Not for many hours but surely for a few play throughs (1st took me just under a hour) and then a few more again once you forget about.
I played four games (my first ended prematurely) and new articles became rarer with each new game. I'm not sure how many articles there are in total, but each week you'll get maybe around 6-8 to choose from. It's exciting to see a new article you never encountered before, but not enough for me to keep playing again and again.
I haven't been able to get a full-blown rebellion with the rebels taking over all four districts, so I don't know if it's possible. The play-through I got on video was the closest I got to being a rebel sympathizer and making it the full 12 weeks. 2/4 of the districts were still Loyalist. I didn't feel like playing again and again, just to see if it's possible. But maybe someone else will be able to get an ending like that.
The app has started to crash on open, anyone else having this issue? Starts to work again after a couple of tries.
Yeah that was happening to me yesterday until I closed all other apps I had open. I emailed the devs about it but never heard back. I assume it's a memory thing.
I'm not sure how people are finishing this in an hour. Are you reading the articles and evaluating what content to censor? There's more to it than just flipping headlines loyalist or rebel, which is probably why some folks are having difficulty achieving their aims.
Exactly. Ive seen youtubers going through the game without carefully considering the nuance of certain headlines
I'm reading many articles and planning the layout of the newspaper, that's the point of the game. Yet it still took me a hour sometimes a little less and got a pretty decent ending 3/4 districts we rebel supporter north we diehard loyalists still and my journalists had some rather interesting lives after the PCB came into place. Honestly I got a much better outcome my first play through than expected. I thing the game needs difficulty settings or something as I pushed and pushed the loyalist government but did not see a single repercussion until the end text, just a few stern letters
So I finally finished my first 12 weeks as a sycophant of the Loyalist government, and I'm conflicted. I'm actually a real life managing editor of a small media company, so I really got a kick out of tweaking the headlines and censoring the body copy, assigning them to (sometimes reluctant) reporters, and laying out the print dummy before allocating my marketing resources and sending that week's baby off to the presses. There were times when this game was a real hoot. I found myself initially reading over the articles very carefully and giving a lot of thought to brainwashing the masses into good little citizens of this imaginary fascist state. Unfortunately, the second half of my first play through kind of fell apart. I started to lose the plot threads of several of the little story arcs that developed over the course of several strings of followup articles. I'm not sure if it was just that their relevance was unclear from the beginning or they were just kind of uninteresting to begin with. I do know that I've been playing Lifeline a bit recently and the amount of recall I have of what happened to Taylor the last time he and I interacted, even when an entire evening or night elapses while he "sleeps," is very high. I care about Taylor and find what's happening to him relevant and engaging in a way that a great deal of what happens in TWI just isn't. Another thing that bothered me is how I stopped receiving mail after the fifth week. I got a threatening letter from the rebels and an invitation to a Loyalists presidential gala and that was pretty much it. And while I'm focused on the top part of the desk, what's the article rejection tray for? What's the point of rejecting articles? I never did and I ended up swaying everyone one way and I think the Independent stayed in business and Phil was named Man of the Year. There's so much potential here. I so wanted to come here and BS a positive post just to get more people buying this on the off chance that the developer refines the gameplay and fleshes out the content. I want to love this game so badly, because the idea of a newspaper game is just so cool! You have no idea how difficult journalism is, unless you've studied it and worked in the field. There are countless ways to write a story and all of them are technically correctly, although each path leads to different reactions from different people. It really is hard to build and cultivate an editorial team that knows which paths are right to take for the audience. There's a chemistry there that's very important. I feel like TWI gets at this in a very basic way. It kind of reminds me of something I read about how Matt Taibbi writes to make the seemingly mundane seem extraordinary (Wall Street financial products that make people's eyes glaze over when you start talking about them, yet they literally destroy lives) while Fareed Zakariah writes to make the ludicrous seem commonplace (the cons of globalization that we all understand are hurting workers in the west, but are accepted as a necessary evil of economic progress because they benefit the wealthy). I did find some criticisms of the game aired in this thread and elsewhere kind of flat. I never had any trouble swaying districts and boosting my popularity. You just need to focus on the stories that a district likes and play to the base in terms of Loyalist versus Rebel slant. Like I said, hopefully the developer keeps expanding and refining this gem of a concept. I'm going to hang onto it rather than getting a refund and putting the money towards Dungelot or Crashlands. In the meantime, I think the developer should bump the iOS version of this down to $2.99 at least. A fiver is kind of steep for what's here, although my opinion might change once I do a rebel play-through. I will make sure to return to the thread for a second round of impressions when that happens.
Try closing all the other apps you have open (assuming you haven't yet). That worked for me when the game was crashing.
Now that there's a price drop, is this worth checking out? I used to be a journalist (the kind with an actual degree, as opposed to a blogger desperate for legitimacy). I remember being intrigued when this game was released, but the ratings had me conflicted.
Journalist here. Bought this for $4.99 at launch. It's pretty disappointing and was never updated. It's a shame because the time is now for a game like this one, only done well.
