The Westport Independent

A nice little game to play. It's a bit short but when the game costs 0$ can't really complain about the length.

A solid game with an interesting premise, where you play as an editor deciding what stories to censor or publish in a post-war dystopia. The moral dilemmas and narrative tension are intriguing, but the gameplay feels a bit repetitive after a while. It’s a decent experience, but you can’t help but feel like it could’ve been better with a bit more depth or variety.

Game is fine but very short, which harms its replayability. Would recommend for under £2.

EDIT: Game .exe no longer runs for me and the promised hotfix in 2017 has not appeared. I would no longer recommend the game.

This is a game whose demo I played long ago, which I only recently came back to finally try for real. I don't know why I didn't play it then; I wonder if history would've been a bit different. The reason why I wonder that is that I find societal conjectures particularly interesting to contemplate, and this game in its inescapable polemics puts forward a comprehensible societal conjecture. It would've affected me had I played it fully four years ago; it is instead affecting me four years later.

This game then does something that I think extensively forgives that: it uses those themes in a complicated puzzle the extent of which I can at least say takes more than three hours to master. It felt like an accomplishment getting riots in the staunch northern sector, and yet it left me wondering if there would be some manner of narrow path of light in this game. Newspapers that strike out against administrations that restrict them are not acting unjustly, but can the loyalists fall without so much dying?

I feel compelled to resort to guessing at content I haven't seen in order to judge the game... which is to say, it successfully put me in suspense both within the story and about its multi-play metastructure. I have to give that credit. It also offers a clear source of biased exploration of that metastructure: what kind of paper are you running? Is the Independent a crime rag fixated on why everything is terrible? Is it a 'serious' industrial paper that loathes to share the celebrity press? How do each of these 'larger variations' affect the flow of this particular societal conjecture?

I've seen another game authoring conjectures about societal implications in this manner. That was Headliner. I think both do a credit to the concept. To speak of the concept in a way that might promote something other than copy-catting, thinking about this game makes me think that something along this lines - retaining the awareness of societal implications - could be grown towards simulation stature to model a software toy version under fewer constraints. As a network influence model, it would be another way for people to fantasize about perfect influence, this time representing the perspective of journalism.

As a petty note, I also like the simple sepia color scheme. I think it's used artfully. I can tell that these colors used this monotonously risk being boring, but they didn't bore me here.

For a small ammount of money this is a nice game to play one or two times. You lead an newspaper in a world where the leaders of the nation are not at their best. How do you spread this news? Are you causing problems? It is up to you. One game takes 12 steps of making choices for your newapaper. This takes up to 40 minutes in total for a playtrough. Playing it ones mores is fun, but not forever.

The Westport Independent is a great example of a good tiny game. It can hold your attention for a night or two. You won't regret your playtime. Regardless of fact that this is very small it has freedom of choice, quite rich branched storyline and colourful charachters. Yes colorful, even if in the game you see only one or two text lines and silhouettes in cutscenes between turns. Many games with big budgets for dialogues and storylines by renowned authors couldn`t give me comparable good experience. Despite the fact that questions brought up by game designers are not currently important for me because of a different attitude toward media in my country and in the western world, I am glad to see that game developers bring up questions that are important for them, I believe. Thank you guys! I don`t regret spending money on it and I recommend this pretty game to everyone who reads or watches news.

Seemed like a novelty idea to explore the concept of media censorshop, especially in this day and age of "fake news"
Unfrotunately the game falls short because no matter what the choice is, it's simply inconsequential. Too bad.

TL;DR: Definitely not worth the full price, but grab it on sale if you have an interest in propaganda, censorship and/or publishing.

-----------------------------

An interesting game which put you in charge of a weekly newspaper in the fictional fascist city-state of Westport. Which four articles will be published this week, what will you censor and will the header be biased? Whom of your four unique employees gets to write which article, and how will it affect the government's suspicion of them? Which article gets to be on the front page and to which of the four city districts do you market your newspaper the most? Will your paper be popular enough to sway public opinion one way or the other before the Loyalists feel you've crossed the line and crack down on your humble little newspaper? And you only have 12 weeks before the strict new law is passed and the game ends!

Twelve weeks, twelve papers, and the fate of the city's future.

If you have an interest in propaganda, censorship and publishing you will like this game. Sadly it offers very little replay value. After playing through the game twice in two hours I noticed very little variation in the possible stories I could publish, despite playing radically different both times.
If you can grab it on sale, do so. But it's just FAR too short and simple to recommend for the full $10 pricetag.

First off: Have you ever read George Orwell's "1984"? Did you appreciate the meanings in it? Did you appreciate the perspective of a government worker who had to edit the media to ensure it to be proper for public viewing? Did you also appreciate the emotions that were conveyed, the fear of defying the government, which could lead to your death, or the thrill of doing the same thing, not giving a damn about the governement and giving the people the information they deserve?

Well, my friend, this game reminded me of 1984. It reminded me of the rumors Americans had heard of the Communist Russia. It reminded me of the thought and fear of a totalitarian government ruling above all. This game placed me in the shoes of the editor for an indepentant media outlet (newspaper, in this case). And in my first playthrough of it, I felt concern for what the government would do to me and my colleagues if I chose to speak out against the government, even the things that were accidents.

One of the things about this game is that you don't know how your article choices affect you, your colleagues, the paper, and the public opinion, until the next week.

I enjoyed this game, and I can't wait to find every different ending I can. I hope you enjoy it too.

If you expect an ambitious game in the league of "Papers, Please", you will be highly disappointed. This game takes less than thirty minutes to complete. Most people think it's too short, but personnaly it allowed me to do a few runs, whereas I did one game and a half of "Papers, Please". This way, you can try many things.

In my first run, I aligned with the government, which was very easy. In my following runs, I tried to make each district revolt. The South and East are easy to "win"; the West and, above all, the North are super hard to turn around (they are lawful Loyalists in the beginning). This was where the game became challenging. I find it amusing to think that one of my hardest challenge in video games was to inform rich people through newspapers that their government is evil and that they should work against it. Who knew we would someday live in such a time...

However, I'm still unsure if the challenge is either very tough and complex or just plain unfair. I feel like you don't know enough about the mechanics. It seems like it's not any articles speaking against the government that will get to the North folks. What makes it even harder is that you have to avoid making the government suspicious; to influence the North, you will almost inevitably bust your limit. How do you find the balance? Lucas Pope, the creator of "Papers, Please", created a free game with a similar concept to The Westport Independant called Republia Times (it was released before). It wasn't divided into districts, and the outcome of everything you did was obvious. Also, the gameplay consisted only of choosing which articles to publish, and how big they would be on the front page; you couldn't modify the titles or the content, and you didn't have to assign them to a specific journalist. Finally, there wasn't all the marketing side of the game; your articles were either political (which are not popular but are influential) or about celebrities or entertainement (which have the opposite effect). So it was simpler and more straightforward, but at the same time isn't it a bit boring if you're sure of the outcome, and if there's no challenge?

The community is so inactive that you can't expect to find a guide on the web. You can't even find a clear description of the achievements.

So yeah, I'm a bit mixed about all of this, but overall I had a great time and it was very compelling to try to make rebels out of the North folks (in which I succeeded! Yay for me :D ).

A minimalistic game inspired by Papers, Please.
You play as an editor at a newspaper
that is being watched by the fascist government.

You have to decide to either censor the news by removing certain details and spinning the headlines
or you report critically against your own government, causing yourself and your employees trouble.

It is a numbers game, meaning you are trying to balance loyalist/rebel support, your suspicion with the fascists, aswell as the popularity of your newspapers by managing marketing aspects.

Your first playthrough of it will be about an hour long.
The replayability is naturally high.

Games like this... really make you think.

A difficult recommendation.

The Westport Incident tries to hit the same trigger "Papers, Please" did and show how difficult it is to operate within a repressive dictatorship. You are taking the role of a newspaper editor who has to basically choose between being a government mouthpiece, and keeping the paper running while being complicit in the government repression; or reporting the news in a more truthful manner, but by doing so putting not just the paper, but also your employees at risk.

Gameplay consists of choosing which articles to put in the paper, how to present them, and who to write the article. For example you may get an article about a bombing. Articles can be roughly separated in two categories: politics and fluff.
Fluff is without risk, but doesn't do much for your paper's popularity.
Politics is where the risk is.
If you are fully loyal throughout it's easy to complete the game, although you do end up supporting a totalitarian regime.
If you decide to be disloyal (and report the truth), you will run into several problems. The most clear one is that if you become too disloyal to the government before time runs out, the paper is closed and the game ends. But even if you try to balance this somewhat by occasionally reporting something with a government slant or publishing fluff instead, you may still risk your employees as they all have their own suspicion meter. Allow this to go too high and they are arrested and you will have one fewer article you can print each week.
Increasing the difficulty further is that your employees have different political leanings, a Loyalist supporter will not be happy to write against his government, for example.

The various loyalties and suspicion rates make the game pretty difficult to balance. There are several possible endings, and it will require multiple playthroughs to unlock them all.

While I like the concept a lot, I have a few issues with this game and they hold it back from being a new classic like its obvious inspiration Papers, Please.
First off, the various mechanics are not really explained. Unless you read this or other reviews, your first playthrough you will likely have no idea about the different employees' suspicion meters, and their arrest will come at a complete surprise. The game has a too brief tutorial and it doesn't tell you about this at all. It is also not clear exactly how the advertisement works, and if this even matters. Each district has two subjects it cares about, but does that mean you are wasting advertisement points by still placing adverts in a district if your paper doesn't include a subject they like? The game doesn't tell you this.
Second, the presentation. There is no voice acting outside of the intro, there is very little animation, and the game simply does not look that impressive. You will be spending most of your time on the same screen just sliding things around with no variation.

For $/€ 10 as it currently priced on Steam I expect more from a game, but at a discount price I can recommend it.

Pick it up if you like Papers, Please, or the idea of working as a newspaper censor in a totalitarion society.

Unfortunately, I can not recommend this game, even though I was hoping it'd be good.

As many others have mentioned, it seems quite similar to "Papers,please" (a game I really liked a lot), and I think that's due to
- the old school graphics which look pretty much like a C64 game. However, it doesn't matter much, as Papers, Please proved (even though I think it should be obvious) that a game doesn't need triple A graphics and can be fun even when it looks very outdated, as long as the GAME is good!
- The theme... the story is set in a region/country with a quite oppressive government, and you have to play along with the rules or suffer harsh consequences
- The fact that you have to decide a lot whether you DO play by the rules, or try to be rebellious.

And I think the game COULD have been fun. However... please take a look at the amount of time I played. That's one and a quarter playthrough...

Yes.

Uh huh, I am serious. I finished the game in what, 33 or 38 minutes? I can't for the life of me understand why there are only 12 "rounds". 12 weeks where you put together a newspaper with 4 articles once per week.
You have different authors, some more in line with the regime, others rather rebellious. You decide whether you print news about politics and spin them to make the government look nice and caring, or try to tell people the truth.

For my first playthrough, I tried to satisfy the government just to see how that'd go. And I finished the game after less than 40 minutes. SO I figured, "Ok", maybe this is supposed to be played several times with different decisions.
However, the replayability suffers because everything stays pretty much the same...your editors, their cutscenes in between weeks (even though they do refer sometimes to decisions you made, many of them stayed the same the second time I played), the headlines/stories.
If they at least had put in randomly generated editors, so you'd have SOME variety when starting over. If they had put a pool of possible stories. I saw the exact same ones in my second game, so even though the game is short, I totally lost interest in replaying during, I think, week 4 of game 2. I had tried to "rebel" against the government this time, but with THAT much repetition, it felt dull.

I think this game COULD have been cool had they put in more randomly generated stuff. More variety. An increasing difficulty (like Papers please, where each day, a new thing to watch out for would be added or changed). More "time". Why only 12 rounds? This feels like a demo for a much bigger game, but sadly, that's all there is.

Even on sale, I don't think the game offers enough for about 5 EUR, not when there are games with more content and depth for like 99 cents. This had the potential to be good or at least decent, but now its a demo-sized game that feels as if the devs started with a great idea and then either lost interest, ran out of ideas or had to meet a deadline and finished the game in a rather basic shape.
Too bad, I would have enjoyed a Papers,please type game with different story and mechanics (newspapers instead of a customs officer), but this is just too little content, gameplay and mechanics. Try it if it's on sale for a buck or two, but I don't think this is worth 5-10 EUR.

At first I was excited about this game, as everybody else, because of the success of Papers, Please, we were hungry for more of this kind of game.

Unfortunately, this feels more like an unfinished prototype of a game.

Most remarkable is the gaping void left by the lack of features in the game. Every ingame week is the same. You grab a story, change its headline, erase a few paragraphs and send it to one of your writers. Then you finish the newspaper which is basically placing the stories in order and choosing which demographic to market that specific issue to. There are no twists, no presentation of new challenges and events that change the dynamics of the game like in Papers, Please; every week is exactly the same.

Gameplay is boring and uneventful. There is no payoff or incentive of going either way. Going Rebel is pretty much the only way to go since unlike Papers, Please, if you go the Loyalist route, there is quite literally no challenge - you cruise through the game knowing that you'll "win". And you have zero incentives of going the Rebel route. Nothing in this game rewards you for anything; you're just expected to do things because it's how you're "supposed to play it".

The only positive things I can say about this game are the graphics and the core idea, which was unfortunately badly executed.

All in all, this is a game that could use a very heavy content update, or even a good do-over. As is, it's not worth playing.

Let's face it, there are comparisons to papers please but it plays nothing like it. So let's break what you have to do down. Ok?
Step 1: Choose your article
Kinda a no-brainer, you are the editor at a newspaper after all. What you have to do is decide WHAT makes it into your paper. You can change the title and remove parts of the article. And it changes the opinion of both the people and the government
Step 2:Publishing the Article
Who writes the article? you? well that's not in your paygrade so deal with it. Your employees do that. However they have their own opinions about the government and how comfortable they are with you. In this game snitches don't get stitches. And they will report on you if they become uncomortable with what you have them do
Step 3:Selling your paper.
This dosen't become avaible until later but you need to manage your marketing. You decide which districts, a total of 4, get your marketing. this then can change their opinion of the current state of affairs in the nation.
Step 4: Repeat?
Well yes, but people do have their opinions of you. If the government becomes too suspicious of you or your employees, you'll be shut down or they will be arrested.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------So basically it kinda gets monotonous around week 7-8 depending on your playstyle but it can be quite fun. Do you obey the loyalist government or help the rebellion? it's hard to do but there are many different endings depending on how you changed the opinions of the people. It's a very fun game and i reccomed it to anyone looking for a good noir style game
It eserves a solid 8/10

Westport is one of those rare gems about wrestling with different perspectives and compromising beliefs while trying to find some greater purpose as redemption for the actions that you do or do not take. The game comes at a time where discussion of the idealogical role of news media and how we form the beliefs we do is important to have.

While it is entirely possible to breeze through in 30 minutes or less, criticising the game for this misses the point.

Modern game design has conditioned us to seek the optimal solution to a problem, but never to reflect on the moral quandry of whether the optimal choice is the same as the right choice. Just like in life, there are easy roads pandering to power and group influence, and there are hard roads of moral principle and rational thinking. To that end the easy loyalist playthrough holds a mirror out from which you figure out where you are on that scale. It's the tension of that easy way out always tempting you that adds value to the choices that you do make. I don't think i've seen a game do this before, let alone do it well.

In some ways there really are no good or bad guys in westport - the rebels are just as much if not more repellantly violent and oppressive as the loyalists. Instead, the core excercise for me quickly became juggling the welfare of my journalists against informing the public of important issues affecting their civil liberties. Who will you choose? Those tangibly close to you, or the unseen public?

Increasingly, you'll find yourself evaluating stories based not on the actual subject matter, but underlying agendas and perceptions that can be pushed by drawing seemingly intuitive conclusions. What is being sold, and what is being ommitted in order to allow those connections to be formed?

And those high minded idealogical journalistic ideas you set out with? Soon you'll be addicted to soft target issues of no newsworthy value simply because they have the least ammount of tied interest while still having popularity value. Poor Harold Finn, I bullied him so much simply to fill pages and get readership :(. An interesting take on the prevalence of celebrity news in modern society.

I'm already thinking about how people will percieve Westport after reading this recommendation. And in some ways I think that might say more about the game than anything else i may or may not have written.

In the interest of fairness and objectivity, there are a few negatives however:
- First week content (tutorial) is largely unskippable
- some of the coffee table dialogue was more conversational placeholder like "this coffee is bad" and "i went on a date which wasn't a date" instead of dealing with interesting choices made or furthering the narrative within the game's theme.
- Advertising preferences are not saved so you have to keep redoing the sliders each week.
- Sometimes get crease and desist threats from the government despite having played a loyalist turn the previous week.
- sometimes hard to tell how anti-loyalist a story is without passing it to phil (the loyalist journo) to see if he wants to transcribe it or not.
- Auto saves at the beginning of each week so if you lose that turn you have a redundant save slot you gotta manually delete.

I personally really enjoy this game. YES, I know, it didn't live up to expectations, its short, and isn't as emotionally conflicting as Papers Please. BUT, what you have here is still a good, fun, original game. Your a media outlet editor under the employ of the "Westport Indipendent", a newspaper publisher. Westport itself however, is a large industrial city split into four districts, The southern docks, the eastern industy area, the western middle class region, and the upperr class elite northern section. The country that westport is part of is run by a totalitarian regime that is referred to as "The Loyalist Party", their goals lie within censoring general media, television shows, books, and other sources of information for the sake of a tighter and more controlling grip on their citizens. The game starts off with a notice from the loyalist party, it states that soon a bill will be passed that basically shuts down all indipendent media outlets and inserts the government in control of all media. You will have 12 weeks until the bill is officially in action, meaning that you must do what you can, to influence the populace through your media in whatever way you can, for example, in my first playthrough I focused mainly on posting government propoganda, to get on the good side of the loyalist party, in turn I was able to influence the unruly southern docks into showing more loyalty towards the loyalist party, which is a big chunk of westport's population, and by the end of the 12 weeks, the government was more dystopian than ever thanks to me, militarized police that were labeled as heroes by my media outlets propoganda, flags on every street corner due to the recently brainwashed populace, and of course, the mass arrests and executions that happened anywhere disloyalty may lie. And as for my second playthrough, I took a hardheaded stand against the loyalist party, trying to brew rebel support into all the districts, I didn't play my cards well, and long story short, me and all my writers one by one were arrested, and assumedly executed. Im still trying to get a perfect rebel ending, trust me, its tough, I've already gotten a half decent rebel ending, but it basically just meant half the city was in a state of anarchist uprising... but wow, Kinda led a tangent with this review, hopefully its helpful in someway to somebody.

For the 10 EUR I paid for this game I could have gotten a kebab, fries, and a coke. And consuming those would probably have taken me longer than it did to play this game.

There's some potential here, but it falls horribly short. The game lasts only for 12 turns, which is nowhere near long enough to make you give a damn about the four people in your editorial team or the gameworld that you inhabit. The game just feels empty and entirely forgettable.

The game is visually appealing, so it does have that going for it. But it still feels like a demo, not an actual game.

If you can pick this up at a heavy discount, its a fun little game to try, but at full price its robbery in broad daylight.

I have just completed my first playthrough of the Westport Independent. I stayed loyal to the government, always painting the rebels as the bad guys and making sure every district adored the Loyalists. My extreme devotion cost me an employee, Frank, but I weakened the rebels' movement and remained a popular newspaper.
While the game is a bit shorter than I would have liked, I still loved this experience. I loved imagining how the people reacted to the articles, how this dystopia changed. I see a lot of replay value in this, to see how the other extreme and min-maxing would work out.
If anything, my main gripe with the game is a minor one; the achievement don't have a description after I unlock them. Minor but annoying.
If you enjoyed Papers, Please or want to see how government censorship can work out in a dark world, I highly recommend this game.

I would like you to note my playtime...

I had high hopes for this game but sadly it fell short. I started with a full Loyalist playthrough and it was dead easy. I had my more rebel leaning journalist write about celebrity gossip and my loyalist leaning journalists write about the glorious actions of our beloved government (Heavily censored of course) so that they would always feel safe and be happy. I quickly gained big favour with the Loyalists, turned all four districts to full loyalist support and won the game. On my second playthrough I decided to, no matter what, go full rebel!

...The Loyalists arrested Frank on turn four. I think he was the one that was a rebel, here you see how much the game had me care about the employees. I don't know who is who...). The Loyalists then shut me down at turn six.

I can see that the challenge of the game is to run a rebellious newspaper without getting shut down and hopefully see the Rebels overthrow the Loyalists in the end of the game but frankly I can't be bothered to try, not now anyway. When playing as a loyalist there is really nothing that counts against you since there is no risk that rebels attack your offices.

Many people have compared this game to Papers Please, and I can see why as they are set I very similar environments, and with similar gameplay elements, like the big bad government and resistance movements. But in Papers Please, going for either one brought different challenges and different rewards. I would like to point to my previous paragraph and once again point out that the rebels are no threat to you in this game.

Is this game worth its price? Absolutely not! The game is maximum twelve turns and i've seen people finish it in around 40 minutes. For me it took an hour. If you want to test it out I suggest that you buy it on the appstore instead where the price is around half of Steams price. Some things change, such as which articles appear on which turn but on my second playthrough I didn't really see any new articles that I didn't get in my previous playtrough. Between turns there is a cutscene where your journalists discuss the current state of the country somewhat based on the articles you decide to print but how the discuss them don't really change depending on what you censor and to which side you lean.

It's a good concept but it doesn't feel finished or fleshed out and for that I can't recommend it as of now.

Sadly I cannot recommend. The demo had 7 weeks, and this only has 5 more. I thought this game was going to be significatly longer, and may have some business management to it. Sadly that it not so.
This somehow felt like it was just about to get to the climax when it ended, which utimately was a let down.
The art style however, is beautiful, and the work on lore and background is great.

*Edit 1*
Hm, that's odd, the top reviews on the page have suddenly shifted.. the first displayed ones are now positive with the reviews being rated less helpful then others farther down the list.
There's also a sudden surge of positive reviews. Odd.

Look at the time i spent playing this game. Yup, that is a single playthrough. 12 turns, that is all.

Replay value seems minor as there are hard repurcussions for extremes, so there is no Papers Please-esque payoff to certain actions.

That said, this game has a lot of potential, and if the gameplay lasted for longer than 12 weeks (turns) i would be able to recommend this game.

As it is now, however, why would i pay 10 euro for a game that entertains me for a shorter time than most Youtube content?