News Tower Accurately Portrays The Mental Anguish Of Chasing Deadlines

It's always fun seeing management sims based on jobs you know, and News Tower knows this. As someone who spent 3 years in uni learning about newsrooms then worked in the more modern versions of them for half a decade after, I would have never thought this could be hit by the management-ification ray. 

More importantly, there's the question of if you'd want to see it. I've heard so many unsavory lies about the nature of journalism and news that you'd think the Tower in the game's title was the one we journalists build out of babies, Scooby-Doo style as we chow down during our lunch break for our 100k/year salaries. And yet, News Tower persists, being a charming take with an interesting view of the world of publishing. 

Title: News Tower

Developer: Sparrow Night

Publisher: Twin Sails Interactive

Platforms: PC

Dateline: This Game

So when it comes down to brass tacks, News Tower is simple. Run a newspaper, assigning from the journalists to the typesetters and publish it every Sunday. Stories have tags, and more tags makes for more readers. It's a great way to objectify a fairly subjective experience- people want to see certain things, and you can work towards seeking those things out. 

It's a game that comes off as hectic, as you manage these, though. While many games always start with a simple 1-2 flow at the start, News Tower literally doesn't function unless you start the game already hiring like, 6 people and a big paper machine, with a very unique supply chain. Staff like Resuppliers are necessary but have long periods of downtime, while journalists almost always have stories go to waste if you want to make sure they're at least getting XP off before the next cycle starts. 

This step-dash of manic spending seems to be inherent to the game, too. Your major progress is defined in pages- you can unlock additional pages for your rag, but once you do you have so much extra column space that you basically feel the urge to blow a huge chunk of money on staffing up to fill it. Compared to games like Anno 117 which are more about slowly easing your way into a tech tree, News Tower feels much more aggressive- it's about leaping into new tiers then aggressively pushing to not go under from the jump. 

The Choices

This framework shows off what I really think the meat of the game is- its decision systems. Every week you're setting your sights on taking over a certain area's readership. This means pandering to their tastes- maybe one neighborhood has a hankering for Crime or Politics, it's your job to go look for stories of that nature. But there's also bigger forces at play: Big organizations like the Mayor or the mob can also approach you with offers, often starting with something simple like not publishing any crime stories this week. 

Having to contort your paper to these needs is the most fascinating part of News Tower by a country mile. You can always reject them- but you'll find you last way longer playing to some kind of team. And at the end of the day, it's not like I, personally, am burying schmucks at the bottom of the Hudson. 

The game even stresses that these aren't moral choices- there's no good faction or bad faction. At the end of the day you're simply making survival decisions, because at the end of the day you're dangerous enough being what is, essentially, a source of information on all things rich and powerful, yet also weak enough that those same rich and powerful can give you a nice editorial shove.

Despite being set in the Prohibition Era, I can't help but feel the framework for News Tower is dyed in the now. It's a very modern understanding of what it's like to be a small news organization working your way up, and it's hard to not just smile a little when a game nicely just gets its subject matter. 

News Tower Verdict 

If you like novel and interesting management sims, News Tower is one you absolutely need to play. At the end of the day it's still a supply chain game- but one that's done in such a unique way that I can't think of any other games that hit quite the same way. 

There is one major gripe with this game that I failed to mention earlier though: The tutorial is abysmal. Due to how aggressively the game jumps in with both feet, you will often have popups for 5 tutorials at the same time- all while the game doesn't automatically pause. My recommendation? Do the tutorial once, then start a new save. It's a level of frustration usually only tied to gacha games, as the game gives you full control of managing everything yet insists you need to look at snacks for your staff like the World Trade Center depended on it. 

Still, once you start that second save? It's a charming game that will absolutely test how well you can operate under pressure. The only unrealistic part is not having redditors tell you a week's worth of work was garbage anyways. 

Game reviewed on PC. Review copy provided by publisher