, no damage is permanent, and while everything physically resets in the loop, memories shouldn’t, allowing everyone to spend the same day differently with each loop, exploring AEON’s sandbox to their heart’s content.

Just one slight problem, no one does remember. The loop has been going on for a very long time, but everyone still thinks it’s the first day.

The only person who doesn’t have that problem is your character, Colt, who doesn’t remember anything, and his mysterious radio contact Juliana, who seems to remember everything but isn’t eager to give the game away, killing and hunting Colt but also trying to jog his memory, probing what he knows, how he reacts and encouraging him to do things differently, daring him to try and break the loop but also working to stop him.

Soon enough you learn that the way to break the loop is to kill each of the AEON Program’s 8 “Visionaries” in one day, that’s easier said than done because of how time works in this game, which sets up its central challenge.

You see, time doesn’t progress in-game, either in real time like in The Longing or an accelerated form like Dead Rising, instead it works like this.

There are 4 time periods in each loop: Morning, Noon, Afternoon and Evening, and 4 areas of Blackreef you can explore, connected by the safe areas of Colt’s tunnels. There’s the residential Updaam district, a research section called The Complex, and the coastal areas of Fristad Rock and Karl’s Bay.

Once you exit an area back into the tunnels time passes to the next period, while in the mission select screen you also have the option to pass to the next period there as well. If you let time pass in the evening, the loop restarts, it also restarts if you die. To make sure that consequences matter there’s no manual saving, though you do get an autosave at the start of entering an area which you can jump back to if you quit to the menu and continue.

In each time period the levels change, areas open and close, weather patterns change, and most importantly Visionaries come and go, their schedules don’t line up to allow you to visit, and kill, them all in one run.

So across various loops you have to visit the different areas, do a bunch of digging, and work out how to manipulate things so that their schedules change, eventually lining them up for the perfect loop, also known as the “Golden Loop”, where you kill them all in one go and bring an end to Blackreef’s groundhog day.

It’s a very different twist on the formula, simultaneously much more free and much less. Much more because unlike the fixed structure of the Dishonored games you can freely visit each district in each time period as you like, and pursue the “Leads” for each Visionary (where you figure out who they are, what their secrets are, and how to get them into position for the Golden Loop) in any order, but much less because ultimately there’s only one specific order you can kill them in that will work.

For me it works well, I’ve had a lot of fun with roguelite formulas, seeing the roguelite singleplayer of Crime Boss: Rockay City as its best mode and enjoying Far Cry 6’s DLC roguelite DLC trilogy, it just hits the spot for me as a genre.

Which is pretty ironic because I normally have a bitter hatred of repetition, I often play games on hard difficulties because I like the challenge and the bragging rights of beating it, but get easily ragebaited by having to do the same segments over and over and over again when they get tough.

But roguelite doesn’t tend to have that problem for me, I think because they’re tailor made for that repetition, because it’s built in the developers also have to think a lot more about how to keep that from becoming stale or frustrating, tossing in extensive degrees of variation and most importantly using their progression systems to allow you to succeed, in a way, even when you fail at your main goal.

Deathloop has both of these tricks in spades. The variation doesn’t come from randomisation in its case, in fact almost nothing is randomised in Deathloop, things like codes are usually randomised per playthrough to stop you just cheating your way through the progression while a rare few are randomised per loop as well to force you to do some extra homework, but otherwise the loop very much stays the same until you force it to change, and that’s the central puzzle of it all.

Progress is maintained through Colt’s notes, where any clues or codes found in one loop will be remembered by Colt in the next ones, and resource wise through a special something called Residium.

Residium is a kind of mystical energy you can find oozing from objects across the map, and the Visionaries bodies if you can kill them. While in Colt’s tunnels between levels (and at the end of the day if you manage to get through the Evening in one piece) you can spend that Residium to “infuse” gear and upgrades, which allows them to come over with you to the next run, turning Colt from a squishy layman packing only a dinky little jam-prone SMG and his trusty Machete into a superpowered war machine.

And speaking of Colt’s kit, this is where I should talk about the tools of the trade, this is where the Dishonored 3 type feel really comes in, with the mechanics feeling very much like Dishonored with evolutions and balance tweaks to feel fresh.

The basic gear follows the formula, you’ve got your blade, your guns, your powers and your traps, in terms of traps the variety of gear like the Springrazor mine and varying Grenade types has been folded into one, the Sapper Charge, which can cycle through modes, playing each of their roles as one bit of kit, a bit of consolidation.

The powers, now called Slabs, are almost all tweaked versions of Dishonored powers

• “Shift” being Deathloop’s twist on Blink, Corvo and Daud’s teleportation power
• “Aether” being its version of Shadow Walk, Emily’s near invisibility power
• “Karnesis” a version of Corvo’s Windblast, where you can send people flying
• “Nexus” a version of Emily’s Domino, where you link people together so any affects one suffers are shared, so if you stab one in the neck they all die as if they were shanked themselves
• “Masquerade”, is a version of Billie’s Semblance, an impersonation power, it’s a Slab you can’t use in the main game, instead being used by Juliana, who you play as in Multiplayer games where you invade another person’s game and them down
• “Havoc” is more unique, buffing your damage dealt and nerfing damage taken, but seems somewhat inspired by Corvo’s Blood Thirsty ability, which increases his brutality

The only truly new one is Reprise, Colt’s Slab which he has after beating the prologue, which has no Dishonored equivalent since it acts as a lives system for respawns, which Dishonored had no need for given its use of manual saving and checkpoints, where death just means loading a save, with death being much more punishing, leading to a loop and a loss of any non Infused gear, Arkane added Reprise to Deathloop to make that fall a little softer.

If you “die” with a reprise left its charge is used up and you spawn in a far away area with a few seconds of invisibility/invulnerability, Reprise charges refresh back to the maximum when you enter a new area, acting as a useful lifeline and allowing for strategies that might not otherwise be on the cards.

But yeah, other than that the Slabs are the most obvious sign of the Dishonored DNA, but they have their own tweaks and overall these are powers I’ve enjoyed using over the years, so I don’t mind carrying them over.

Where things have opened up a lot is the guns, given that this is a 60s setting things have evolved a lot from the Dishonored era, where those games just had 2 guns, the Pistol and Cross/Wristbow, Deathloop has 8 regular guns (standard issue for your enemies and found throughout the levels) and 4 unique guns (found only on certain characters or unlocked via sidequests), making for 13 total, adding a lot more combat variety into the mix.

How you use that kit is also much more free form, in Dishonored games your right hand (left mouse button) is always used for your sword, while your left hand (right mouse) is your weapon or power slot that can be cycled through.

In Deathloop you can mix and match, cycling through slots on either hand with quick bind keys, although it makes for a learning curve with more buttons to remember it makes for a much more versatile system.

In exchange though one big element was stripped back, with the game having no non lethal tools whatsoever. Dishonored 1 had a limited set of non lethal options with sleeping bolts and a chokehold takedown that could only be used from behind in stealth, with Dishonored 2 massively expanding that set with stinging darts that force enemies to flee, chokedust, non lethal taser mines and more non lethal takedowns, both games using what was called the Chaos system where more kills would change the world, with characters becoming more cruel, callous and violent and the endings being much bleaker.

Death of The Outsider still accommodated non lethal play but binned Chaos, allowing for consequence free play, but Deathloop goes even further by just not allowing the softer touch at all, since the timeloop means there’s not really any value in people’s lives anyway, they’ll be back tomorrow no matter what you do. Although it might be a disappointing strip back to some it didn’t actually bother me, even though a stealthy “clean hands” run is my core way of playing Dishonored, both for the challenge and more hopeful results you get, I do like Deathloop just encouraging me to let loose and toy with the sandbox at my leisure.

Other key elements have been tweaked to add more challenge into the mix. Like Dishonored you have your health bar, which gets minor amounts of regen but otherwise has to be restored through health items, and a mana power (though Deathloop calls it power), in Dishonored you could restore both of these through elixirs which you could pick up and use at will.

In Deathloop health elixirs are instantly used on pickup, while mana has no elixirs at all, being tied to a cooldown system instead, this goes quite a way to making things tougher, since damage can last for a good while before you find the next health items and overusing powers can lead you to moments of real vulnerability, you can’t just stock up and spam potions when you’re in a pinch.

The same thing applies to weapons and powers too, in the Dishonored games you could hold as many weapons, powers and upgrades you could get in your inventory (though Dishonored 2 had top tier weapon upgrades called “Masterworks” that were mutually exclusive), in Deathloop the magic number is 2. You can bring a max of 2 guns and 2 powers at any one time (not counting Reprise, which is always equipped after being unlocked) and each power can have a max of 2 upgrades equipped, weapon and character upgrades, known as Trinkets, are a little more generous, with 4 character trinkets being allowed as the max and 3 per weapon, and by the time you have all those upgrades in your arsenal you’ll be very powerful indeed, but to a lesser extent than Corvo or Emily.

The Slabs are also earned differently, in Dishonored you had to hunt down Runes throughout the maps which you could use to then buy powers and their upgrades, Deathloop’s Slabs are owned by the Visionaries, who drop them on death, or an upgrade for them if you already have the base level Slab, adding in a risk/reward element.

The new arsenal also obviously adds in an extra element of threat, because the enemies are almost all gun toters and they’re a lot more spry than the Dishonored games, where the City Watch will slowly pull out their Pistols, announce “firing!”, shoot once and then reload, giving you around 5 business days to get out of the firing line or get rid of them, these wily motherfuckers will mag dump you with SMGs and dash zig zags.

They also have much greater awareness than in the Dishonored games, where you can easily hide up on a chandelier or a shelf and never be spotted, Deathloop’s Eternalists tend to have very long ranges where they can start spotting you, as well as noticing when you use certain powers like Blink, sorry, Shift, around them. In some cases this even went too far, with enemies seeing me through walls, pissing me off as I was losing stealth to cheating rather than my fuckups.

On their own the enemies are still easy enough to get rid of or avoid, but in large numbers they can be deadly, especially if you get too impatient or sloppy, once I unlocked and upgraded the Slabs and got the hang of them they were usually no match for me but there was still much more of a sense of risk, which is obviously amplified by the whole roguelite system. If you haven’t reserved your gear with the Residium it’s not coming with you when you croak, that makes the early game especially more of a learning curve as you’ll have to make a bit of progress, lose it again, then learn how to keep it, rather than things being much more of a straight line.

The game also has no traditional difficulty modes either, with you being able to toggle how many “Reprises” you get and a “Loop Stress” system.

You can toggle the number of Reprises from 0-4 or infinite, which can obviously go a long way to changing the balance, even removing much of the threat of combat and turning the loop into a pure puzzle, but I just stuck to 2 and found it kept a balance between leaving room for mistakes and still being punishing enough.

Loop Stress basically is an adaptive difficulty system where killing Visionaries and surviving makes enemy behaviour tougher and increases the chances of Juliana showing up to ice you, dying turns that back down, it can also be toggled to a more typical Low to High series of options.

But in practice I never actually noticed it making any difference, at one point early in my return to the game I was constantly dying in a certain section, and no matter how many times I revisited it the enemies kept their savvyness, and occasional cheating, and Juliana always showed up to hunt me, it didn’t get any lighter as I kept getting mogged, either that means the system doesn’t have much influence or I guess the baseline just isn’t that easy.

It’s a formula that felt like a breath of fresh air since it actually adds a bit of challenge to the mix, weirdly enough I’ve seen some people saying Deathloop is too easy compared to Dishonored games, and to be fair its AI did used to be much dumber, with their awareness being improved in a patch, but when I look at that criticism now it comes off to me as either outdated or just coping.

I can run circles around the Dishonored games, I only ever play them on the hardest difficulty because they’re just not challenging enough otherwise and even then unless I’m being impatient they don’t offer much, combat can be snapped in two by superpowers and just stocking up on bullets and bolts, stealth can easily be cheesed thanks to, again the superpowers but also just sub par enemy awareness, and save scumming can make any scenario easily beatable, you have to really handicap yourself to make things tough again, like avoiding power use or in Dishonored 2’s case using Custom difficulty to ramp things up even more.

I’ve never really been able to tell whether this is a product of experience or the game just genuinely being very easy, but either way the point is, though they’re my all time favoured games for their settings, stories, aesthetics and toolsets, a good challenge isn’t one of their strong suits.

By the end, with an upgraded character, Deathloop gets into that territory too, but the denial of save scumming, needing to Infuse to keep gear on death/loop, the more spry AI, arsenal variety, difficulty and inventory limitations meant that challenge lasted longer, making it actually a step up in this area.

It makes for a very familiar formula but one tweaked enough to stand on its own two feet, with obviously the looping and free exploration system making the most difference.

So it was a pretty gutting experience to lose to broken performance, like with The Longing I’d thought about going back over the years, just to try it again to see if random luck would turn Crashloop back into Deathloop, but never got around to it, but I’ve gotten better about encouraging myself to actually finish games, both for the sake of it and so my money doesn’t go to waste.

For a bit now I’ve had 2 folders for my Steam library “Need to play soon” for the games I bought and didn’t play and “In progress” for the games I’ve started, whether I’m still playing them, I left behind or what, that folder sits there as a reminder of what I need to get done, and so every so often when I’ve got time to kill for gaming I’ll look at the list, install one and play it through.

Lately I’ve gotten very good at catching up through this, which is also how I got back to The Longing, but when I had one of those “what next” moments I just saw Deathloop there and decided to give it a click, noticing its list of updates, the top one which mentioned its 4th and last update “Goldenloop”, actually did mention crash fixes, and that was all the convincing I needed.

Reinstalling it turned out to be a great choice, I loaded back in and Colt started walking through that tunnel, I braced myself for a crash and it just didn’t happen, back to the game I was.

I had thought about starting a totally new playthrough since I’d forgotten much of the story besides the fundamentals and what clues I’d found on how to break the loop, having gotten about half way through the Leads before being forced to give up, but I liked the sense of stubbornness of picking up a playthrough I couldn’t finish 4 years earlier and carrying it on as if I never stopped, plus the convenience of not having to redo 11 hours worth of work.

It also gave me a strange sense of immersion with Colt and the whole premise, early in the game it becomes clear that Colt’s combat experience and parts of his memory are just waiting there to jump back to life, but they start at the back of his mind, with the front being packed with confusion, leaving him a struggling amateur, since I had those 11 hours of experience with the game, knowing the weapons, some of the powers, and decent chunks of the plot, but with years of time for it to slip from my memory, I was in a strangely similar place. 

At first that loss of experience meant I was having my ass handed to me, with the not so variable variable difficulty not helping, but I didn’t mind it in the end because working out how to use my powers and what to do made it very satisfying, early on I kept trying to continue the lead of one of the Visionaries, Fia, either storming in guns placing or fumbling stealth, leading to a big combat encounter I would always get killed off in, but eventually I picked the right gear, using Aether and a silenced Pistol, managing to avoid Eternalist patrols, kill Fia and dig through her bunker to find the clues I needed, and it felt like such a relief and satisfaction. The prey became predator.

Thanks to existing clues and Leads being logged it was also pretty easy to remember where I was progress wise and what more I had to do, setting me off on a roughly 10 hour journey over 2 days that completely fucked up my sleep schedule, as much of it happened in a single evening/morning stretch where the game just hooked me and I didn’t fancy turning it off, although occasionally the clues were a bit too unclear, forcing me to look to guides on a few occasions, generally the time bending exploration was really fun and those 4 maps didn’t get old.

Even though they’re each smaller than your average Dishonored level for sure (though still sizable) the core gameplay being strong and designed for repetition made it work, and the other element that really held the game up was story.

Colt and Juliana are compelling, well written characters, you’re a bit limited in how much you can get out of the rest of the cast given that with very rare exceptions everyone is out to kill you, which doesn’t leave much room for small talk.

Juliana is after you too, but each time you enter an area Colt and her will have a bit of radio banter, usually of the snappy kind but sometimes she throws him a bone and reveals a bit of the backstory or has a more sympathetic talk, most of these are from a randomised pool but sometimes after you find an important clue you have a specific talk related to that instead, there were enough of these that I only heard 1 repeat in my playthrough, with a few more in the post game before she told me she had nothing more to say and stopped calling.

The other Visionaries do have personality to them, which you can get from overhearing dialogues, reading their texts on their computers (which the game calls Minicoms) or finding audio tapes and written documents, though Colt’s relations with the other Visionaries before his rebellion are only mentioned in passing.

The main Leads also offer more on how AEON’s project on Blackreef came to be and Colt’s part in it,

Spoiler Section (Playthrough Info and Discussion of Endings)

revealing that Colt was not only the head of security for the project but its main instigator, having discovered it in a botched military experiment decades ago, getting caught in the loop, eventually escaping and being locked in an asylum after reporting it, revealing it to Visionary Egor Sirling when he was rescued years later, prompting them to return to the island and establish the loop. 

The rocket used in the experiment lies dormant in an underground base waiting to be used again in order to reach Juliana and kill her to break the loop once and for all, speaking of her, he also discovers that Juliana is none other than his daughter.

As you get near the end of the game Juliana gets a lot more desperate in her radio calls, dropping the cheeky mocking of Colt and makes serious in an attempt to stop him breaking the loop, asking him what will happen if it breaks and suggesting it could be a disaster where they all die instead of it going back to normal as Colt assumes, and speculating on what the outside world actually looks like, suggesting it could be apocalyptic, although she tries to put on a more optimistic face too, saying she’s looking forward to meeting him on equal terms.

Once the 7 visionaries are successfully killed you return to the rocket and blast off to meet Juliana, entering the stabiliser core where she introduces you to the pistols and has one last conversation, telling him that he knows how to break the loop but not how to use it and encouraging Colt to ask questions about her, Blackreef and the other Colts he’s seen, while also pointing out that none of the others actually want to leave the loop and won’t forgive him for breaking it. She sprinkles in her own threat by pointing out that every time she’s woken up before him, indirectly implying that she could’ve always stopped him if she wanted and chose to let him get this far, and more directly implying that she’ll kill him if he really does go through with it.

Colt has none of it, fearing losing his memories again and not seeing any value in the inertia of the loop, saying he’d rather die for good than keep living in it and constantly killing each other, but Juliana reveals that she only started fighting back after he repeatedly murdered her, seemingly either in an attempt to jog her memory or to break the loop, still trying to convince him there’s another choice and telling him to take the Pistol.

This leads to a standoff where they point the guns at each other as she promises new discoveries if Colt doesn’t shoot, giving a count of 3, by this point I thought I’d come too far to not break the loop, and figured that if I didn’t it would just lead to me having to repeat the perfect loop again to get back to the choice, so as we hit 3 I shot her, sending her to her death.

Colt raged as he was expecting her to shoot too, seemingly assuming that the choice was either he doesn’t pull the trigger, she shoots him and the loop resets, or they both shoot, both Visionaries die and the loop breaks, he realises that she was never actually going to and planned to use her death to guilt trip Colt into not finishing the job, leading to a final choice, you can jump to your doom and break the loop or sit down and let time pass, starting the dance all over again.

I lept to my fate, leading to an ending cutscene, Colt wakes up on the beach with a changed red sky, seeing that it worked, Juliana points her gun at him with a heartbroken look, but puts it away and shifts out as he calls out to her, leaving to parts unknown, we then see a montage of the Visionaries realising that the dawn has broken followed by Colt punching Charlie out and taking 2-Bit with him with the help of a few Eternalists to leave the island.

So the Visionaries and Eternalists let Colt leave, either because they don’t want revenge or because they have no idea Colt was even responsible, not remembering what happened and Juliana not telling them, but it made for a somewhat wholesome ending as the cycle of hatred and death is over.

But after looking up the endings online after I read that not breaking the loop was an actual choice, sitting in the chair just brings you back to Morning, basically just putting off the choice, but not shooting in the standoff actually does end the game, so I jumped back into the game to see it for myself.

Luckily even though the loop was broken in the story, the game just lets you start back from Morning anyway as a kind of post game to chase up anything else you want to find, and even though the final Lead for breaking the loop was marked as completed I was able to pick the Visionary leads in the first district, after I dealt with them the game stopped marking the quest and that became a repeat pattern, forcing me to pick a gear Lead in another district to get the UI to mark the exit to the map but allowing me to select the Visionaries again in the next district, an annoying workaround but it did allow me to progress still.

Having really enjoyed revisiting the game I tempted myself towards a little bargain, if I died on this run instead of making it to get the other ending I would restart my entire playthrough, working my way all the way back through the loop’s mystery so I could spend more time with the game and experience what it was like to be vulnerable again, without having all the infused powers and big guns to play with as soon as Colt wakes up, but I did die and ended up deciding not to go through with it, since it would’ve been a self imposed 20 hour or so time investment for a few minutes of an ending at most.

When I finally got back to the core I didn’t pull the trigger, leading to a short cutscene where Colt wakes up, the weather the same as it always was with the loop unbroken, turning to find Juliana waiting up on the rocks as they ask what they’ll do together, Colt planning a day out where he’ll throw Aleksis into the meat grinder and Juliana offering evening drinks, playfully nudging him after he mentions his love of booze. A short mid credits segment has him offering her the chance to call him dad, which she takes up before they both decide it doesn’t work, but she has fun making him cringe by doing it again.

These endings, though good, did feel pretty underdeveloped, the broken loop ending being 3 minutes long and the unbroken loop ending being just under 1, they leave plenty to reflect on but also a lot they just don’t play with.

The broken loop confirms that time has indeed been passing in the outside world, with the 60s only being preserved on Blackreef until now, and judging by how things look it really is the apocalypse Juliana predicted, but it also confirms that breaking the loop did bring things back to normal for everyone inside it, giving everyone a second chance, but it still leaves many things open, what Colt and co will do with this new world they’ve found themselves in, or if he’s completely killed off any chance of seeing Juliana again.

The unbroken ending basically spells out what Juliana’s motivations really were, showing that although she was partly motivated by spite, she basically bullied him into trying to break the loop and hunted him so that he would be forced to recover his memories piece by piece, hoping that she could get her dad back since just telling him everything at once would overload his mind and make him forget again. But although it has that cute mid cred moment, the unbroken ending especially felt like a missed opportunity, with the promised “other worlds” and answers to the game’s questions being missing, instead just showing a small piece of Colt and Juliana’s reconciliation.

The fact that it sees Colt agree to use the loop as a sandbox instead of the hints at something more also makes it feel like a pretty disingenuous choice, his characterisation through the whole game is not wanting to be stuck in the loop like that, even though he does find fun in it at times when he gets to best Juliana or kill off Visionaries he doesn’t see Blackreef as a playground or value the creativity that comes with infinite time, so why would he just 180 his mindset at the last minute? You can kind of spin it as him just not being able to bring himself to shoot his daughter as she tries to reach out to him, either because she succeeded in shaking his confidence in what happens when the loop breaks, making him fear she’ll stay dead, or because he can’t bring himself to risk alienating her for good, but it just felt awkwardly justified to me.

Right up until its finale I was really gripped to the story, as it slowly reveals its layers and Colt’s role in this whole mess he’s made for himself, even though I did know about some big twists,that Juliana was his daughter and that they were set for an ending Pistol duel , there was still plenty to learn and it covered the runtime well, but the endings did feel like a letdown.

They’re a big gulf from the endings in the Dishonored series, which to be honest I forgot were actually are just as short as Deathloop’s until I looked them up to check, but I remembered them as being longer because they extensively spell out the impact of your choices on the world and the key characters, with a high degree of variation based on those choices, especially in Dishonored 2 making them feel much more substantial.

It’s not like I mind that they decided to keep some things ambiguous with Deathloop, that’s just fine, but I would’ve liked something more for the 20+ hours my playthrough took, which, so How Long To Beat tells me, is a pretty average time.

The other big shortcoming the game has is replay value, Dishonored had it in spades thanks to its extensive variation and short runtimes but Deathloop offers very little. It still has plenty of variation but since it has a much longer runtime where thanks to the whole loop system you’ll be constantly revisiting those same 4 levels, you’ll have seen almost everything there is to see and done pretty much everything there is to do in just one playthrough.

I can’t really criticise it that much since it’s a natural limitation a roguelite will bring on without randomisation, and Deathloop can’t really have randomisation because it would either break the formula or make it too frustrating. You need it to be fixed that events will always play out in a certain way without your input and always play in a certain other way with your input, without that fundamental you don’t have the sense of progress that comes from finding clues and you don’t have the central goal of working out that perfect loop, but it’s still a big limitation.

Funnily enough though I’ve been feeling like erasing my progress and playing it through again anyway, because I just love the game, it’s formula, it’s world, just so much about it, and I want to actually go back and experience that early game where I’m much more vulnerable again, having to earn my way back up to the power fantasy.

For now it’ll wait as I want to clear more games off of my list, but it’s definitely a game I’ll be thinking about fondly for a good while.

Something Different

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Not for Broadcast

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And now for something completely different, do you remember FMV games? Chances are if you’re around my age you don’t, it’s a niche genre that’s mostly been forgotten, with posterchilds like the Sega CD’s weird Night Trap game, but one unlikely studio actually managed to revive this genre to great effect.

That studio, NotGames, started out making cheap parody games, their first game being NotGTAV, released in 2014 ( later renamed NotTheNameWeWanted due to copyright anxiety, though that didn’t stop them from using the old marketing), a snake knockoff with all the sounds and music done acapella and all of the graphics being hand drawn, and lots of cheeky humour, I bought it after watching a Jim Sterling video on it a year later, played it through then promptly forgot about it.

This was followed by NotCoD, an aesthetically similar game released in 2016 that shifted to a side scrolling shooter style, which I didn’t bother to play at the time.

They were basically a low budget little jokey studio that didn’t seem like they were exactly aiming for great heights. So I was very surprised when in 2020 they released their third game, Not for Broadcast, into early access, and it was an actual proper game!

Not for Broadcast has you planting your bum in an editing booth and editing the news as it goes out live, controlling what the audience sees and sometimes what they hear, the mundane job turned political thriller format was one I was especially interested in since I’d already gone through the absolute classic that is Papers, Please, but that similarity is where the comparisons end. Papers, Please has you meticulously checking documents to decide who comes into your country and who doesn’t, NfB tasks you with stringing together a good TV edit.

The main tools of NFB’s trade are

• Your 4 camera buttons, where you have up to 4 camera feeds running and click their buttons to decide which feed goes out, you as the editor can see all 4 while the audience only gets the one you selected, but both you and the audience can only hear the audio from the screen that’s on camera
• Cameras are coloured green (best angles - can stay on for around 10 seconds without being punished) yellow (middling angles - can be shown for up to 3 seconds without switching) and red (not appropriate - can’t be shown at all)
• Your censor button for bleeping out inappropriate language
• The interference switch which you use to follow a waveform, keeping the broadcast from being disrupted
• And the ad buttons, where you load 3 tapes out of a selection into your tape player below your desk, then press one of the buttons to cut to one at the end of a segment

Each of these either being controlled by mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts.

The idea is you keep a good variety of camera angles in to make the edit interesting, bleep when appropriate, and keep the broadcast running along smoothly, with your performance at these jobs impacting how well the channel is viewed.

The higher the viewership, the better paid your protagonist, editor Alex Winston, will be, the ratings system also acts as a health bar, where eventually if you perform so crap that everyone tunes out, you’ll be taken off air.

Each of the game’s broadcasts is split into 3 segments with the ad breaks in between acting as a short breather, with text based story segments inbetween broadcasts that contain a subplot involving Alex’s family life, with his wife Sam², their 2 kids Suzie and Charlie and sometimes other relatives like grandma Cassandra and cousin Chris, as well as his work/life balance with his boss, Boseman.

Politicisation soon creeps in for Alex’s job and family life as his home country, an unnamed fictionalised Britain, sees a radical leftist political party called Advance elected to power with a massive 81% of the vote, with its co-leaders, lawyer Julia Salsbury and ex-TV personality Peter Clement, announcing the Assets and Wealth Act, a sweeping tax reform that totally cuts off loopholes and allowances for offshore wealth, with the government revoking the passports of the country’s millionaires, allowing them to leave the country only on the condition that they pay their taxes owed first.

The money is pledged to uplifting the rest of the population, raising living standards and investing in public services, but the authoritarian methods used to take it lead to the rise of a protest movement called Disrupt and tensions internationally with the world’s equivalent of the UN, the World Council.

Alex, a former cleaner, takes over as news editor when they find the editor’s room deserted on election results day. Your edits of the broadcasts, from the country’s prime time news segment, National Nightly News, from its top channel Channel One, define how the population views this political conflict, and the family life text segments decide the fate of your family and where they personally align themselves.

The early access launch had the first Episode including 3 broadcasts, plus a bonus broadcast called The Telethon as an optional tutorial, with production on the second Episode being derailed by the COVID pandemic, prompting NotGames to put together a different Episode called The Lockdown instead, with the actors filming from home to create a lockdown themed dream sequence episode taking place after Episode 1.

Shooting restored later in the year leading to the release of another bonus broadcast, but properly filmed in the studio again, called The Telethon, presented as archive footage from the world’s 1950s era, originally included as an optional tutorial segment mid way through Episode 1 and later moved to a separate menu option.

Episode 2 was finally released in January 2021, adding the next 3 broadcasts continuing the main story, finally followed by the final Episode and the full release a year later.

The game stood out as an example of Early Access done right, although it took a bit of time to get from first launch to finished version thanks to being developed in the UK’s COVID crisis, with 2 national lockdowns being a big problem for shooting an FMV game, NotGames managed to more than triple its content on offer and that content was high quality, with excellent acting and extensive variation.

Although the overall structure of the episodes is the same every playthrough, many segments have different versions based on your choices, with the finale branching out into 4 different variations which, based on certain choices you make and what the reputation of Advance and Disrupt are, branch out further into 14 total endings, earning NotGames a Guinness World Record for most footage in an FMV game at a massive 43 hours, with further variation in subplots based on your ad choices and decisions made in the text segments, making the game a very genuine “choices matter” experience.

Its main strength was ultimately its writing, although it sometimes struggled to find the right balance between silly almost Monty Python type humour and its serious intense moments it managed to deliver a lot of nuance with its political commentary, inspired by real world events but telling an original story, with several major twists and hidden details included across the game and in the branching paths.

This means that you can only get the full picture with multiple playthroughs as well as with the Rushes system, which allows you to watch and listen to all camera angles from a broadcast at your leisure, where you can find character moments from those red rated shots you’d never be able to see normally. 

My opinions on the characters and the factions shifted throughout my original run and even further as I saw many of the endings, though luckily that first run I managed to get an ending I was very happy with.

Spoiler Section (Spoilers for all Episodes and Ending Content)

I started out decently sympathetic to Advance, as an elected party with extensive support, genuinely committed to holding a rich elite to account and successfully investing in public services, a credible socialist project, and looked down on the protests against them since they were generally just the former super rich complaining about being demoted to a middle class lifestyle, whining that they wanted their money back.

I became wary of them as the story progressed as they became more authoritarian, grabbing hold of the media and demanding censorship of dissident speech after the World Council pushed back on their redistribution efforts and sanctioned the country and an internal protest group, Disrupt, rose to prominence, but I basically kept complying because I was wary of the consequences of defiance, Disrupt earned credibility with civil rights arguments but I still fundamentally saw them as a group focused on the restoration of the elite, so I didn’t have much sympathy for them, though I still tried to keep a decent balance in the headlines.

The end of Episode 2 caused a dramatic shift, as the sanctions crisis broke out into war, ending with arguably the game’s most shocking moment, when Advance nuked the cities of the World Council nations, then Salisbury emerged to demand their unconditional surrender, planning to annex them under Advance rule, as well as a horrifying mass casualty event, Alex’s own daughter was killed in the bombings since I’d agreed to pay for her holidays abroad near the start of the game.

At the start of Episode 3, Disrupt under the leadership of former conspiracy pundit turned political activist turned insurgent commander launched an armed uprising, and I briefly decided to support them before witnessing their first act, bombing a memorial service for the now dead Peter Clement, which caught numerous civilians in the crossfire, I refused to follow Alan’s instructions to present the uprising as positively as possible and transmit coded messages, leading to his death at the end of the day and the crushing of Disrupt.

The final 2 episodes were almost devoid of choices to make as you see a world where Advance have truly realised their victory, progressively watering down the media until all real news is stripped away, with only celebrity gossip and game shows left over and all advertising replaced with Advance broadcasts, but one final chance to overturn it all emerged when dissident news anchor Jeremy Donaldson returned, interrogating Salisbury live on air and offering up a hidden tape exposing her for Alex to play, when I chose to play it it revealed that Peter was planning to expose Salisbury after the atomic bombings, leading her to order his murder, although she arrested everyone in the studio the Epilogue revealed that she had been arrested and put on trial, with Advance significantly reforming, restoring independence to the former World Council nations and ending dictatorial rule, agreeing to elections under new leader Katie Brightman, ensuring that the rich elite wouldn’t be restored to power, but the country wouldn’t become a totally unaccountable jackbooted society, making for a really satisfying story arc.

The other big draw I had with the game was community, where I joined the Not for Broadcast Discord after Episode 2’s release, tuned into the regular NotGames livestreams and got into contributing to the game’s wiki, making me a fairly prominent community figure getting into regular debates about the story, piecing it together, and getting to chat semi-regularly with the devs and sometimes the cast too, with the release of Episode 3 seeing me and several others piece together all the ending paths and the mechanics behind them in just 3 days, with a mix of guesswork, speculation, playtesting and datamining, a major accomplishment for the community.

This also encouraged me to play several different new runs of the game going hardcore Pro-Advance or Pro-Disrupt and taking different branches, getting most of the endings, but I didn’t get all the way because it was pretty difficult to explore all paths thanks to the save system, where you can have plenty of save files but going back to an earlier save would wipe the progress after it, making it hard to accommodate different branches in quick succession without diving into the game files to make copies of different paths.

This meant getting all the different branches required a bunch of lengthy retreads through parts of the game between the key decision points, so I couldn’t put up with the time investment for full on completionism. Even so I stayed in the community for some more time after that, with NotGames later announcing DLC for the game, leading me to buy the game’s Season Pass.

But the DLCs (released Jan 2023, Nov 2023 and Aug 2024) hadn’t really seemed like what I’d been hoping for, where I’d been hoping for more worldbuilding, especially a potential prologue storyline that would show what the world was actually like before Advance (which was something the devs had planned for a potential standalone Demo but scrapped).

Instead the DLCs seemed to focus on a less grounded more jokey tone with less of that central political thriller element, with the first 2 (Live and Spooky and Bits of Your Life) being based on entertainment programs and the final one The Timeloop, well, being pretty shark jumping with its premise alone. So although I was still a huge fan of the base game I didn’t end up playing the DLC, leaving the game behind on my birthday in 2022.

Live and Spooky

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Inspired, actually, by starting this segment, I returned as a Wiki contributor and decided to give the DLCs a chance, and to be fair to my younger self, my fears were exactly right.

The first DLC, Live and Spooky, is set mid way through Episode 1, labelled as Day 85, with Alex being put through an “optional” (compulsory) night shift by Boseman, editing for the Live and Spooky TV show, with the showrunner Dianne explaining that ad choices have been removed (with ads being replaced with automatically selected archive film reel footage) and the interference controller on the right side of the desk switched out for a device called the “SpiritJammer” which supposedly does nothing, but Dianne asks that you don’t fiddle with it.

An extra series of buttons on the left allows you to pick effects which Dianne explains will “help things along” with the ghostly scare factor, since the team have never actually found any ghosts, with the buttons allowing you to choose where the characters go next when unlocked, choices include the Costume Room, Prop Store, Workshop and Stage.

Tuning into the show you get to meet presenter Wayne De Spiritwhistle, who meets with Channel One regular Patrick Bannon, the only character from the main game in the DLC besides Boseman’s brief opening call. He explains that they’re there to explore the Bannon Sound Stage, a set made for Patrick’s dad Graham, where a terrible accident happened years ago, introducing him to his pseudoscientific expert in the paranormal Dr Ahmed.

Baffled by how the DLC’s puzzle actually worked I quickly went and just looked it up, not wanting to be lost in repeat playthroughs, and there’s pretty much nothing to tell you any of it in-game, with all the mechanics being extremely unintuitive.

Spoiler Section (All Acts and solution to the DLC's good ending puzzle)

In Act 1, Ahmed toys with an “EMF” device and a ghost cam that can supposedly detect the paranormal before Wayne looks for supposed ghostly signs, with the location buttons then unlocking and Dianne telling you to send them to the costume room first as that’s what’s in the script (though you can actually take any pick you like).

Only 3 choices are actually visited in any one run, so in my first run, picking randomly after the Costume Room, I ended up going to the Prop Store and the Workshop.

The Costume Room revealed a potential suspect, Marie Murphy, a costume designer whose poor work on a harness got a stuntman, Brent Backflip, badly injured in an accident. The Workshop revealed another, Backflip himself, speculating it was due to his own incompetence, and the Prop Store revealed a third, ex military man and propmaster Cedric Slone, who had a vendetta against Bannon and could’ve sabotaged the props to cause an accident, who gets ruled out as Wayne becomes possessed by Cedric, who denies doing anything to cause the accident and blames Bannon himself, but with the 3 rooms up, the mystery is left unsolved, leading into Act 2.

Act 2 has Wayne, Amara, Patrick and Patrick’s assistant Holly explore the soundstage, introducing the ghost device, you have the 4 of them rushing about the stage on your feed and need to save them from the ghost, who warns that you have to sacrifice one else they’ll “take the last”. After a bit the ghost will force the camera to one of the 4, fiddling with the dials, sliders and switches on the ghost machine as a timer starts up, if they’re not back in the default place before time is up, the ghost captures them and they are sacrificed.

After a few seconds watching the 4 faff about around the stage, the ghost forced the camera to Patrick, who I managed to save with some quickly twiddling with the machine, returning to the 4 on their run before I was forced over to Holly, who I didn’t manage to rescue. The camera then cut away to a new room, the stage, where Holly walked in and after some nervous wandering, vanished away with a flickering of the lights, seemingly dead.

Returning to the 3 on the stage, the camera forces me to Amara, who I also fail to save, with the camera cutting to another room, the writer’s room, where she gets excited to meet a ghost, then quickly changes her mind and tries to escape, disappearing too.

Returning to the 2 left, Patrick and Wayne, I’m forced over to Wayne, who I do manage to save, returning to the corridors with the 2, I’m forced over a final time to Patrick, who the machine automatically fails on, with him wandering into a dressing room, seeing a vision of his dad bullying a woman called Marie, who turns into a zombified monster and leaps at Patrick.

Wayne then wanders into the last room, the projector room, where he rummages through the room before seeing Bannon’s name scrawled on the wall, his feed cutting out to the next break, leading into segment 3.

But that segment ends abruptly, with Wayne begging for his life before his feed cuts again, seemingly to his death, then cutting to a new room with a surprisingly alive Holly in the vault, seeing a vision where Marie berates Graham for ruining the show by meddling with the script, before he berates her for the accidents, as her zombified ghost then appears to Holly, who asks how she could cause all this just because she wanted her credit, with Holly leaping at her and disappearing them.

After the 3rd film break Marie appeared through the screen screaming, with the end screen promptly telling me that Alex died.

In Act 1 only the room you end on (visit third) matters, with the Prop Store ruling out Cedric, the the Stage ruling out Brent, the Workshop leading to Wayne just getting confused (being unsure which theory could be right) and the Costume Room ruling out Marie, revealing a letter from Bannon showing that Graham made the cutbacks and ignored Marie’s calls for safety checks, this is the correct choice.

In Act 2 there are the 5 rooms, the Stage, Writer’s Room, Dressing Room, Projection Room and Vault, and who goes where is decided by the 3 sacrifices.

The 1st sacrifice decides who goes to the stage (and the vault), the 2nd sacrifice decides who goes to the writer’s room, while the 3rd sacrifice decides who goes to the dressing room and projection rooms, whoever was sacrificed goes to the dressing room, whoever wasn’t goes to the projection room instead.

The correct answers are Holly needs to go to the Stage/Vault, while Patrick has to go to the Projection Room, the 2nd sacrifice doesn’t matter (as long as Patrick isn’t chosen). If you get all of that right the mystery will be solved at the end segment in the Vault and everyone lives, if you get any of it wrong, Alex dies.

To get Act 1 right you have to pick the one place the game tells you is the starting area last, and any other combination of room visits is pointless, then in Act 2, the frantic jumping around means that you might not even understand that you’re choosing where to send the characters through the sacrifices, and you definitely have no way of knowing who you’re supposed to sacrifice and who you need to save.

On top of that, the whole thing is filled with red herrings, since it doesn’t matter which rooms you visit first and second, or who gets sent to the writing and dressing rooms.

The way the puzzle is set up is pure trial and error and that’s especially annoying when each run of the DLC will take around 50 minutes, with the lack of anything in the way of hints and the sheer number of wrong choices you can make that means it could take you many many hours before you actually reach the ending, so I just didn’t bother, I looked up the answers and then skipped over playing it again, moving straight on to the next DLC and planning to come back later.

I was hoping to get away from the repetition, the slight problem with that was the next DLC was also very repetitive.

Bits of Your Life

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DLC 2, Bits of Your Life, has you playing as Dave, Channel One’s old editor who leaves the country at the start of the first level in the main game, allowing Alex to take over his job. BOYL is set 12 weeks before the main game (billed as Day -49), acting as the closest thing to a prequel for the Not for Broadcast story.

The DLC has Boseman pressuring Dave into editing an episode of chat show Bits of Your Life, a parody of This is Your Life, a UK TV show where the host tricks the guest into thinking they’re going to some other event then brings them on to meet people from their past, reflecting on who they were.

This particular episode involves none other than Peter Clement, known for his former TV shows and gaining recognition as a political candidate for the upcoming election, acting as a chance to learn more about Peter as a character and see a bit of the world before Advance’s takeover.

Once again the game has a simplified ad system, though slightly less so than Live and Spooky, you don’t pick the ads yourself but have a choice of 3 in each segment except the last (which just has 1), with the “ads” being archive footage of Peter’s old shows Just the Job from the 1960s and 70s and Petey from the 80s, with the clips being named on a paper on Dave’s desk.

Otherwise gameplay is vanilla enough, with the regular rules of just keeping variations on shots to make a good edit and occasionally having to bleep out swear words, the interference system is again replaced by a new device on the front desk called the “Calls Machine” which calls in the 6 guests of the show: Peter’s parents Martin and Fanny, his ex Chelsea Bunns, his former sidekick on Just the Job Little Jimmy Chizzle, his old war buddy Ivan Vodovich, TV executive Dorothy Hammerman and lastly his political ally, Julia Salisbury.

The machine can’t be interacted with, being set to automatic mode and calling the guests in linear order on its own.

In the first run the show plays out as normal, with the only variation being the ads played, the first set are wholesome stories from the shows which leave Peter in a good mood, with second set show a drinking game that has him get out his flask and take a swig, the last being nasty moments that make Peter look bad, pissing him off, but these reactions are only shown as he watches the ad breaks themselves, with him otherwise acting normally in the rest of the show.

The run sees BOYL host Eamon Tightly do a piece to camera, explaining that Peter thinks he’s there to do a reunion episode of Just the Job, but we know better, ambushing Peter after he does a dance number with the Just the Job theme tune and bringing him back to the BOYL studio.

He brings Peter’s mum and dad, with Fanny telling the story of how he used to have the family all do made up plays as a kid, setting the stage for his later stardom, followed by Chelsea talking about how Peter brought her to the stage under their old school, where he’d made an opulent hiding place, presenting him as a classy sweet lover, leading into the first ad break.

Jimmy then comes in, saying Peter’s an up front person, not pretending to be someone he’s not, but was a real prankster, with Eamon showing some archive footage of Pete sabotaging a hammer Jim uses, nailing his foot, leading to a rather frosty departure between the two of them, Ivan comes on to credit Peter as the man who saved his life and between a bunch of pisstaking praises him as good in a crisis, with the two of them making the memorable promise of “never again” when reflecting back on the war (which goes about as well as it did in real life), heading into break 2.

Dorothy then comes on to tell Peter he’s got his new job in the bag, with the two reminiscing over an old drinking toast they did before each show, before Julia comes in to talk about their campaign, praising him for being an unconventional, authentic figure unlike perfectly manicured but sinister politicians of the establishment, praising his honesty, with Eamon cutting to footage from an election debate between Peter and rival party leaders Jacob Hamilton-Mann, a posho right winger and Henry McNair, a posho centrist, both former Prime Ministers of the country (with Mann being Prime Minister whose resignation kicked of the election).

The two talk about how they each have business approval, failing to explain what’s actually different about themselves, before Peter jumps in to advocate for the common man, pointing to his poor upbringing, promising to give the people a real voice to replace these elitist sellouts, then we cut back to Eamon ending the show with a Just the Job dance number and then the final ad, an election campaign broadcast from Advance.

3 segments, 6 guests, roughly 30 minutes, seems simple enough right? But this is where the shark jumping really begins.

You see, Dave is NFB’s first voiced protagonist, kind of, he doesn’t just talk to himself or other characters in the game, he’s a 4th wall breaker completely aware that he’s in a game and talks to you, the player, directly. At first he just gives some fairly stock commentary on what he’s watching but after the first playthrough Dave complains that the ending was too boring and the broadcast resets, Dave then unscrews a port on the Calls Machine, setting it to manual and allowing you to call the guests in any order you want, then drops a notepad on the desk to take notes on what reactions you get from the different orders, setting up the DLC’s big puzzle.

Your job is to find the 6 unique story paths and 10 endings of the DLC by picking the right combinations of guests, 1 path/ending is already unlocked, the regular 1-6 order, which Dave brands the “boring shit” path.

Picking a different guest to start with sets you on one of the other 5 story paths, opening with a different version of Peter’s musical number like some parallel universe, if you guess the path’s guest order correctly from there you’ll get to discover a new story revealing parts of Peter’s character and the wider world, but if you guess wrong the plot will go “off track” and end early after the 5th guest with Eamon having a mental breakdown, and once you’re off track you can’t get back on.

The off track path has the final 4 endings which vary based on Peter’s mood, he can either be sober, drunk, angry or drunk and angry, with his mood being influenced by the ads you play and certain guest order choices which can lead to scenes where he drinks or gets pissed off.

It’s a system that handles the repetition a lot better with optional hints and certain paths revealing correct numbers, letting you get a few paths without guesswork, benefitting again from hilarious acting, like Peter trying to ask Eamon how long the episode was planned for then getting totally blanked, Eamon getting ragebaited by the show going to shit or embarrassing himself (and usually his guests) if things go in the wrong order, where he tries to ask the pre planned questions anyway even as they obviously don’t fit, sometimes going as far as announcing the guest as if it was the right one when someone different is right in front of him, usually completely fumbling their names and not even knowing who they are either, being completely lost when his queue cards don’t give him a helping hand.

It also starts to tip its toes back into the politicised serious moments that were key to the main game, even though the non “boring” paths are usually a chaotic shambles played for laughs they start to show a lot of how Clement became a key political leader and give you extra backstory about his character.

There’s the drunk Peter successfully getting the show back on the road and bringing it to an end on the planned musical number, angry Peter realising that he needed to show concern, blasting the entertainment industry for putting a mentally unwell Eamon back on the treadmill, getting into a wider point about the public struggling to make ends meet, promising Advance will bring dignity.

Spoiler Section (Key story details of several of the DLC's paths)

The Brother path introduces Peter’s lost brother Sidney, first mentioned by Jim, who keeps in touch with Sid, then constantly by the other guests, a brother Peter has kept out of touch with and really doesn’t want to hear about. The mentions convince Eamon and floor manager Eric to get him on the show in the hopes of winning an award for the family drama, introducing archive footage of Just the Job where the two of them meet on the set, with Sid introducing Peter to his girlfriend, who he expects will be “Mrs C”, with Peter making sure they get the best seats in the theatre show they’re going to visit.

Since Mrs C is what Pete calls his wife in the main game, the implication of what happens next is pretty obvious, Hammerman spells it out when she tells the story of how the wedding was the last time the two brothers spoke. Julia is the only one who doesn’t talk about Sid, not knowing about him, instead talking about Peter’s ability to connect with people and bring out the best in them.

Chelsea encourages Peter to get back in touch with Sid and Eamon then puts on another debate clip, with McNair and Hamilton-Mann both preaching about family values, with McNair struggling to explain how they actually differ and Mann encouraging policies to keep families together, Peter attacks both of them for their elitism and talks about his own experience, with his fighting family leading to his dad hitting them, something he actually defends in a way by saying they deserved it, he argues that some families actually shouldn’t stay together, with the McNair and Mann policies forcing them to else they’d starve (presumably losing out on vital benefits).

Eamon then brings out the 7th “hidden piece” of the bits of Peter’s life, ragebaiting Peter by introducing Sidney, but they end up having a cold but mild mannered introduction to each other, revealing that they fell out of touch after Sidney made a prediction that their marriage wouldn’t last, they warm up though as they recognise their own mistakes, Sid for not respecting that it was Mrs C’s choice to get together with Peter instead, and Peter for not understanding Sidney’s resentment, leading to them coming to terms and shaking hands.  

The Political path delves into more of the struggles of the setting and Peter’s ambitions for leadership, with Eamon trying to avoid politics but the show ending up there anyway as the guests talk about their struggles and him working to solve them, with Fanny Clement saying he always tried to stand up for what was right, even his against his own dad’s bullying.

Hammerman reminisces on an old episode of Just the Job where Peter helped a bereaved widow complete her husband’s last project, revealing he died from lung disease from mine work, with the mining company cutting off her pension. Peter steps in, using his TV wealth to fund it himself, when praised for his generosity Peter pushes back, saying it was only a small fraction of his money, with little changing for the people at the bottom, prompting Hammerman to admit she could pay more, taking Advance’s looming tax plans with stride.

Julia explains that the two of them both grew up poor, with her only going to an elite uni thanks to grants Hamilton-Mann tossed out, where she saw the elitism of trust fund children. Chelsea reveals she didn’t watch Peter’s show due to her own poverty, forced to choose between TV or having the heating on, hurt by the rising cost of living, revealing her real name as Chelsea Wednesday, warmed by an offer from Peter to help but turning it down.

Jim finally comes in to call Peter out for his bullying, revealing he only stayed on the job for the money, needing to help out his brother, complaining about being badly paid, but when Peter offers to help he gets angry again, blasting him for thinking he can patch over his anguish with bills, asking if he’ll do the same for the whole country, and storming off. Eamon then cuts to a debate clip where Peter hits out to Mann for pushing the idea of the rich being “self made”, telling him that his mass economic growth and foreign investment isn’t actually reaching people, promising to drain the whole lot with his taxes, McNair chimes in to say that tax has to be raised gradually to stop the rich fleeing the country, with Peter ending on “let them try”, foreshadowing the passport confiscation at the start of the main game and how many will end up supporting Advance’s mass tax to even out a very uneven world, but some will push back even if they’re not the kind rich enough to be hit by it themselves.

It started off strong with its free flowing style, funny segments and unique storylines, being enticing even in spite of the shark jumping, but after a few hours the gameplay started to fall apart since except for the paths you can find the numbers for (where I got 2 with some luck, with a third path giving you its numbers if you get part of the way on it through guessing) finding the paths is pure guesswork.

Since it’s 6 guests in 6 slots that makes for 720 possible combinations, so my more mathematically inclined buddy G0utBack tells me, and the overwhelming majority of them are wrong, leading you off track.

Once you’ve seen most of the off track endings going off track starts to get old fast, the sober, angry and drunk endings are easy to get, but the 4th drunk and angry variant is much harder unless you know already what to do, so you’ll be seeing those 3 endings a lot when you make mistakes.

Even though there’s a huge number of off track scenes based on what order you invite the guests in, most of them are pretty much the same, with Eamon introducing them, asking them the question meant for the other guest, them saying they have no idea and Eamon quickly shooing them off with an air of awkwardness, which is a good laugh the first few times you’ve seen it but once it’s the 20th time you’ve seen the trick it stops being a funny gag and starts being something tiring and draining.

Bungling a path means you have to spend a very long time waiting to get back on track, since each run takes around 30 minutes to finish, that’s something you can narrow down by loading a save to restart the run early, but it still means that the tedium and repetition really starts to creep in quickly, and those endearing funny moments become a lot less so. The game is generous enough to let you skip the ads/archive clips after you’ve watched them for the first time, but the rest, not so much.

After 3 hours I didn’t manage to guess any of the paths successfully, so I managed to get as far as 6 endings, the 3 main off track ones and the 3 ones the game will spell out to you, the boring path, the brother path and the political path, after finding those I was running around in circles going off track, getting up to 9 runs and 3 hours of playtime before I gave up and just looked up the rest of the combinations.

In fairness, there was a method to the madness I missed thanks to a bug, at the start of the game you get to select how many hints you get ranging from all to some to none, and I picked some, normally with some hints on Dave is supposed to reveal thatno number will appear in the same row or column twice for the paths (so say a path goes 246513, no other path is going to have 6 as the third answer) , once you know that it allows you to rule out a lot of possible options and the more paths you get right the more you can rule out, but that hint is supposed to appear on the 5th run of the DLC, I only got hints up to the 4th run, a hint that Dave repeated several runs later, where he then stopped offering them at all, leaving me in the dark.

That would’ve potentially tempted me to keep trying if I knew it, but to be honest the price of failure just being repeat tedium already made me not want to keep guessing randomly, I wanted to try for the sake of having that kind of authentic feeling of discovery and solving the puzzles, but I didn’t want to drown the game’s original content in a sea of rewatches.

Spoiler Section (Key story details of the other paths of the DLC)

The Intervention path (labelled as just ????? until the end) has Peter having a much happier reunion with Jimmy, shaking hands, sharing a hug and apologising for his abusive pranks over the years and not keeping in touch, with Jimmy accepting his apology and agreeing to have a pint after the show, admitting that despite the bad treatment he saw Just the Job as one of the best times of his life, Eamon then passes out after taking a swig of Vodka from a drunk Ivan, with Jim coming back to host, introducing Peter’s mum, who stages an intervention.

Having Chelsea tell her story about how she’d found a drunk Peter cheating on her in their hiding spot under the stage, and Julia talk about a debate session where Peter called someone in the audience a cunt, alienating a young enthusiastic activist, who would never vote for them, saying that Peter was making the right points but choosing the wrong words to make them, admitting her fear that he’ll kill himself with the drink, cost them the election and deny them the chance to help millions, with Peter’s mum wondering who will suffer if he becomes Prime Minister and takes his eye off the ball, a foreshadowing of how he failed to spot Julia’s work on the nuclear solution in Episode 2.

The Carnage path goes off the rails with Jim spiking Peter, offering a “coffee” that turns out to be wine mixed with acid, with Eamon later showing archive footage from Just the Job where Peter spiked Jim and had him try his hand at wood carving, bludgeoning his hand with a hammer in the process, Peter then mistakes Chelsea for the woman he cheated on her with, Jan, leading her to slap him and storm off, with him running after her to apologise, later reemerging with Ivan at the last segment of the show, where Eamon puts on the debate footage.

The footage shows him being attacked by Hamilton-Mann for being a drunkard, where he hits back with Mann’s own scandalous behaviour, where he was found wanking over the graves of dead feminists, the sex scandal that led him to resign and call the election, but Mann clownishly tries to dodge the subject by insisting he’s getting treatment and is still a “safe pair of hands” to run the country, with Peter calling him delusional and then attacking McNair for being just as bad, if not worse, since McNair hides his scandals while at least Mann’s are out in the open.

The Fight path sees Peter getting repeatedly ragebaited and tempted to drink, with Ivan later revealing how their friendship started, as Irkistan and the home country became allies in NFB’s version of WW2, fighting in another country, Konislava, with Ivan getting separated from his squad and hit by a gas attack, Peter comes over and shares his gas mask with him, taking turns as they find a house to hide in, later emerging days later to find it a deserted ghost town and returning to their command post, not even knowing who won the battle. Eamon then puts on the archive footage, where Peter demands someone at the Just the Job studio be sacked for misplacing his tools, only for his stage manager Frank to berate him and reveal he misplaced them himself after getting drunk and forgot about it, with him sheepishly apologising.

When his parents come on he ends up berating his dad for beating him with his belt, yelling that he had to hide from him under the school stage, then he gets punched by Jim after slapping him when Jim confronts him about his abuse, an excited Dorothy Hammerman announces that Bits of Your Life will be moving to Channel Three, excited by the trainwreck of a show driving up ratings, and Eamon shows a debate clip where Peter berates McNair and Hamilton-Mann for constantly preaching about values then changing nothing, pointing out that they rarely ever actually disagree, being a useless establishment with fake choices.

Mann rants that Peter’s passion and monetary policies will embarrass the country on the world stage and bankrupt the economy, speculating that he might start a war foreshadowing the sanctions and global conflict that emerge in Episode 2, McNair shows a slight disagreement with Mann, calling for investment in welfare and education, but insists on slow gradual change alongside him, Peter warns them that the country is with him, promising to unite it, while Mann predicts he’ll start a civil war instead, another foreshadowing to the Uprising of Episode 3.

As the musical number comes on at the end, Peter stares Jim down while Ivan holds Eamon at knifepoint to stop him interfering, but as he goes to hit Jim, encouraged by his dad, Chelsea gets in the way, Martin starts berating her and Peter turns round and thumps him in the chest, yelling at him for starting a cycle of bullying, abusing him, leading to him abusing Jimmy. Jim then calls the show a joke and storms off, with Peter rejecting an offer from Ivan to go and kill him, with the show ending on an awkward version of the dance number.

After I got all of these I went off track one last time to get the drunk and angry ending, which since it’s off track doesn’t have much to add for the most part, just showing repeated Eamon fumbles, but it’s one of the craziest endings for sure, ending with Peter berating Eamon for freezing up, where he makes the stupid mistake of challenging Peter to a fight, leading to Peter chasing him around the set, punching Eric and knocking him out with a vase, then dragging Eamon by his feet with a scream. Does it have much to say? Not really, but it’s pretty funny, it’s just a shame it’s so difficult to cause compared to the other 3.

And actually after looking back on these to write about the DLC I just realised how really well done they are, showing all these sides shown to one of NFB’s best and most important characters, with lots of foreshadowing (or since pretty much anyone who plays the DLC will have already beaten the game, winking the hindsight) to the key beats of the main game’s plot, making it the closest thing to a prologue of the main story, but it still acts as a terrible fit with that story thanks to Dave’s self aware looping and 4th wall breaking, and gets brought down by its puzzle having little actual logic to it.

Even though its paths actually do come with themes, those themes aren’t represented in the orders you need to reach them at all, in the off track paths you can start to work out what guests and ads make him mad or prompt him to drink and find your way there, for the actual paths there isn’t any of that.

For example you’d think that the Brother path would lead with family members, so Peter’s parents, but no, because they start the normal path, they don’t even come second after Jimmy reveals that Peter’s brother exists, instead taking third place. You’d think the political path might start with Julia, since she’s Peter’s political co-leader, but no, it’s actually Ivan. To be fair, Ivan’s an ambassador, it kind of makes sense, but then Julia comes second, right? No, she waits until 4th place, after Peter’s parents, who sometimes talk about his leadership but usually focus on his childhood in other paths, and Dorothy, a character who in other paths makes a point of saying politics isn’t her thing.

You can’t work out paths by picking characters who fit the theme, it’s just by hitting buttons until you rule options out, meaning that playing without cheating and looking things up will lead you constantly into the repetitive madhouse that is the off track paths, it makes more sense than Live and Spooky, but that doesn’t take it very far, having some amazing storytelling locked behind some very clunky design.

The Timeloop

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The final DLC, The Timeloop, somehow managed to be even more of a fever dream experience to play than the first 2 DLCs, being the least and most repetitive DLC and the best and worst DLC to play.

Mechanically things start out the same as the vanilla game, the only difference being that things like the interference system and ad choices are unimportant, since you’ll never get far enough to have to deal with them (you’ll get why shortly).

The story begins on the Night of Smiles, another broadcast set mid way through Episode One (labelled Day 126), with Boseman drafting in Alex for another all-nighter.

Before the show goes on air 2 scientists, Dr Magnus and his assistant Chester Mimms, arrive in the studio, with Magnus telling Mimms he has to remember a combo of seemingly random irrelevant info, the number of times he was stood up on blind dates, the worrying number of lumps under his left arm, the date his childhood sweetheart married his best friend, the number of conversations he’s had with his dad and the exact time his mum walked out, with the two of them sitting down on the studio sofa before Magnus kicks Mimms off, sending him off towards a weird device on the edge of the set.

Jeremy and Megan arrive and introduce the show, explaining that the device is the “Euphoria Device”, which Magnus and his “Happiness Collective” have built to bring joy to the country, interviewing Magnus after the break where he explains the apparent science behind it: Everyone has their own frequency that they vibrate on, with happy people vibrating at higher frequencies than lower ones, so the machine will generate a note that reaches everyone and improves their mood.

With a statement from Peter Clement and Julia Salisbury they reveal that the project has been bankrolled by Advance, wishing the Collective good luck with the project, back in the studio everyone does a countdown and on 1 Chester hits the button, setting off a spark with the window in Alex’s room smashing, mid way through this time suddenly freezes in place.

Alex himself isn’t frozen though, still able to look around and interact with things, and it turns out Boseman is free too, telling Alex that a red button on his desk his started flashing, pressing it then telling Alex to press the one in his room too, which activates a contingency plan, reversing time.

Once pressed Alex is back at the start of the broadcast, which carries on from the beginning, setting up the DLC’s big conundrum, you’re stuck in a timeloop, the broadcast will never finish its first segment because every time that button will be pushed, forcing you to hit yours and go back to the start.

Luckily for Alex, Boseman recognises that something has happened too, and on the first loop he tells him to press the contingency button again, when the loop restarts he sets up a whiteboard to write solutions on, already having started with his first idea, just unplugging the machine, this doesn’t work as one of the crew members, Colin, notices it and plugs it back in, pressing the button and starting the loop all over again.

From here Boseman writes down several solutions, giving Alex a choice of what to do next, everything about the DLC from here will be a spoiler section because I can’t really talk about it without going into how the puzzles actually work.

Spoiler Section (Everything else!)

This makes up the DLC’s first Act, where you get a set of solutions to try, being able to pick them in any order, and then once you complete the set you move on to the next one, and as you can probably guess from the fact that this is Act 1 none of these solutions actually work.

Cancelling the show leads to the programming being replaced with a Cat Football championship, with Jeremy and Megan interviewing 2 argumentative and posho coaches, Felicity Snippety-Whippet and Montgomery Fortune, but time ends up freezing anyway since the show just ends up getting moved to Channel Three, who carry out the experiment anyway, but off screen they hit their buttons and restart the loop. The other option, a bomb scare, leads to everyone being evacuated from the studio except a cleaner, who bumps into the machine and activates it by accident.

They then try just destroying the machine, with it being covered during the broadcast until it gets unveiled when it’s time to activate it, revealing the whole thing as a trashed wreck, but Magnus addresses the Collective through the broadcast, telling them to activate a backup machine they have at their HQ, restarting the loop again.

This then leads to 3 more options, just outright telling everyone about the loop in the hopes that they’ll stop the experiment, putting a guard on the machine to stop the button being pressed and replacing the presenters.

Trying to tell everyone leads to Boseman gathering everyone together to try and explain the timeloop, which the scientists dismiss as impossible, with Jeremy thinking Boseman has gone crazy, Boseman tries to grab Magnus to stop him using the machine but he gets chased away by the studio security, leading to Magnus hitting the button.

Putting the guard on has Boseman hire Andy, the cop from the main story, who introduces himself as part of “Drop Dead Security”, later interrupting the broadcast with a bout of sneezing then being confronted by Magnus, who tries to argue with him, Andy then shoots himself in the foot and stumbles onto the button.

Replacing the hosts branches out into 2 choices of new hosts, but while they lead to the broadcast being much more chaotic, in the end the button still gets pushed.

This leads to the 2 final attempts, which come one after another, tricking the scientists into going somewhere else so they can’t run the experiment, with them first being sent to the Bannon Soundstage from Live and Spooky and second being sent to an aquarium, but both times they manage to escape, assuming that the sabotage was down to the Collective’s rival, the Blissful Union, so they rush to activate the device before the show even starts.

Boseman finally gives up and resorts to a much more direct method, just outright killing Magnus and Mimms, which works. Jeremy and Megan arrive with their guests missing, Megan mentioning that the dressing room was covered in blood, but Boseman quickly realises this was a pretty stupid idea since he’ll be banged up in jail for the killings, so he rushes down to the studio and presses the button himself, leading to Act 2.

Realising that disrupting the show doesn’t work Boseman instead tries to work out how to disable the machine remotely, pointing Alex to a device on the left of his office called the Relay and tasking him with finding the code to unlock it, revealing that the weird factoids Magnus mentions at the start of each loop are what they need to find.

He then gives Alex his rolodex which can be used to pick different guests, with 5 guests to invite, hoping that their interference will prompt Magnus to reveal his secrets, giving Alex a bell to ding when you think you find clues, where he will either tell you he’s noted them down or that you got it wrong, he also turns off the ratings system so you can watch the studio footage while other moments like titles and speeches are playing, catching hidden dialogue without being punished. After all clues are found in the 5 sequences some bits are still left, with Boseman adding the 6th option of inviting everyone at once, a chaotic sequence where the final clues can be found.

This was probably the best segment of the DLC for me as I had to pay attention and listen out for all the clues in the dialogue, it was also more relaxing not having to bother with the usual editing requirements, not worrying about dwindling on shots and getting to laugh at swears going out unbleeped, I managed to solve the puzzle with all clues first time except one which wasn’t in the dialogue, but the title sequence, which required 2 extra go arounds before Boseman just told me to look there, which I never would’ve thought to do otherwise.

Once all clues for a part of the code are collected, you can click on that part’s title and Boseman will convert the clue details into the code for you, so I wasn’t stalled by the logic puzzle, making it a much more understandable and enjoyable puzzle sequence.

Putting in the code unlocks the Relay and its 2 panels, with one on the left having wires being numbered 1-3 and the other on the right having wires lettered with the codes, TV, MS, TA and VL, Boseman explains that to use the Relay you have to plug a number wire into a letter wire, and doing so starts Act 3.

So making a random pick of wires to cross I found myself in a pirate themed universe, with the office turned into a ship, the broadcast played out more or less the same with Jeremy and Megan interviewing Magnus and Chester, but with a very different visual style and lots of arring and yo-ho-hoing, this is one of the 12 different parallel universes you can reach with the Relay through the different combinations of letter and number wires. 

Boseman explains that the key to stopping the loop must be finding the identity of Magnus’ sweetheart, who he mentions off hand in a few of the versions of the loop, giving Alex 4 clues to find: Her honorific, first name, last name and job title.

This is a very different segment to Act 2 though as you can’t find pieces of the clues in every version, instead just 4 of the universes actually have the pieces you need, forcing you to just keep going through until you find them, returning the gameplay to trial and error.

It’s not something cryptic as Boseman will outright tell you if you watched a broadcast and missed something, so you can rule a universe out as soon as you watch it first time even if you don’t pick up on whether there’s a clue or not, but given that most of the universes are going to be duds there’s actually very little gameplay in this segment at all, with the game’s “health bar” switched off all you’re doing is listening out for a clue that 8 times out of 12 isn’t going to be there, making the whole thing a really bizarre experience.

It alternated between feeling boring, since this is supposed to be a game not a TV show, (especially a TV show where only a small portion of the screen actually has the show on) and endearing with the sometimes wildly different versions of the universes and character interactions, having played the whole DLC through in one sitting up to this point I did stop half way through, picking up later in my day, and did find it being more on the endearing side when it came back, but the gameplay was still mostly unengaging.

Like with the last Act I found all clues on my first try except the last one, though this still took much longer since finding the clue once you’ve got to the right universe isn’t the problem, it’s finding the right universe in the first place, I noticed Magnus’ lovebird being mentioned in the last clue but didn’t realise it had new info until Boseman called me out, but since it was my second to last universe I decided to see the last one for the sake of completion before going back, finally getting my 4 clues and moving to Act 4.

Technically I actually hadn’t been as much of a completionist as I thought, as once I beat the DLC I found on the wiki that there were 2 more universes, the Notverse and the Unityverse, that you can find by ignoring the instructions on how to use the Relay and crossing 2 letter or number wires together instead of mixing letters and numbers, these of course don’t have any clues either, so that’s actually 10 duds out of 14.

Act 4 has Boseman inviting Magnus’ lost love, revealed to be scientist Delores Kline, to the show, hoping that being reminded of his love for Kline will lead to him finally stopping the experiment, expecting that they’ve finally broken the loop he restores the ratings system and disables the relay system, preventing any more timebending.

This seems to work at first but despite Dr Magnus nervously rekindling his love for Kline and deciding not to activate the device, he falls on to it and activates it anyway, freezing time as the guest cards fly in the air, leading to Boseman giving up. But after Alex prompts him to invite everyone again alongside Kline (done by clicking on the cards) the final sequence is unlocked where Boseman turns the show into a love themed segment, rounding up all the guests and telling them to bring the two together. This nearly fails again as professional dickhead Geoff Algebra alienates Kline, but the two scientists actually rekindle their love in the end anyway, convincing Magnus to stop the experiment and decide happiness needs to be found through life experiences not a machine, ending the experiment for good, cutting to the credits with a cat football championship.

I completed the DLC in a total of 40 loops, so minus the 2 times I bungled the act 2 puzzle and the 8 times I went throughmultiverses that had no clues in them, that’s a minimum of 30 loops to solve the puzzle, you can technically make it even shorter by just putting in the code without getting any clues in Act 2, cutting out 6 more loops, but the code has so many numbers and is so complex that you’d never realistically be able to do that unless you already knew it, trying to just randomly guess would take far longer than actually doing the loops and getting the clues properly.

A regular loop lasts around 6-10 minutes, with some of the sabotage attempts in Act 1 being much shorter at 2-5 (and 2 of them being even shorter at just under a minute) and some of the later segments being even longer, in one case being 15 minutes, and together they make the Timeloop almost as long as the entire main game ( roughly 5 hours vs the main game’s 7).

While it’s impressive just how many variations they did, it’s pretty ridiculous when you consider that those 5 hours are the same short premise repeated over and over and over again, of course many variations are highly different, making it not too grating, but it’s a bit much to say the least, especially when the gameplay is very minimal.

The other episodes toss in different tricks to keep your attention throughout the broadcast, in the main game there’s managing the interference, making the more political choices that will impact the story and special extra mechanics on certain days like buttons becoming electrified in Level 3, having to manage the heating on Level 5 and so on, in the DLC Live and Spooky has you struggling with the ghost device, Bits of Your Life has you working out the puzzle of staying on track constantly, so although they’re flawed in their own ways there’s quite an active gameplay component.

The Timeloop doesn’t have any of this, with its only gambit being picking different levels through the solution attempts, guest invites and multiverses, basically having a level selector, otherwise you have the basic mechanics of shot toggling and censorship then having to listen out for clues, which are a decent base but not really enough for the whole length of the runtime, meaning that it feels like pretty much just 5 hours of watching a bunch of different skits.

And that’s far from the worst thing in the world, as again the segments are well acted and well written, though the writing does struggle at times because there’s only so many ways you can play out this short scenario and not make it feel samey, but there’s plenty of sections I liked,

Memorable to me for either being a good laugh, showing off a bit more of the game’s world or just having some endearing character moments, but like I put earlier, I’m trying to play a game rather than watch a show, so roughly 2 and half episodes worth with minimal interaction feels like an awkward way to set it up.

Which leads me to what I said about the DLC at the start, it’s both best and worst, least and most repetitive, least repetitive because unless you mess up by missing a clue (which you almost always won’t if you’re paying a decent bit of attention) you’ll never see the same scene twice, most repetitive because those scenes are all spins on the starting one.

Best DLC because it’s much less cryptic, clearly explaining the mechanics and warning you when you’ve missed something, which allowed me to solve the whole thing without any guides, worst DLC because besides the level selection there are no new mechanics and there are in fact even less than the base game, as the second half of the DLC which takes up most of the runtime switches off the difficulty entirely.

And again, the whole premise just has a crazy level of shark jumping that just doesn’t fit with the main game at all.

Much as I’m more focused on the political drama side of the story the jokey absurdist side of things is a big part of making Not for Broadcast what it is, like the ridiculous Sixth Form drama troupe of Geoff Algebra, baffling sports games, silly character names, absurdist commercials, constant cheeky banter and colourful swearing and so on, and while it’s an element that struggles to balance with the drama at times it’s one that’s key to not making the story feel like depression conga line, and in giving shock value to the drama when it comes back.

But except for Bits of Your Life that balance totally vanishes in the DLC, with timebending, the supernatural and 4th wall breaks there’s no attempt to keep things grounded anymore, the character development and nuanced commentary totally vanishes, and it just feels like half of what NFB is has just gone missing, while BOYL dips back in, revealing more elements of Peter’s character and backstory with fantastic acting, it’s in the prism of Dave’s silly 4th wall breaking adventure, so it still doesn’t even get close to bringing back the tone the original game had.

In the end though the whole shark jumping wasn’t really what rattled me, more the very strange gameplay setups, where the first 2 DLCs are incredibly cryptic and reliant on trial and error, while DLC 3 has very little in the way of stakes or gameplay at all, mostly just being watching skits.

So I’m glad I played them to sate my curiosity, see the excellent acting and a few more pieces of the NFB world, and just get back into the game, but they are a very weird outlier, making me wonder how NotGames came up with them.

Even so, while it might be a while until I can find out, I’m very interested to see what’s next for them, because they’re a talented enthusiastic bunch.

After finishing The Timeloop I went back to finish Live and Spooky, which ended up with me feeling glad I’d decided to cheat and look up the answers, it’s a shame I couldn’t discover the mystery naturally but it’s a lot better having that disappointment than the tedium of cocking it up time and time again, with each time costing me half an hour, though I still lost time to another little problem, crashing.

I can’t remember ever having crash problems in the original playthroughs of the main game and it didn’t happen in any of the other DLCs either, but L&S crashed in my first run on the first segment, forcing a retread, in this second completion run it crashed there then around 4 or 5 times in the second segment, as if the ghost was trying to smash up my PC to stop me winning too easily.

But after I purged that pissy poltergeist by restarting it I managed to finish the DLC and decided to jump straight back into the main game, completing a run I’d started 3 years ago and earning my 9th epilogue, with only 1 crash early on that again I managed to stop from carrying on with another restart.

A Matter of Epilogues

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Spoiler Section (This whole segment is a spoiler section, it covers most of the game's Epilogue paths after all!)

It was a Disrupt sympathetic run where Jeremy had died, I carried it on to save Alan, but foil him at the last moment by exposing Disrupt’s cabal on tape, leading to a military coup ending called Changing of the Guard.

Although I was retreading scenes I’d seen many many times over the more varied mechanics made it feel much less dull or tedious than the DLCs could be, though managing interference could be a pain in the arse, I also got to see a very different side to certain characters, like getting to see the story beats of my daughter Susie when she lives or a Boseman that couldn’t stand me since I’d never bothered to show up to his work events and hadn’t been getting the best grades on the broadcasts (often due to purposefully showing clips I wasn’t supposed to as part of Disrupt loyalty, like a hand signal from a backdrop that was a coded message in The Uprising or cops beating a nudist protester in The Sterility).

His different attitude especially sticking out when he obviously tried to dump suspicion on me for helping The Uprising and pushed off my attempts to blame other people with real bluntness, where before I’d seen him actively cover for me and accept those attempts even when they were obviously bullshit, something I assumed he always would’ve done.

These little changes showed the value of those text segments, though they don’t impact gameplay or the ultimate endings they can add in a lot of variety without nuking the budget of what is still very much an indie dev team, not a minted money printer.

Like with the whole going back to old games thing inspired by the “in progress” and “need to play soon” Steam folders, collecting that Epilogue encouraged me to chase after this bit of unfinished business too, hunting down the remaining 5 Epilogues.

Gathering together a list of the ones I needed to get I quickly realised why they were the ones I had been missing, as they required highly unintuitive playstyles.

3 of them involved Disrupt being the dominant faction, including All Fall Down (earned by killing off both Jeremy and Alan and refusing to play the tape), Jeremy’s Injustice and Julia’s Judgement (where you save Jeremy but still kill Alan, JI for not playing the tape and JJ for playing it). Each involving siding with Disrupt but letting one or both of their key allies get killed.

Then there was the opposite, A Renewed Mandate, caused by saving both Jeremy and Alan but with Advance being dominant, requiring you to save both of their key rivals including helping an insurgency against them on the day that comes, but otherwise side with them as much as possible.

And lastly there was The Middle Ground, which is the only ending in the game that accounts for faction and includes a neutral option, all other Epilogues either don’t have a faction or have 1 faction dominant over the other, so this one though not quite unintuitive was obscure and I wasn’t sure how tough it would be to get it.

A spreadsheet created years ago by the community called the Community Route Log has a lengthy guide explaining how to get it, with specific choices on headlines and key plot choices to make, but I didn’t really want to be so restricted in choice, assuming that this was just a way to get it, not the only way, but feeling like I might have to follow it anyway just so I wasn’t rolling the dice on whether I’d get it or not, wanting a surefire path to the Epilogue.

So given that my Pro-Disrupt run had Jeremy dead I went back to the Uprising to kill Alan, since it was the least distance I had to go back for to get another Epilogue, going for All Fall Down, confident I could easily do it.

That didn’t go to plan as I followed Alan’s first instructions on public influence, making Peter look bad, Disrupt look good in the funeral bombing, playing the Interference and the Disrupt tape, but refused all of the coded messages instructions, thinking that would work, instead after Alan got ragebaited, begging me to help, at the end he suddenly turned confident, telling me to look at what I made happen, and the Uprising succeeded, forcing me to go back to the start of the level to try again.

This left me very confused on how the Uprising actually worked, because I had been convinced for the nearly 4 years since I first played Episode 3 that the only thing that mattered was following the instructions, with faction strength having no influence on the Uprising’s success, if you follow all the instructions (or at least all the coded message ones) it succeeds, if you don’t it doesn’t.

I was convinced that any suggestion faction strength played a part was just a community rumour and assumed that any reports of it succeeding when instructions weren’t followed or the opposite were bugs, but after having fumbled it I wanted to make sure I got it right this time.

So I looked up a bunch of messages and found compelling evidence that faction strength did have a role, with one person mentioning that the Uprising succeeded even when all they did was tune into the Interference, not following any instructions at all. Another player, who had actually reached out to me for advice on how to win the Uprising, later managing to get all the different Epilogues, had posted screenshots of their save file showing their Uprising choices influencing faction strength.

At first I thought what was happening was faction strength was the defining factor on who won the Uprising, with refusing or following the instructions just being dramatic shifters of faction strength, so I figured I had to follow none of the instructions to counteract the strong Disrupt strength of the run, though it did leave me worried if that would then cause a problem for making Disrupt strong again to get the Epilogue.

So I played it again, followed no instructions whatsoever, though still refused to carry out Advance censorship or play their tapes, and Alan died, I managed to find my save and eventually saw that Disrupt had massively tanked in strength while Advance had risen, but not as much as expected, with Disrupt still being on top. So I was wrong, faction strength doesn’t decide who wins, the instructions still do, but basically faction strength influences how many of them you need to follow (with the instructions also including the interference plays), if Disrupt is strong you don’t need to do much at all for them to succeed and have to refuse everything for them to fail, if Advance is strong it’s the opposite.

With Disrupt still stronger I didn’t really need to do anything to win, but I went full Disrupt again to be safe, successfully getting the Epilogue, I then went back to the Heatwave, killed Jeremy, then otherwise repeated the formula to get Julia’s Judgement, then replayed the final segment and without playing the tape to get Jeremy’s Injustice.

Armed with the knowledge of the Uprising mechanics I worked out a surefire way to get A Renewed Mandate, basically doing the opposite of what I’d done to get these endings, doing a totally Pro-Advance run except for the Uprising, where to counteract Advance’s strength I followed all of Alan’s instructions to the letter (though still doing Advance censorship and playing an ad of theirs) which kept him alive, I then went right back to supporting Advance, successfully earning the Epilogue.

This was my only nearly full playthrough in the Epilogue quest, since I wanted to be Pro-Advance from the get go to make sure they would be the strong faction rather than continue from an early point in the Disrupt run and change the tide, I say nearly full because with the first level having no choices to make besides whether or not you get a good grade, I was able to skip it, it’s basically a tutorial.

So I went to Day 3, making sure to answer the questionnaire with all the answers Advance liked to hear and refused Chris my passport, putting me on the path to An Advanced Warning, where you get so much approval from Advance that they actually warn you about the nuking before it happens, allowing you to save Suzie. I thought I’d done this before but actually hadn’t, having never refused Chris or made select other choices like refusing to broadcast Disrupt’s introduction in the Heatwave, again leading to a very different story.

With Advance’s propaganda totally defining the media and Disrupt barely even being mentioned or seen until The Uprising, and Chris being a character in my text stories for the first time (if you give him the passport he gets killed off), having Alex’s whole family through to the end.

Checking the stats after the Epilogue was achieved I noticed that Disrupt had massively gained strength and Advance lost it after the Uprising, and like with All Fall Down it wasn’t enough to close the gap between them, allowing me to keep the faction I wanted strong.

But I noticed that after the Uprising when I’d gone back to supporting Advance I managed to increase their strength by around 40 points, leaving me wondering if by supporting Disrupt post uprising instead I could hand those 40 or so points to Disrupt, narrowing the gap between them and allowing me to get the Middle Ground without having to start a totally new run following those ultra specific instructions from the community log.

Which worked perfectly, ultimately narrowing the gap between the factions to just 20 points, with Advance still on top but the Middle Ground was triggered, revealing the mechanics to me, you don’t have to perfectly equalise them, just narrow the gap, allowing me to finally have all of the Epilogues after nearly 4 years and update the wiki so everyone else could understand the system too.

How not to build an Open World

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Mafia 3

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The Mafia series is a franchise some in my social circle have been big fans of for a long time, but besides watching some clips from time to time it hadn’t really caught my eye, I bought the Definitive Editions of the trilogy when they went on a major discount in February last year, finally getting around to playing them in October.

Mafia: DE was a full blown remake of the original game (the original released in 2002 and the remake in 2020), with excellent presentation and an interesting world, showing off life in the Prohibition Era, and although the characters are likeable and certainly humanised, the game goes to great lengths to show that working for the mob is dirty, having you acting like a thug and killing people who don’t deserve it, it has some annoying limitations, like scrapping the original game’s public transit system and removing different ways to approach missions, making the game feel much more railroaded, basic crappy melee combat, clunky driving and some annoying forced stealth missions, as well as the game overall feeling like it slightly overstayed its welcome but overall it worked well and felt worth playing.

Mafia 2: DE initially felt like a total ripoff, as I quickly realised it wasn’t the full remake Mafia: DE was, instead being pretty much a straight copy of the original game from 2011, with only a few minor tweaks here and there, but I quickly chilled out as I realised how it was a strong improvement on the original, they cut down the number of missions but made them longer and feeling more varied, they added some things to do in the city in between missions, improved the melee and driving mechanics and added a more in depth wanted system, the title is still a total pisstake but that aside it was still fun to play through.

But the real one I was interested in was Mafia 3, I’d seen a bunch of the game’s cutscenes years ago, becoming very curious about its world and eager to try it for myself.

Mafia 3 has a very simple premise, you are Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam War veteran who returns to his home city of New Bordeaux, Louisiana (USA) and loses everything to mob boss Sal Marcano, setting off on a revenge quest to not just kill Marcano, but dismantle his entire organisation across the city’s 9 districts.

It’s certainly a departure from the first 2 Mafia games, thematically and mechanically. In terms of themes the big standout is obviously, your protagonist isn’t an Italian-American with a Mafia history, he’s a black man who wants them dead from the get go, and mechanics wise the game is no longer a mostly linear game with some free roaming in between, it’s a full on open world experiment.

That departure didn’t really bother me, obviously because I don’t have much history with the franchise, so shifting the theme doesn’t hit me like it might have done to someone who was glued to its mob protagonists for years, but also because I don’t actually think Mafia 1 and 2 shared a lot either.

A mechanical base and a general theme of a protagonist who joins the mob and goes through all the dirty work that involves, sure, but except for one mission near the end of the game, whereyou kill Mafia 1’s protagonist Tommy Angelo as a favour for the family he ratted out , Mafia 2 doesn’t actually make any references to the first game, for all intents and purposes it could’ve been its own thing, and that was just fine with me too since I liked the story.

And what a story Mafia 3 has, I think it has one of the best narratives I’ve seen in a game, thanks to compelling characters, its unique Louisiana setting (which is a kind of region I think isn’t really explored in games) and the variety of formats it uses to deliver that story, where the narrative takes place across 3 main formats, Lincoln’s “present day” in the 1960s, shown in both cutscenes and gameplay, and 2 different kinds of flashforwards shown only in cutscenes: A 1970s Senate hearing involving Donovan and a 2010s documentary featuring various characters, especially Lincoln’s old pastor Father James, each focusing on the aftermath of Lincoln’s crime spree and how he managed to accomplish it. Those cutscenes are helped along by some fantastic acting and the mocap tech to back it up.

The gameplay has a strong core, with fast and brutal combat, a huge array of weapons, a solid cover system where you can snap on and off of cover a lot easier than previous games, and some great driving, with high speeds, smooth turns and easy recoveries, a very welcome break from driving the 1920s shitboxes of Mafia 1 and a further improvement from Mafia 2, which was improved thanks to the 50s cars but still wonky at times.

So it has everything going for it, right? Not quite.

Since Mafia 1 and 2 weren’t proper open world games, the devs weren’t well versed in what to do with an actual open world, and what they came up with was absolutely terrible.

After the Prologue you get to dismantling Marcano’s empire across the 9 districts, and how it works is this.

Each district has a boss, representing the entire district, and 2 underlings representing its 2 rackets, aka dodgy businesses belonging to the Mafia.

You have to damage the businesses, which then lures out their underlings to be killed or forced into Lincoln’s crime family, once the 2 underlings are dealt with the boss comes out, you kill them and you get the district.

In this formula only the district bosses offer unique story missions, the racket damage involves generic little bite sized jobs of 5 kinds: Assassinations, interrogations (just a takedown where you hold instead of press the button), thefts, property destruction and hostage rescue, then the racket bosses are the same as interrogations, you storm whatever building they’re in and grab hold of them.

Thankfully in the last 3 districts, the district bosses have 2 missions instead of 1, where you take down an accomplice of theirs before going for the boss themselves, so that’s 12 unique boss missions, plus the final confrontation with Marcano, but these unique missions are massively outnumbered by the 18 racket bosses and hundreds of racket damage jobs which dominate most of the runtime. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the game has even more generic busywork for you, although at least these are optional. Early on in Lincoln’s conquest he recruits 3 of his own underbosses to manage his conquered territories, Cassandra, Vito and Burke, and they each have 2 extra mission types for you.

• Trafficking missions have you doing collectathons for the bosses, increasing the value of their rackets by stealing things and delivering them to them, you get one of these for each racket the boss controls, so 2 per district
• While loyalty missions are given out in 3 sets by each boss, 1 set for each district they get (the first set contains 1 mission, the next 2 contain 2 missions each), Cassandra and Burke offer more collectathons while Vito gives out assassination jobs

The amount of these you get varies, the first 3 districts are automatically assigned to the 3 bosses equally, but after that you get to decide who gets what, so if you don’t give territories to an underboss, you don’t get their extra missions.

But yeah, add in these 18 trafficking missions and up to 15 loyalty missions to the pile of racket jobs and you’re looking at a whole lot of busywork.

My first 9 hours of the game basically progressively developed into the hate side of things, the game opens with a lengthy 2 mission prologue with lots of unique gameplay and environments, frequent dialogue and cutscenes, setting up Lincoln’s revenge quest in a style not unlike the previous Mafia games, but then after that prologue it all vanishes and the game sets into its formula, rackets, racket bosses, unique district boss mission at the end.

First you liberate Cassandra’s territory, Delray Hollow, then the game branches out a little as you’re sent off to liberate Vito and Burke’s turfs, River Row and Pointe Verdun, after you gather the bosses together in a Sit Down the game branches out further, allowing you to take on the next 3 districts in any order and appoint them to whichever underboss you see fit.

By the time I got to this point I was already exhausted, having done countless bite sized jobs already, drive here, kill this guy, drive off, drive here, steal this, drive off, drive here, interrogate this guy, steal this, drive off, repeat 5 times over, I had seen pretty much the entire gameplay formula with the first turf, already had to repeat it 2 more times, and to beat the game I was going to have to do it 6 times more.

A near total lack of any substance at all. Like, don’t get me wrong, Mafia and Mafia 2 weren’t exactly the most groundbreaking games when it came to mission design, they were also very repetitive with constant drive and shoot drive and shoot segments, but they had fully fledged missions with unique scripted sequences, gameplay twists, their own environments, and narrative connective tissue, enough to make it feel solidly engaging instead of mind numbing.

It took me 12 hours to finish each of those games, and in that time I’d played 20 unique missions in Mafia 1 and 16 in Mafia 2, in almost the same amount of time in Mafia 3 I’d played just 5, or 6 if you count the Sit Down (which is just a cutscene) with all the rest being that generic bite sized filler.

But my mood on the game was soon about to change, something else unlocked after the Sit Down job is the game’s 3 DLCs: Stones Unturned, Faster, Baby! and A Sign of The Times, and these are proper storylines with a decent number of missions under their belt (6 for Stones Unturned, 5 for Faster Baby and 7 for Sign of The Times), offering a welcome break from the monotony.

As soon as Sit Down was finished Donovan called Lincoln encouraging him to meet, and not about Marcano, about a more personal agenda, basically setting up Stones Unturned, his DLC. The others don’t have these kinds of dialogues, leaving you to just start them whenever you feel like it unprompted, so I went to do that first given that for immersions sake I tend to not like leaving characters waiting for meetings for hours, days or even months, unless its Hanako at Embers in Cyberpunk, if you know you know.

And so Stones Unturned was a great breath of fresh air, with a frequently told storyline, lots of in-game dialogue, and more importantly just dedicated missions. Rather than just showing up on some random street corner, icing a guy then driving off, rinse and repeat 5 times over, it was a chain of decent length missions with unique environments and setpieces, it wasn’t exactly rocket science, mostly still just driving and shooting though with some extra gimmicks thrown in like turret segments and short investigations, but it felt like the game wasn’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

The story also actually had a narrative that didn’t just lay its cards out on the table straight away, as you and Donovan unveil a Cold War conspiracy tied to an ex-CIA traitor, Aldridge, allowing for some actual development, vs the main game which lays them out right after the prologue and doesn’t have much else to show.

And it left me with this half happy half angry feeling, happy because it was just solidly fun, and angry because I was just wondering, why isn’t the rest of the game like this? Instead of the endless repetition why couldn’t we have had, say, 2-4 missions per district, giving the main game some meat on its bones?

But even though it left me wanting more from the main game, it was enough of a detox that going back to that core loop didn’t feel like pure ragebait, so I got back to it, basically deciding to carve out the tedium in 2 big waves, the first wave I met with Donovan in each of the 3 districts, then talked to each of his informants (2 per district, so 6 total) and got to work on all their petty little racket jobs. Still unoriginal for sure, but having got my detox I was able to just focus on how the fundamental mechanics, the driving and the shooting, were very solid, rather than the bite sized gameplay surrounding them, bopping along to classic radio songs like Tramp from Otis Redding and Carla Thomas and Soul Man from Sam & Dave as I jumped out to toss a few bombs and spray a few shots, then got back in to do it all over again somewhere else, ramming through anyone who got in between those errands.

Soon the wave was complete with all 3 bosses open to be dealt with, letting me play 3 lengthy missions in one go. Infiltrating the hotel HQ of Tony Derazio to assassinate him, where you have multiple routes in and out of the building and the ability to stealth some segments, rescuing Enzo Conti in an escape sequence, and a chase for Frank Pagani, leading to another set of missions, where the game actually expands the final district mission into 2 parts, where you kill an underling of the boss and then the boss themselves, leading me to joyfully incinerate racist Klan radioman Remy Duval and gundown his followers, taking care of his boss Olivia Marcano afterwards and then assigning her District to Vito, giving myself some extra busywork by finishing off Vito’s loyalty missions, where I then gave myself another detox with another DLC, Faster Baby.

A high octane storyline about visiting a “Sundown Town” called Sinclair Parish, neighbouring New Bordeaux, on the orders of activist Charles Laveau, aka The Voice. Run by the corrupt racist Slim Beaumont, the town is off limits to black folks, the DLC opens with Beaumont gunning down a black man caught in the town at night, later stealing a file from him when he turns out to be an investigator sent by Laveau. Laveau tasks Lincoln with retrieving it to expose Slim for his crimes, together with the help of his daughter Roxy and later dissident weed grower Mitch Decosta.

A new area to explore, made much more tense to roam in because of the “you’re not white, so we shoot on sight” attitude of the cops, plus some bombastic setpieces. Although it was shorter than Stones Unturned, it was again nice to just have some variety injected into the gameplay.

I carried on the main game by taking the last district, assassinating the corrupt judge Cornelius Holden as his convoy cruises through the city, followed by hunting down the magnate of Marcano’s casino scheme, his brother Lou, as he took a boat ride through the swamps, handing the district to Cassandra, staying on the repetition detox with the last DLC, Sign of the Times, a very different feeling pack, with a horror theme and a much less action packed story, involving some slow investigation sequences where Lincoln photographs evidence and checks over items for clues, it did feel like a real outlier with the rest of the game, but still ultimately won me over with its creepy moments and genuinely punchy story as Lincoln works with Father James to uncover the works of the Ensanglante cult, trying to protect their victim, Anna, and push their influence out of New Bordeaux.

With the cult removed I returned to busywork, finishing Cassandra’s loyalty missions and then completing the Bail Jumpers epilogue side mission of Stones Unturned, followed by capturing the final district and completing Burke’s jobs

Another few hours was spent upgrading the weed grow and renovating the bar up to its final upgrade, then when I could’ve put everything to bed I decided to wait a few more hours, letting the money tick up so I could buy the M60 and the final grenade upgrade, rampaging into Marcano’s HQ to kill him and Giorgi, then returning to finish the upgrading of the bar and join with Lincoln’s lieutenants to rule the city, finally finishing the game at the 45 hour mark.

A love hate relationship that generally shifted more to love at the end, but not fully, my time with Mafia 3 was definitely the most mixed bag of any game in this series, when they actually try with unique missions, either in the DLCs or the District Bosses, the game can be really fun, with decently varied encounters and locale variety, but when that’s the exception, and the rule of the game tends to be lazy, copypasted filler, it really stings to get through.

I did make it worse for myself by opting for near-completionism: Collect 3 cars for Burke, then collect 3 more cars, then 3 SUVs, 3 boats, and 3 more cars, do you have to fight for them? Usually no, do you get in a chase over them? Nah, you just find 3 cars, get in one, drive it back, get in another one, drive it back, get in another, drive it back, and so on.

Doing all of the extra loyalty jobs and side missions when I could’ve avoided them with very little consequence, but even if I’d skipped them over so much of the runtime would’ve been dominated by the generic. Interrogate these 3 guys, kill these 5 guys, rinse and repeat over and over, the game pretty much never has any tricks to make these busywork sections of the game interesting, and it’s so odd because when they’re not half arsing it the devs are able to come up with engaging scenarios, lovingly linked by the connective tissue of the cutscenes, for most of the runtime they basically just tossed a lot of their talent away to waste.

With the fantastic performance of the actors, it’s really strong stuff, but loses out to just being buried under a bunch of chores.

Reading up on the game after finishing it, I found out that there is an understandable reason for this, originally the bosses of each district were open to be attacked from the very start of the game, letting you wage Lincoln’s war of revenge as you saw fit, but at first the bosses would be well defended and incredibly powerful, near impossible to take on. Damaging the rackets would weaken them more and more, making them more manageable to then go on and attack.

But in playtesting this system proved problematic, as players repeatedly threw themselves at the bosses and had their asses handed to them, making the gameplay pure ragebait, the devs knew they needed to fix it but by their managers dragged their feet, and by the time they’d got agreement of the bosses it was too late, the game was soon in need of releasing, so the developers quickly resorted to just removing the option to attack the bosses early, removing the frustration of tossing yourself into an unbalanced encounter but shoving the tedium down players’ throats.

The original concept was still a clunky sounding one, having the same flaws of lacking many missions with substance, just patching them over by letting you skip some of the filler, but either way, this game is a real example of lost potential, I think with hindsight I would still recommend it, but with an asterisk, approach with caution, caution of being sucked into boredom.

Like a Phoenix

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Dispatch

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Now here’s a surprise, after adding Not for Broadcast to this article I figured I’d got my final line up for my Games of Interest, 5 is plenty, right? But as the new year was fast approaching I had an interesting little experience.

I’d been playing through Baldur’s Gate 3, a real “choices matter” RPG that I absolutely adored the storyline for, but at the end of its second Act I’d ran up against a combat section that was extremely frustrating, and I mean so frustrating it took me 2 long days of on and off play, hours and hours, to get through it, a massive untelegraphed difficulty spike meant I’d suddenly been subjected to a ball busting encounter I was just not prepared to handle at all.

So before going back to BG3 I wanted to take a breather, with a story focused game that didn’t have those tests of intense suffering between its narrative beats, and I had just the thing to suit that need, pulling Dispatch out of my Steam Wishlist and into my Steam Library.

Dispatch is the first game from AdHoc Studio, a team built by former employees of Telltale Games.

Now if you haven’t heard of Telltale Games you’ve probably been living under a rock for just over a decade, but they’re a studio that became very well known for their series of narrative based games that started with 2012’s The Walking Dead.

Set loosely in the universe of the Walking Dead comic series (not the super popular TV that followed it) TWD was a point and click adventure game with an episodic structure, what made it stand out was very much its characters, with plenty of light and sympathetic moments sprinkled together with dramatic flaws and tense moment to moment choices as they judged you for what you did, who you sided with when push came to shove, and what you chose to reveal to them.

Defined by its timer based system where you frequently got choices between up to 4 options, sometimes narrowed down to just 2 or 3, with the timer pressuring you to make it fast, failing to do so could lead to either your character staying silent or just dying in a game over.

Some of these choices were minor ones, either not having much relevance at all or only getting small callbacks later, while others were major, having major ripples into subsequent episodes, with the game making sure to remind you with “X will remember that” dialogue pop ups.

Helped along by a big results screen at the end of each episode showing you the choices you made and how they compared to everyone else’s, Walking Dead got people talking, helped along by the fact that it just had some excellent acting, making for really gripping performances.

The success of Walking Dead made this format Telltale’s core formula, expanding to new IPs, they followed up with The Wolf Among Us, a fantasy take on the formula based on a comic series called Fables, then bounced between more IPs and Walking Dead followups.

There was a Borderlands game, Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy, 2 seasons of Batman and Minecraft games, while TWD got a DLC for the original called 400 Days, plus 4 new seasons, the main stories of Season Two, The New Frontier (Season 3) and The Final Season (Season 4) as well as the Walking Dead Michonne spin off. 

Later entries hammered home the choices and narrative elements even more, filing off the point and click adventure systems pretty much entirely, with the only bits between the dialogue being bits and pieces of investigation segments and quick time events, making the games more like watching a TV show with a choose your own adventure element to it. But the strong narratives they offered did the heavy lifting and managed to hold the appeal of the formula.

I actually only experienced a small slice of this lineup, playing through the Walking Dead series and the Batman games, starting with the original TWD a whopping 9 years ago, in late late 2016. But those games I was certainly hooked for.

Funnily enough I’ve never read a single page of the Walking Dead comics or watched an episode of the show, despite my dad being a big fanboy of the series, but TWD’s own narrative took me a long way, loving the interpersonal dramas, tense and heart wrenching moments of the series, with TWD being one of the only games, or things in general, that managed to get a tear out of me for many years.

The sense of continuity was also really appealing, you had the ability to carry your save file forward from season to season, although these didn’t lead to meteoric shifts or anything it was really cool seeing choices I made several seasons back still getting those callbacks, the game legitimately remembering the steps I took on my long journey.

And the Batman games? Well, I’m a sucker for the Batman universe, and especially for seeing unique takes on it, and I really liked how it explored who Bruce Wayne/Batman is in a deeper way, giving you the leeway to decide who is the mask and who is the real person beneath, decide which of them to send to certain scenarios, and what personality comes out in the hardship of the crime fighting crusade, merciful or harsh.

But despite capturing the imagination of millions with their stories, behind the scenes Telltale was an Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

The list of 12 games I mentioned Telltale worked on since the original Walking Dead, totalling a whopping 54 episodes of stories, were released across the span of just 6 years, an absolutely colossal workload especially given the number of choices each story has to track and account for, and with them all being tied to expensive big name IPs, costly to acquire, the company struggled to hold together, ultimately buckling under the weight in 2018 when they dramatically fired most of their staff, leading to the cancellation of several projects and Walking Dead Final Season’s being left in limbo in the middle of production.

The Final Season was ultimately saved when Skybound Entertainment, the owners of the Walking Dead IP, decided to do justice to the series by forming their own Skybound Games studio, hiring much of the game’s original staff and cast to put together the final 2 episodes, but the original Telltale studio pretty much evaporated, being bought by a holding company called LCG Entertainment.

This is where AdHoc comes in, not wanting to be directly under new Telltale’s thumb a number of ex TT devs formed AdHoc, agreeing to collaborate with them on a new Wolf Among Us game, writing the game’s second season and starting the work of proper production, recording dialogue, animating cutscenes and so on, but LCG apparently weren’t very responsive to them and it was later revealed that they had laid off much of their WAU2 staff, instead pivoting to what is so far the only game released under the “new Telltale”, The Expanse: A Telltale Series, the still battered new Telltale seemingly just wasn’t able to juggle multiple projects at once with their slimmed down resources that LCG had failed to grow.

This left AdHoc badly at risk. How could they keep pumping vast amounts of money and putting in the work hours on Wolf Among Us 2 if they had no guarantee the game was actually going to come out and make them that money back through their share of the revenue? They couldn’t, if they tried they’d just be repeating history and dooming themselves to the way of the dodo.

And so they pivoted to another project, something that would be handled solely in house, with an original IP they would fully control, originally conceived as a live action project (a dream smashed by COVID) before shifting to animation, they came up with their take on the superhero genre.

In a futuristic Los Angeles superhero Robert Robertson, aka Mecha Man, is knocked out of commission in a battle with his arch nemesis Shroud and his gang, the Red Ring. As a hero without inherent superpowers he relies on the Mech to go out in the field, and in this battle the Ring manage to destroy most of the suit along with the core that powers it, the Astral Pulse.

After washing his sorrows away in a bar he’s met by fellow hero Blonde Blaze, who recruits him to the Superhero Dispatch Network, a company with a roster of heroes sent out to protect its subscribers. The SDN relies on Dispatchers, often ex heroes themselves, to assign their heroes to the right job at the right time, earning the heroes valuable field experience and satisfying the customers.

Blazer’s deal involves Robertson agreeing to mentor the SDN’s worst roster, the Z-Team, who are all participants in the Phoenix Program, a program where ex-supervillains can rehabilitate themselves by joining the side of good under the SDN’s wing. In exchange, Blazer promises to restore the Mecha Man suit, allowing Robert to be a hero once again.

The team includes portal wielding Demonic swordstress Malevola, the invisible stealth expert Invisigal, light based pop star Prism, elemental mud being Golem, pint sized super strong boxer Punch Up, winged and bladed ex-mob assassin Coupé, the half-beast Man-Bat knockoff Sonar and the fireball slinging Flambae, and they’ve been an utter nightmare for every dispatcher assigned to them so far, who’ve all soon quit after taking them on.

Disrespectful, dismissive, self sabotaging and at times flat out incompetent, they’re the last people you’d want to mentor, but they’re also the ones most in need of it, so Robert (with the help of Blazer and his cranky old friend Chase) needs to whip this batch of dipshits into a capable crime fighting force.

Dispatch was first revealed at The Game Awards show back in December 2024, but behind the scenes the game was seriously struggling and again at risk of meeting the same fate as the Final Season, being canned before it was even finished and burying the studio underneath it, the production of the game was causing AdHoc to bleed cash so the reveal wasn’t as much of a glossy display of confidence and more a desperate hail mary, but luckily after a few botched attempts to make a deal the game was finally bankrolled by Critical Role, a media company formed by a bunch of voice actors and game designers that broadcast their own custom Dungeons and Dragons games and marketed their own D&D modules.

Impressed by Tellta- I mean AdHoc’s storytelling skills they made a deal to chip in on the rest of development, in exchange for AdHoc later making a game in their custom Exandria D&D universe, allowing the game to finally make its way out the door where it released in an 8 episode format (with the episodes being shorter than the average Telltale Game, where 4-5 episodes was the standard), Episodes 1-4 dropped in October 2025 with 5-8 releasing in November, in batches of 2 episodes each.

Clips of the game had made it to me through Instagram reels and I took a bit of interest in the game thanks to the Telltale lineage, prompting me to bung it on my Steam wishlist, but it was only when I had the BG3 ragebait moment that I actually gave it a shot, playing it over 2 sessions at the end of the year.

The game has a mix of 2 main modes, there’s storytelling segments which act as classic Telltale flair, picking your choices on a timer and doing QTEs, seeing the main action of the narrative and the development of the characters, and the dispatching, where you have a map of L.A. with timed incidents to respond to by sending your roster of heroes.

In between these you get occasional hacking minigames, where you guide a little ball through a maze of nodes, hunting for and punching in codes and avoiding obstacles, whether that’s the timer or antivirus nodes that’ll zap your little ball of code into nothingness.

The hacking I honestly didn’t care for, with it feeling overly long and difficult, prompting me to switch off the difficulty in the options which disables the timer and gives you infinite lives, but the main meat of the game has some real strengths.

The dispatching segments have some notable depth to them, with each hero having their own points in 5 different stats, Combat, Vigor, Intellect, Charisma and Mobility, which the jobs you send them on will demand in different amounts, as well as context dependent bonus abilities and “synergies”, where they can work better when paired with a certain partner, giving them a decent amount of mechanical depth.

As they complete jobs they gain XP, allowing you to upgrade their points in the stats, either making them a jack of all trades that can cover any task with a middling success chance or an expert in certain fields, easily able to clear jobs that demand it but easily liable to screw up in tasks outside their niche.

The jobs themselves also have a decent bunch of variation, with their own little stories, and on top of the stat demands they also vary in how many slots they have for your heroes, some only allow you to send 1 but others allow up to 4, allowing you to increase success chance by sending more heroes with different disciplines, the jobs also don’t outright tell you which stats you need, instead hinting it through the descriptions, leading you to figure it out yourself.

They can also lead to complications where you have to pick extra options on what actions your heroes should take, which also have their own stat demands, and sometimes you get special options if you send the right hero for the job that can instantly resolve the job instead. 

On top of that, there’s also training school, where you can send your heroes to come back with new abilities that help in the dispatches.

It’s a decently deep system that reminded me of my time playing 911 and 112 Operator a few years ago, though those games had you directing vanilla emergency services, not superheroes, but it has the same kind of premise of juggling the timings of escalating problems across a city, each with their own stories, while trying to balance sending the right people for the job and having manpower left over, that juggle plus the sense of progression that comes with stat upgrades and new abilities makes for a solid experience.

In between the dispatches you have the story segments, and these are also worthy of high praise, they were really well written with likeable characters and fantastic animation that could rival any TV show or movie, even though the Z-Team are villains turned heroes on a rehab program, they’re volunteers, so it’s not like you’re working with the Suicide Squad.

It’s great because you’re working with people who genuinely want to do right but are still bogged down with doubts and bad traits like arrogance and self sabotage, matched by their mechanical tendency to drop the ball on jobs in dispatches (especially in the early game thanks to their low stats), even though he wants to work hard Robert is a low energy miserable guy much of the time and easily gets frustrated by the Z-Team’s incompetence, but he learns to grow his faith in them, motivates them to do well and becomes a proud, supportive leader.

It makes for a narrative that felt surprisingly grounded and offered depth, grabbing my enthusiasm, leaving me eager for more with each episode and pleased to see that the Telltale devs managed to get back on the saddle with a quality experience.

Besides the hacking wonkiness, there were other areas where it wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows though, as I played through the game it soon became obvious that my performance in the dispatch segments had no impact on the story at all, whether Robert manages to take his team to new crime fighting heights or literally fails every single job he assigns his team to there’s no impact on the dialogue whatsoever, in fact there’s only 3 exceptions to this I know of in the entire game, in the first episode Robert will have a different line based on his performance in a training session for the dispatching, and in the finale there are 2 potential consequences you can have.

Spoiler Section (finale consequences)

The last Dispatch has you fighting an ex SDN hero of yours to save the city, where you can attack them by sending your heroes on a special attack mission to drain their health bar, while the city’s health bar is drained by other assignments being failed or allowed to expire, if you win this segment by defeating the rival before the city falls you get a choice on whether to allow them to rejoin the team at the end of the game, if you fail you don’t and they automatically get arrested.

Lastly, the game has a major story arc surrounding one of your heroes, Invisigal, depending on your choices she can either be successfully rehabilitated, staying on the team as a hero, or she can lose her faith in rehabilitation and return to villainy, you see the outcome of this in the finale and whether she stays a hero or not is based a scoring system, with points being awarded or taken away not just based on your dialogue choices, but also how she performs in the dispatches, with points being gained for successful missions and being sent on training exercises and lost for her being sent on missions that end up failing.

Other than this, your performance in the dispatching does not matter at all, in fact after beating the game I learnt that you can actually play the game by totally ignoring all of the dispatch missions entirely. You can literally sit there, kick your feet up, watch all of the missions expire and never assign your team members to a single job, and there are no consequences for this, the team will still go through the exact same story arc, as one of my favourite YouTubers, Tehsnakerer, put it when discussing old Telltale, you actively need to work to stop the illusion falling apart.

And besides the poor story/dispatch integration, that’s the game’s other real achilles’ heel to me, the very very limited choice impact, in some ways the game is highly reactive to your choices, constantly calling back to earlier decisions in dialogue and also visually, as a little example very early on you get end up in a scrap with a hero called Flambae, with the choice of tossing water or alcohol on him, toss the water and he slips over and knocks a tooth out, which he has missing for the entire rest of the game, toss the alcohol and he gets set on fire, losing his eyebrows, and they slowly regrow over the season.

There’s all sorts of callbacks like this across the season that make it feel like you’re having an impact with your choices, but for almost the entire game callbacks is as far as it goes, all of the actual character arcs and their timings are totally predetermined.

It doesn’t matter what you do or say to them, your team will start off not liking Robert, not trusting him and not giving a shit about his advice, then they’ll grow to find faith in his words, start to like him and become genuine heroes that care about the team, again there’s only a select few exceptions to this rule.

• In Episode 3 you have to cut one of 2 team members, Sonar or Coupe, with the cut member resenting you and joining the villains
• In Episode 4 you get the choice to go on a date with either Blonde Blazer or Invisigal, starting a romance, with a few choices in later episodes to either continue it or call it off
• In the final episode you get Invisigal’s hero/villain outcome based on the points score, and that choice to welcome Sonar or Coupe back or not

Other than that, you have no influence on these people at all, now I didn’t mind that in my playthrough because I did really enjoy the story and didn’t really have any glaring moments where I wanted an option different to where the story took me, but I do think it really stings that except forInvisigal’s outcome , the whole “mentoring” story is basically fake, you can’t make or break these people, they’re only going down one road.

Railroading is something Telltale games have always been criticised for and to be fair, it’s mostly true, it’s pretty much infamous that these are really “choices don’t matter” games, because even though they do remember your choices, they will basically constantly override them to get the story to where it’s supposed to go, if you have a choice over whether someone lives or dies and they survive they’ll quickly be relegated to the background and almost certainly die soon enough anyway, if you have what seems like a major branching choice, it’s fake.

Do youvote to go to the dairy farm in S1E2? It doesn’t matter, the episode takes place there, you’re going. At the end of the episodedid you want to steal the supplies from the seemingly abandoned car, or not ? It doesn’t matter, if you don’teveryone else still will and its owner still goes mad and blames you for the death of his family, becoming the main villain of the finale .

Did youabandon Lilly or agree to take her with you in S1E3? It doesn’t matter,if you took her with you she abandons the group soon after, if you were supportive of her she’ll offer to take you with her when she leaves, but it’s a fakeout, she still abandons you .

Did yourob Arvo in S2E4? It doesn’t matter,even if you didn’t he leads his group back to you, calls you out as if you did anyway, and tries to rob you back, leading to the death of his group in a gun battle and him joining your survivor group .

I could go on, but you get the point, the stories in Telltale games always had lots of little reactions to your choices but almost no genuine branching paths, which I think was especially a result of how they quickly expanded their work after the first Walking Dead to dozens of different projects, working on 3-4 games a year, when you’re juggling that many stories at once it’s hard to come up with meaningful branches for each of them.

However, those reactions they offered were pretty genuine, if you play Season 1 you can have a totally different relationship with Kenny based on if you help him and side with him or don’t, if you support him he’ll become a loyal friend eager to help you out, if you don’t he’ll quickly become spiteful and refuse to help you at plenty of opportunities, and the same goes for many of the other characters across the series. 

You might not really have a choice over where they go or usually how they end up, but you do often have an influence on what your relationship with them is, except for those few exceptions I mentioned before Dispatch doesn’t even give you that.

Now I don’t want to judge AdHoc too harshly for this, they didn’t have the problem of juggling multiple projects at once but they were making the game while struggling to keep the studio afloat, its slick presentation means few can really tell, but it’s a small miracle the game even made it out the door.

On top of that, the other big factor is design changes, the original concept for Dispatch had you mentoring just 1 hero of a choice of 3, with the story being told through cutscenes, the wider Z-Team was added mid way into development, with the dispatching segments introduced not only to bring in gameplay variation but also to cut costs, since they didn’t need to be animated.

When you put those 2 together, the late inclusion and the struggle for the studio to stay together, it helps explain why the dispatch mechanics don’t get to influence the story or offer consequences, it still sucks but I can’t knock them that bad for it knowing the circumstances, with the game’s massive success strengthening AdHoc I hope it’s something Season 2 can manage much better.

Gameplay wise Dispatch is mixed, since the dispatching adds some proper gameplay, making it the first Telltale style game in years to really feel like you’re not just in a slightly interactive TV show, but the heavy railroading and lacking story consequences mean it still doesn’t feel very responsive, but presentation wise it’s an excellent experience, leaving it a satisfying end product and a strong foundation for more.

Conclusion

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So, those are my Games of Interest. As I became more glued to going out last year my game time significantly dropped compared to 2024, but now I’m in my poorer season and I’m trying to get back to work, habits I neglected like lengthy game sessions and music streaming are coming back into the picture, so I feel like this isn’t the last of this format, even though I do want to get back to the sweet touch of the grass.

But until then, back to it!

Changelog

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• Edit 1 - 25/01/26 - Added images, corrected order missions were played in for Mafia 3
• Edit 2 - 04/02/26 - Extra spoiler section and spoiler fix

Footnotes

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