Salamander County Public Television

One of my favorite experiences from 2022 was manning the censor button for a popular news show in the hilarious game Not for Broadcast. This was an expertly-crafted satire that poked fun at the media, all while proving that working at a TV station can be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the brand-new game Salamander County Public Television takes the opposite approach in nearly every regard. It’s an abysmal mini-game collection that is never funny, never entertaining and never seems to understand the purpose of satire. This is my review of Salamander County Public Television, one of the very worst games of 2023.

Let me try to clear up some of the confusion: As a new hire at the Salamander County Public Television station, it’s your job to contribute to the filming of the channel’s many different shows in hopes of earning high ratings. Unfortunately, you were hired at the worst possible time, because it seems as though every single resident in Salamander County has vanished. Poof. All gone. This is especially bad news for a public TV channel, as you need at least a few people tuning in. We’re given a month to figure out what’s going on and to get the ratings back up to an acceptable level, even if that means doing something drastic.

The story is largely confined to a parody Slack program called Whack, which allows you to interact with your boss, Geoffry, as well as another new hire named Ember. Wait, did I say that we interact with them? That’s not entirely true, because we’re the kind of silent protagonist that doesn’t even respond in a text chat. Most of the conversation is between the other two employees, who are often revealing pivotal information and telling the player what to do. Other characters that pop in and out of the chat include the station’s penny-pinching owner, a mouse with very long legs and Susan, the customer service representative of a software company named Rambicule.

When we’re not trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious disappearances, you’ll spend most of your time playing a couple dozen mini-games in order to create a daily stream of TV shows. These activities include stacking as many ingredients onto a burger before it topples over, helping a cat plug in the television, creating a perfect donut, mashing up apples with a shopping cart and even replacing the wheels on your car with mushrooms. The games are silly, random and almost always over in less than a minute or two.

One thing you’ll notice is that these mini-games are very loosely incorporated into the story. These aren’t so much TV show ideas as they are activities that are so flimsy that you have to wonder who would watch this crap. And the way they come up with these so-called show ideas is insulting to everybody involved. Imagine having a group chat about how much you hate pineapples on pizza, so you base an entire show around vacuuming pineapples off of pizzas. Well, you don’t have to imagine, because that’s exactly what happens in the game.

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What’s frustrating is that there is a genuinely compelling mystery happening during all of this frivolity. You would think that the mini-games would revolve around the idea that the good people of Salamander County have all gone missing, yet that’s so far down the list of priorities that it might as well be an afterthought. Everybody at the TV station understands that nobody is watching, so the fact that we continue to produce these terrible shows is absolutely baffling. And let’s be honest, even if the townspeople hadn’t up and vanished, they probably wouldn’t be tuning in, because these show ideas are terrible. They are barely good enough to sustain a minute-long mini-game, let alone a full TV show.

And that brings me to the other big problem with Salamander County Public Television – it simply isn’t funny. This is one of those rare cases where the game is so unfunny, that I started to wonder if it was even attempting to make jokes. That is to say, on the surface, it certainly looks like it’s trying to be a parody of the kind of public television stations that you normally flip by while looking for a Two and a Half Men rerun, what with the full-motion video commercials and segments that run between the mini-games. The problem is that these bits don’t even make an attempt at humor. This is the kind of game that mistakes randomness for a punchline. That can work, but the developer doesn’t even make an effort at creating a funny premise.

The humor works a bit better in the group chat, where there are some funny back-and-forth conversations that sell the absurdity of the situation. Unfortunately, the jokes are almost always ruined by the awful text-to-speech computer voice that steps on every punchline and simply doesn’t understand comedic timing. I found that the artificial voices really took me out of the situation and made me question if I was the only real person in a computer simulation. From the writing to the acting to the way the story is structured, nothing about this game comes across as natural. If you were to tell me that the whole thing was written and made by a computer AI, I would probably believe you. This whole game feels a little off.

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For me, the game’s biggest sin is that the mini-games simply aren’t much fun. Most are easy to learn and take a few tries to master, but even with the learning curve, they just aren’t fun to play. Of the two-dozen mini-games in this collection, there isn’t one that I would want to go back and play. In fact, at least half of them are so bad that I’m happy that I never have to play them again. These mini-games are as paper-thin as you can possibly get, and even that description is too generous for some of them. They aren’t funny or enjoyable, and worst of all, they have almost nothing to do with the television theme.

And even if you somehow get invested in the mystery of an entire county vanishing, the resolution to that story is so unsatisfying that you might as well quit halfway through and make up your own ending. Salamander County Public Television is a satire in search of a target. It’s toothless, pointless and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. And even though it’s only January, this is already a front-runner for worst game of the year. Turn off the TV and go outside.