Times & Galaxy is a delightful send-up of news machinery
Unfortunately, a series of hard-to-ignore issues derail what should've been a tour de force
Review: Times & Galaxy
Developed by Copychaser Games and published by Fellow Traveller
Rating: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
If you’ve ever worked in a newsroom, the characters (figuratively and literally speaking) onboard the Scanner — the spaceship that acts as the official HQ of the Times and Galaxy holopaper — will all seem very familiar. Uncomfortably so, at times. Right out of the gate (or inside the gate in this case), there’s the receptionist. Warm and welcoming, but with a propensity for passive aggression every now and then. And there’s even the security guard — gruff, sometimes hectoring and on occasion, very reluctantly helpful.
And then you enter the newsroom proper. There’s the upbeat and brash sports reporter rushing over to take a moment and ask if you watched the game. And before the words, “What game?” can leave your lips, they’re grimacing at a missed goal in a match playing out on a TV screen somewhere. You make the best of the opportunity to slip away. That’s when you run into the reporters — particularly those who believe the world begins and ends with their beat. You clumsily wade into a conversation and begin to recount seeing a vehicular accident outside the office the previous day. “You know,” they’ll cut in, “Back in 2005, I was covering a car accident when I got a call-…” Before too long, it’s time to make your excuses and beat a hasty retreat to your own desk.
In the interest of brevity, we’ll skip along past the benevolent and helpful senior reporters, the much-maligned (rather unfairly, if I do say so myself) copy-editor, the hard-to-read assignment desk head and of course, the editor-in-chief who will balance the art of providing astute advice with trying to slip in puff pieces “because the featured person is a friend”. Copychaser Games’ sci-fi point-and-click, narrative adventure and journalism sim Times & Galaxy that released on June 21 is in equal parts an accurate depiction and sharp satire of the newspaper life that often cuts very close to the bone. But it isn’t without its rather glaring flaws.
The masthead
As far as the premise goes, it’s a winner: You are an intern reporter (and a robot to boot) at the titular Times & Galaxy, and have 17 news cycles within which to cement your job. Each cycle introduces different goings-on aboard the Scanner and a new set of news stories you can pursue. These stories take you to malls, courtrooms, different planets and so on.
Upon arriving at your destination, it’s up to you to figure out exactly what the story is. This is done through a combination of examining items of interest, watching events unfold and talking to NPCs. While the first two activities require little personal intervention beyond clicking the item of interest, it’s the third — the talking to NPCs part — where things get more interesting, and less pre-determined. Your dialogue choices (in terms of the questions to ask, the line of questioning to follow, and whether to comment or ask a question) will rather logically determine the sort of information you are able to unearth.
Once you’ve scoured the scene for every little bit of information, it’s time to craft the story. And the way to do that is with the Build-a-Story screen — a fun little gameplay mechanic (see image below) that lets you mix and match informational nuggets you’ve collected. Along every step of the way, you’ll be told about whether your selection pushes your story in one of three directions: Alien interest (because there’s more than just humans in this universe), sensationalist or informative. You’ll also be warned about the impact your choices will have on the Times & Galaxy’s reputation and readership.
For the rest of the game, you adopt a Mass Effect-like approach, whereby you travel to different parts of the ship, interact with all the Times & Galaxy members of staff, and take on little side quests (often at their behest) or main missions. These are a pleasant enough distraction from the more serious stuff like newsgathering and reporting, and give you a chance to get to know your colleagues better. Tying the package together with a neat little bow is the combination of fun visuals, snappy writing and the game’s jaunty title track (which you can enjoy here). At no point in my seven-hour journey did I find the dialogues or personalities to be anything less than entertaining.
Corrigenda
While the official count is around seven hours, I’m convinced my playthrough took a whole lot longer because of the number and variety of bugs (often game-breaking ones) with which Times & Galaxy is infested. At first, I imagined the bugs I’d encountered were aberrations or chance occurrences, but by the time I was done, I was certain that several key QA or testing steps had been skipped before launch. Notable among these was one that kept me from discovering information that could have proven very useful for a story.
As you can see in the clip above, instead of investigating that smile-shaped crack in the ground, my Reporterbot appears to be groping at thin air. I’d assumed that this would eventually stop and his findings would be presented; sadly, it took me seven or eight minutes to realise that game was broken and would need to be restarted. Elsewhere, dialogue bubbles disappear arbitrarily, the odd trophy or two fails to trigger and the most egregious of all: A quest requiring you to match entities from columns A and B refusing to let you scroll up and down the list.
After numerous restarts, I found that the cursor moved just fine from column to column, but going up and down was torture. Where possible, I tend to steer clear of hyperbole, but there’s very few other ways to describe the agony (there’s another) of pushing the thumbstick up or down repeatedly, until the cursor finally moves one place. Then you repeat the process. And again. And again until a task that should’ve been fun and taken no more than 90-odd seconds to accomplish, ends up turning nightmarish and taking 20 minutes.
The bugs are only one, albeit sizeable, aspect of what lets Times & Galaxy down. The second big issue with this game is the unutilised potential of so many of its features. Chief among these is the Build-a-Story tool that ends up being less about your ability to sniff out a story than a case of relying on whichever option gets you a bigger reputation and readership boost. NPCs attempting to influence or guide your story in a particular direction (as you’d see in a real newsroom) is a concept that is also grossly underutilised — I believe it pops up once or twice at the most. The codex is another example of a great idea that serves little purpose. Not once did I find any of the information in there helping me out on the field or as part of any side quest. Additionally, throughout the game, it’s possible to seek feedback from your seniors about how you’re doing. Unfortunately, the response ends up being largely perfunctory and doesn’t offer enough of an incentive to do things differently.
Third, there’s the most ironic issue of all. Typos strewn across the game as liberally as points of interest on the map of an Ubisoft game. Off the top of my head, I came across the word “sentance” (see the Build-a-Story screen grab above), someone was apparently “listing to” somebody else, and finally on the topic of naming ceremonies, I was informed that those in charge had “stopped given out” certain types of names. In most games, spelling and grammatical mistakes can be ignored, but in a game about journalism that cocks a snook at the notion of journalists who can’t spell, this is quite inexcusable.
Letter to the Editor
Ultimately, Times & Galaxy is a fascinating idea that stutters in its execution. Imagine an investigative report for which you’ve zeroed in on an important story, conducted thorough research, lined up on-record interviews and a robust list of corroborating accounts, nailed the timeline of events and are all set to write it. But then you decide only to use half the quotes, bury the lede, introduce logical errors in the presentation of the story and most unconscionably, litter the prose with typos. Alas, I find that to be a most fitting analogy.
The writing throughout the game is of a high quality, which is an absolute prerequisite for narrative adventures and visual novels. The art style is attractive and the core gameplay loops are fun. Most importantly (to me, anyway), the game has a lot of important and insightful things to say about journalism, journalists and the nature of the business at large. However, the gameplay, the bugs and other issues conspire to prevent you from engaging with this insight and depth of thought in any significant or meaningful manner.
The bugs and text problems can probably be patched out with an update or two, but the game itself — one for which I had very high hopes — spurns the chance to be a seminal work on journalism. Which is a shame. Well, on the brighter side, at least it’s a whole lot better (and a lot less pontificating) than The Newsroom.
Game reviewed on PlayStation 5. Review code provided by publisher