by Dante Douglas (@videodante)

• The Westport Independent
  
• Developer- Double Zero One Zero
  
• Publisher- Double Zero One Zero
  
• PC (Steam, Humble Store, GOG), iOS, Android, Amazon App Store
  

The Westport Independent is a 2016 game by Double Zero One Zero. It’s the first game they’ve launched on Steam and a valiant effort at that. The Westport Independent places the player in the position of a head editor at a small newspaper in country living in the shadow of a rapidly-ascending nationalistic party, in the final 12 weeks before newspapers are subject to a new, harsh regulation on what they can and cannot print.

As the editor, you have say on certain decisions within the game, and can censor news items and change headlines as you are wont- provided that one of your four writers is interested in taking the edited story and finishing it for print. Each turn of the game is one week within the city, and at the end of each turn you are given a short summary of the social and cultural effects of your last issue, as well as breakdowns of how many papers were sold in each of the city’s four districts.

This conceit means that most of the game takes place behind the editor’s desk, and your understanding of the outside world comes through a combination of the stories submitted to you, occasional bits of mail, and the coffee-table discussions of your writers. The primary narrative conflict in the game- between the nationalistic and brutal Loyalist Party and the contrasting, oft-violent rebellion- is delivered through these vignettes of stories, conversations, and mail. It’s an intimate framing of a large-scale national event, and the game shines in its moments of commonplace reflection of macro-level shifts in policy and legislature.

Your writers- Julie, Phil, Frank, and Anne- span the political and class spectrum, and your only information on them comes from their short dossiers available at your desk. They’re characters whose primary characterization is seen through the coffee-side chats and their comfort levels at their job- if you force a writer to write a piece against their political views, they’ll be less comfortable at the job, and might even quit.

Aesthetically, TWI is gorgeous. The simple color palette and exquisite art shines through, especially when bolstered by ‘period-appropriate’ 1940s-style jazz throughout the game. Each scene feels rich in detail and care, and even the silhouetted figures of the writers are rich with life in the moments where you can see them vignetted against the windows, in conversation. Little artistic and design touches- like the changing logo of the Independent based on which districts you market to, are brilliant. It’s a very welcoming environment, even if the narrative conceit of the game is harsh, and built on conflict..

Above all things, The Westport Independent becomes a game of managing averages. Each article chosen to feature must be balanced such the writer is not uncomfortable with the piece, and that the Loyalist government does not unduly suspect your paper for spreading rebellion propaganda. It’s a balancing act, one that is meant to reflect the actualities of writing anti-government material in a country where the government particularly cares about upholding their reputation.

It’s strange, then, that TWI goes to the effort of allowing the player to choose to side with the government. A black-hat narrative option aside, the path of least resistance is also the most evil- choosing to censor what the Loyalists would like censored and pass innocuous stories to your more rebellion-minded writers is a piece of cake, but it’s clearly not what the developers intended as the ‘full playthrough’ of the game.

As with many modern titles, TWI does offer multiple endings depending on the city’s view of your paper and of the government at the end of the game. Each week in game-time reassesses the city’s priorities within each of its four districts, which roughly run a scale from ‘more affluent and consumeristic’ to ‘more working class and critical’. It’s a thin critique, at best, of class divisions within a city of stratified class relations.

Hints of deeper criticisms of gentrification, violence, and drug use occasionally pop up, but frustratingly the game is very centered on what I would unkindly call a ‘Bioshock Infinite critique of class’, concerned ultimately with the rather thought-terminating conclusion that ‘power will corrupt’ over any more meaningful interaction with systems of power. There is no talk of race, sexuality and only a few throwaway lines about the intersection of gender with class.

It’s disappointing, ultimately- especially when placed against the game's’ high points and intimacy with the ‘ground-level’ effects of social change. There simply could have been so much more said through the game's’ mechanics and writing that feels noticeably absent. For a title so pointedly interested in the effects and manifestation of class privilege, it is silent on the intersections of other systems that affect citizens’ quality of life.

At times, the systems of the game interact masterfully, though not always so. For example, a writer who has tripped the party line can be arrested- effectively removed from your pool of writers. In a game where you only have four writers, each of whom can take one article for a four-page newspaper, the loss of even a single writer drastically affects your productivity in taking articles to print.

It’s a shame, too, because if this mechanic was deepened- possibly by the ability to hire more writers, or restaff from a pool of potential writers- this could have opened possibilities for far more strategic staffing. I don’t particularly want to fault the developers for this (it would have probably exceeded the scope of the game, and possibly subverted the goal to empathize with the writers you start with) but it’s worth noting.

The game is short- probably about an hour for each playthrough, played at a moderate pace. At the end of each playthrough, you are presented with a short epilogue of each four districts’ current events and that of your writers. It’s a relatively transparent system, but not negatively so. Depending on what you print, and who read it, there is a possibility that the Independent swayed the people, toward the rebellion, or toward the Loyalists.

I appreciate what The Westport Independent does with its setting. Placing the player in a position of limited social interactivity is relatively ‘accurate’ to the role of a newspaper in a society- it may not dictate what to do, but what is being printed will have an effect. It’s a strange place to put the player, intentionally limited in their power over the city, but when it works, it works very well. I only wish it worked more often.