Front Page: Newspaper Sim

Write the headline. Print the paper. Find out what the town thinks.

Five stories drop on the wire every morning. Pick the lead, pick what runs underneath it, pick a photograph. Then write the headline yourself, out of fragments, and put it on the press.

Nobody here will tell you whether it was any good. The town will.

The headline is the game. You assemble it a word at a time. COUNCIL ADMITS THREE-WEEK DELAY is a different paper from WASTE TSAR BURIES RAT ARMY, and both are yours. The game never comments on what you made. It just prints it.

Three people you answer to, and you cannot keep all three. Readers want heat. The law wants truth. The proprietor wants his own opinions back in print by Thursday. Every edition serves two of them at the expense of the third.

The press. Plates lock. Half a second of nothing. Then your page runs, ink heavy on the first dozen copies and settling as it goes.

In the morning. Circulation. Complaints. One letter to the editor. And one telephone call from somebody who is not happy.

A lie is cheap until it isn't. Print something thin about somebody who can afford a solicitor and you will get a writ. Three of those and you settle, out of the paper's own money.

And the paper remembers. Every front page you have ever run is in the back issues, and what you asserted on edition four can come back as established fact on edition twenty.

Two to three minutes an edition. Forty stories, five hundred headline fragments. Every story, person and paper in this game is invented.

Controls (PC)

• Mouse: click a story to read it, click the arrows to change each headline fragment, click Press.
• Esc: back (at the menu it asks before closing)

The itch.io version

• No ads. No in-app purchases. The full game, once.
• The mobile version's four video offers (stop the press, the lawyer, the photographer, an open wire) are not in this version: free every morning, they would undo the day or stack permanent help.
• A tall window (540x960) that fits a 1080p screen and can be resized.

Credits

Art: LimeZu (limezu.itch.io), Modern Interiors and Modern Exteriors. Fonts: Bodoni Moda, Anton, Source Serif 4, Black Han Sans, Gowun Batang, Varela Round, Pretendard (SIL OFL). Made with Godot.

Privacy policy: https://crystllabs.com/privacy.html