News Tower serves up the ultimate journalistic fantasy: a stable work environment

GamesSimNews Tower serves up the ultimate journalistic fantasy: a stable work environmentWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Sparrow Night)

News Tower early access

On January 24, a couple of weeks before I installed the spanking-new industrial printer that would kickstart my own (albeit fictional) newspaper business in News Tower, The New York Times ran the following headline: “The News About the News Business is Getting Grimmer”. A day later, CNN went with “News industry off to brutal 2024 start” and Axios promptly followed up in typically pithy style with a list of outlets in trouble, including layoffs expected to hit major publications such as the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated, depressingly titled “Mainstream media bloodbath”.

(Image credit: Sparrow Night)

News Tower early access

(Image credit: Sparrow Night)

News Tower early access

Most importantly, I had to identify and hire the right people for the right positions. No need for another politics reporter when Dennis had that topic covered, but I was desperate for someone to write about sports—especially since the Flatbush neighbourhood, where we were hoping to attract a readership, was keenly interested in the subject.

News Tower is a business sim of two halves which, somewhat surprisingly, reminds me more of XCOM than a typical tycoon-style title.

Juggling the workaday demands of my organisation is modestly engaging, if not particularly inspiring, at least in the current early access iteration of News Tower. The audiovisual flavour does a lot of the heavy lifting in these stretches, with a downbeat jazzy score setting the mood while the funnels of ocean liners sailing down the Hudson River parade across the Brooklyn skyline as I’m preparing to close shop for the night. But some of the menial tasks required of me have been a regular source of frustration. The cause of an employee’s discomfort remained a mystery even after consulting the relevant view and inner-monologue cloud (whose purpose is, evidently, to disclose exactly these complaints), meaning that some improvements in office ambiance had to rely on arbitrary experimentation. And relocating certain pieces of equipment (looking at you, printer belt) proved so awkward, I decided to restart my playthrough with an altogether different plan rather than suffer through the ordeal.

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(Image credit: Sparrow Night)

News Tower early access

Moreover, the shrewd addition of multi-step assignments and random events that may hinder (or altogether stop) an investigation magically brings to life a cast of characters that, in reality, amount to little more than a bunch of random stats. Based on their history of triumphs and failures, you gradually start projecting different types of personalities onto your employees much in the same manner that you might with the unerring sniper from your XCOM squad or the light-footed winger from your Football Manager team. After successfully navigating a couple of tricky encounters—a brush with some angry mobsters and a standoff with irate police officers—I found myself instinctively entrusting more important stories to Mary Johnson, even though I had a senior crime reporter on the team.

News Tower provides just the bare bones of these stories but brilliantly nudges the player’s imagination to fill in the gaps and turn some basic info and a few rolls of the dice into long-running career narratives: the rising star; the veteran who thrives under pressure; the one who could never catch a break. I could almost hear those people’s excited chatter after their shifts had ended above the din of the local speakeasy, the blare of the orchestra, the clinking of martini glasses. And I could not help but envy them.

(Image credit: Sparrow Night)

News Tower early access

Yes, News Tower still unquestioningly adopts the classic conventions of its genre, always eager to saddle you with the next task the moment you’ve completed your last one, never yielding in its demands on your concentration. And it’s true that, when looked too closely, these design hallmarks start feeling ironically close to the same efficiency-obsessed ideology that plagues the contemporary workplace. But if its underlying principles (alongside that of most business-sims) can be justly scrutinised, that doesn’t mean I cannot still relish that emerging surface narrative: of a news team whose collective careers are allowed to flourish inside a single news organisation, under a single roof, year after year.

News Tower is out now in early access, but the Steam Next Festdemois also still available if you just want to dip your toe in first.

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