News Tower (now in early access) boasts the intriguing but brief experience of saving a sinking 1930s newspaper
destructoid.comNews Tower, from four-person developer Sparrow Night, tasks you with saving a sinking 1930s newspaper. The game’s early access release feels more like an extended demo, but it’s one that definitely has me intrigued about the future.
The game begins with you inheriting a small newspaper business from your uncle. The paper publishes each Sunday, so you need to start sending out your small team of reporters to find stories immediately. Every story is marked by tags – like crime, politics, or sports – that correspond to the interests of various readers. The tags you choose to print each week, particularly the ones that make it to your front page, affect how much money you earn.
That money can be spent on anything from workplace necessities like bathrooms for your employees to printing presses that let you publish more stories each week. The basic system is easy to grasp, and finding the right way to prioritize the needs of my individual employees and the requirements of running a business made for a fun balancing act.
My first big surprise in News Tower came when I got the chance to plan out my paper’s expansion. There’s an in-game map of New York that’s covered with small neighborhoods you can target each week. Different neighborhoods prefer different types of stories, so as soon as you start expanding, you get to make more purposeful decisions with what your reporters research and what your paper actually publishes.
Along with neighborhoods providing you with alternate goals, there are also various factions in the city who reach out with their own special requests. The mafia offered me good money to halt all crime reporting for a week, and the mayor’s office paid me handsomely to print a few flattering stories about the mayor’s latest initiatives. These “Hidden Agendas” encourage you to expand into neighborhoods that want to read about what your secret patron has requested, which provides you with another fun set of priorities to balance.
Sometimes individual
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