I have a tendency to stay away from "decision games"; those where you have to constantly make tough choices with consequences that only become apparent later, once you've become powerless to prevent them. Telltale's focus on binary decision matrices, beginning with The Walking Dead: Season 1, is perhaps the most famous example of this format, but there have been many others in the Indie scene including Papers, Please, Gods Will Be Watching, Cart Life, 60 Seconds! and Reigns. Each tends to present an endless parade of Trolley Problems for which there are no simple and easy moral victories, and supporting one viewpoint or character invariably means abandoning another, equally valid option.

I get tremendous anxiety from playing games like this, for two reasons: the first is that it preys on my real-life indecisiveness - while I'm not as comically bad as, say, The Good Place's Chidi Anagonye when it comes to hard (or less than hard) choices, I still tend to freeze up and vacillate for a while when presented with any kind of Morton's fork. The second is that I'm always looking for that ideal route in any video game: a sort of narrative min-maxing that rarely applies to reality but is one of the finer aspects of escapist media - that conceit that a perfect plan always exists and can be executed upon with enough foresight and consideration.

Headliner: NoviNews, the second game in the Headliner series from Unbound Creations, is distinct for a few reasons, the first of which is that your job in determining what becomes headline news (hence the title) has very apparent effects on public opinion and the world around you, but secondly because it's a relatively short game - there's fourteen in-game days, which takes a couple of hours to see in full - designed for replays. Rather than "be satisfied" with your initial set of choices, you can jump right back in and see what would've happened if you'd been more critical of one recurring news topic or another; though you're likely to see people suffer elsewhere.

The game is split between two halves, the first of which is the morning shift where you do your job and select op-ed news stories to go out to broadcast later that same day, many of which run counter to each other, which boost or discredit various important news topics. Set in the near future in the fictional country of Novistan, these topics range from the quotidian like government overreach, the necessity or delay-incurring perils of universal healthcare (eep), the nature of the current pandemic wracking the country (eep eep), increased police brutality and extrajudicial abductions (eep eep eep), and the country's strained relationship with its closest neighbors, to the more futuristic like the abundance of peacekeeper drones on the streets, the emergence of the dubious "synthehol" BuzzBetter, or the increased prevalence of genetically modified embryos. Your boss recommends that you stick to whatever positions you initially take, mostly so it doesn't mess around with the game's way of shaping the world to your decisions (besides, dithering on everything just makes the station seem untrustworthy), and the results of these stances and biases have a profound effect on the second half of each day, as you make the evening walk commute back to your apartment.

Graffiti and civil unrest on the streets are the most overt reactions to your news editing, though your close relationships are profoundly affected as well: your brother, Justin, an aspiring comedian with an inclination towards chemical dependency and anxiety attacks who is looking to you for support; your coworker Evie, a foreigner keenly aware of xenophobia (potentially increased or decreased by any nationalist streaks in the news) who came to this country for the better healthcare and is a potential love interest; the local shopkeep Rudy, whose business suffers from increased globalization and might be convinced to sell out and go all-in on the newest synth fads; or an adorable pup that can be kept in your apartment at a minor expense or turned away.

Headliner: NoviNews isn't quite as severe with its repercussions as a Papers, Please or Gods Will Be Watching, which really seem to enjoy twisting the knife, but seeing how your choices greatly affect the people around you in positive and negative ways is distressing on one level and impactful on another. The former, of course, comes from any sense of guilt you might have in generating suffering for the sake of alleviating it elsewhere, though you can play your character as a generally insouciant career gal (or guy; or non-binary, which isn't an option I see too often) who shrugs their shoulders at the chaos they're inadvertently sowing. There's also the stark similarities between the game and real-life, in part because of those previously mentioned hot topics, but also in how the current president is clearly up to no good and you have the choice of bringing the government's crimes to light at the risk of getting your boss arrested and your brother spirited away to a government black site, or letting them walk all over you and the people by regurgitating their jingoistic scapegoating lies about the nearby nation of Learis being the root of all problems faced by Novistanians.

That impactfulness comes from how Headliner is one of the few adventure games where decisions really make a huge difference, and the relative compactness of the game - both in that the "world" is a single street and that you only ever deal with a handful of topics - makes it easier for the developers to maintain their focus on how certain divisive subject matters can shift the public's attitude towards authority figures, technological advancement, and foreign nations. The length and replay aspect also do a fine job in ameliorating the build-up of tension that might ensue as you stand poised on a spiral of defeat, as playthroughs are short and you can hop into a fresh do-over if you should accidentally let your sibling overdose or get the president assassinated (I mean, shit happens). I can't say I fully enjoyed the game experience, given what I said in the lede about my anxieties with games of this type, but Headliner: NoviNews does as best a job as it can to sell me on the concept.

Rating: 4 out of 5.