The Westport Independent Review (PC)

The Westport Independent can be a frustrating experience, with limited variety and repetitive mechanics, but the game does manage to send a clear message about the media and the kinds of news that we consume, how easily they can be manipulated towards different ends even by those who should know better.

We tend to think of censorship as something that only happened in the past, an impossibility in this age of massive information overload and multiple channels that can transmit it, but right now, there's a South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law proposed in the United States that seeks to promote responsible journalism.

The lawmaker initiating it probably knows that such a bill will never pass, but the simple fact that it is proposed shows that we need to appreciate a game that makes us think about censorship and about how it can affect our society and behavior.

The Westport Independent is developed by Double Zero One Zero and published by Coffee Stain Studios and can be played on the PC, available on Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store, as well as on both iOS and Android mobile devices.

Story

The Westport Independent is set in an unnamed country that is ruled by the Loyalist Party, an organization that seems to embrace the right wing of politics and is opposed by a group of rebels, with the player cast as the editor of a newspaper.

A new Public Culture Bill is coming into effect in 12 weeks, designed to enforce self-censorship and to limit the freedom of speech, and the player has to navigate the tricky political climate to keep their publication in print while also delivering as much real news to the people as possible.

Censorship, the power of the press, the effects of government pressure, the way terrorism can be justified, marketing versus truth are all themes that The Westport Independent touches upon while giving the player the space to create their own narrative every time they explore the same twelve-week period.

The Westport Independent changes

Writing is at the core of The Westport Independent, with the game featuring a wide variety of news pieces that tackle a range of subjects, from the misadventures of a movie star and industrial events to violent protests and confrontations between police and a rebel group.

The articles vary in quality and entertainment value, with some of them offering quite a bit of humor while other focus more on the facts or the effects of government actions on society and those supporting the rebels.

The player as editor creates the narrative with each new campaign, and the only fixed points are the news pieces they have to deal with and the short cutscenes between weeks that show the other employees talking about the state of the country or their personal lives.

The Westport Independent is designed to be played multiple times, but there's too little variety when it comes to both the story elements and the news articles, which puts extra pressure on the mechanics to keep the title engaging.

Gameplay

The Westport Independent is a turn-based experience built on player choice that features some solid core systems with plenty of interactions and consequences to explore in multiple playthroughs.

The player is the editor, which means that, every new week, they get a selection of articles, presumably already written by the staff, and need to decide which of them to publish, with each of the four other employees able to only transcribe one of them into the actual newspaper.

Each of the articles that can be published each week has a headline that can support two different approaches as well as paragraphs of text that can be censored to change the tone of the story or eliminate some of the information that it plans to deliver.

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The journalists themselves have their own personal histories and preferences and might be unwilling to transcribe a particular story if it clashes with the way they see the political situation while a separate meter tracks the suspicions they generate with the Loyalist Party with their reporting.

The player also has control over the placement of stories in the newspaper, which apparently only has four major sections, and the way it is marketed to the four major districts of the city, each of them with its clear preferences and population demographics.

“The Westport Independent is a balancing act, with the player asked to make sure that their newspaper continues to be published by weaving a path between the interests of the Loyalists and the rebels, finding a way to keep popularity up and all employees present at the end of the 12-week period.”

The game uses relatively simple mechanics to show how easy it is for a human being, even one that knows the importance of their actions and the duty they have to the public, to ignore a story or to significantly tweak it in order to serve another interest that seems greater, like the safety of a person or the need to have a job to return to next week.

But The Westport Independent fails to offer enough variety to drive its ideas home, especially when it comes to the news articles and the various ways in which they can be censored.

The headline is the most effective way to tweak the meaning, but the fact that only two are offered, each with clear biases, feels like a missed opportunity, as does the fact that the paragraphs are often too dry to keep the stories interesting the second time around.

I like the message that The Westport Independent sends and the compromises it forces players to make, but the game needs to offer gamers more variety to keep them interested and playing until they see at least one of the detailed endings.

Graphics and audio

The Westport Independent is presented in a pixelated and almost black and white style that, like the rest of the experience, will remind plenty of gamers of Papers, Please.

The look of the game is not too generous and might turn some gamers off, especially given the fact that it's often hard to make out some details, like the statistics that stay glued to the top right corner of the screen.

The presentation used by the developers at Double Zero One Zero does not have a clear and direct connection to the themes of the game and does little to enhance the atmosphere of tension and oppression that the entire experience is designed to evoke.

On the other hand, the interface of The Westport Independent is easy to understand and use, and the early turns of the game do a great job of explaining how everything works.

The sound design is also a little disappointing, with a moody soundtrack that unfortunately repeats every turn and with some grating sounds linked to the actual player actions that forced me to mute everything after about an hour of play.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion