Local News with Cliff Rockslide

So far this year, I’ve created annoying content for Salamander County Public Television and manned the control booth while playing Not for Broadcast: Live & Spooky. With that kind of resume under my belt, it only makes sense that my next job would be as a cameraman for a local up-and-coming streaming program in Butterfly Valley. That’s the conceit in the new game Local News with Cliff Rockslide, a narrative adventure where we follow the charismatic host as he accidentally uncovers a conspiracy bigger than anybody can imagine. With a mix of first-person excitement, visual storytelling and puzzle solving, this is not an easy game to classify. But should you still tune in? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Local News with Cliff Rockslide.

From the moment you step off the bus and say hello to Cliff Rockslide, you know that this is not going to be the typical adventure game. Here’s a guy with the want, the desire and the enthusiasm to be a great newsman, only without the training and reputation. He is, like a lot of us in this new world, trying to make a name for himself online through a streaming news program that only has a few active viewers. He’s not going to pay you anything and I’m not even sure this can be classified as an entry-level job, but there’s something about Cliff’s passion and go-get-it attitude that is impossible to resist.

The big problem that our wannabe newsman faces is that he lives in a small, sleepy town called Butterfly Valley, where everybody knows each other and nothing much happens. It’s the kind of town where one of the many colorful characters getting a new pet is considered breaking news, and Cliff better be there to give us all the important details. After all, you need to give the audience what they want.

It's while poking around town for these special interest stories that Cliff uncovers something really BIG – a pumpkin. That’s right, it’s an absolutely massive pumpkin sitting in the front lawn of a local elderly couple. After asking the right questions, we discover that the local farm is full of oversized fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes, radishes and jalapeno peppers. There’s also a weird metric-worshipping cult that has moved onto the farm, as well as a strange chemical being brought to the farm that is definitely not manure. Oh, and did I mention the explosion? That’s right, suddenly Butterfly Valley is full of breaking news stories to cover.

As a cameraman, your job is pretty simple – follow Cliff and make sure you get the best shots during the interviews. Local News turns this aspect into a bit of a mini-game, where the goal is to zoom in on a person or object when it’s highlighted purple, then pull back to get the wider shot when something is glowing green. This seems simple at first, but what makes this so challenging is that the different characters will be spread out, forcing you to predict who will talk next and pan over to them before they stop glowing green or purple. You’ll earn up to three stars (and more subscribers) depending on how good you are at capturing the right shots in each interview, something that really pushes you to improve your craft.

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When you’re not shooting interviews, you’ll need to roam around Butterfly Valley on your own investigating clues that could break this conspiracy wide open. This is something that plays a big part of the game, as we’re asked to sneak into houses and other locations on our own. This is where the game starts to be more about the mystery and adventure, demanding the cameraman to use all of his investigative know-how to solve puzzles and get out safely. And all that is before the story truly goes over-the-top, giving us an epic final act that is simultaneously goofy and satisfying.

For as clever as the cameraman conceit is, the real star here is the story and the writing. It’s common for conversations to go on for quite a while, and there are enough jokes and humorous bits to keep things from being too wordy. Although the developer describes Local News as a “first-person visual novel,” it didn’t really remind me much of a visual novel, at least not at first. Sure, there were a lot of conversations, but there were also puzzles, action bits and a whole town to investigate.

However, things start to shift a bit in the final act. That mini-game where you try to capture the perfect shots during interviews basically goes away, replaced by linear stages with lots of running and exposition. That’s not to say that the second half doesn’t stack up to the first, because this game goes in some truly crazy directions and there’s a fight at the end that you definitely won’t see coming. Even though it’s over a bit too soon, Local News is full of fun and clever ideas that you won’t find in other games this year.

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While the story definitely satisfies, there are a few technical problems that got in the way. The biggest issue I ran into was that I couldn’t use the mouse in the game. I could walk around in Butterfly Valley like a normal first-person game, but I couldn’t interact with the environment in any way. In fact, since you need the mouse cursor to use the main menu, I couldn’t change the options or even quit the game. Thankfully, I was able to plug in my PlayStation 5 controller and play through the game.

However, even with the game pad, I ran into a few control issues. The big one was the look speed, which goes from bad to worse depending on if you’re zoomed in or not. Using the default speed, getting a zoomed in shot is practically impossible with the controller. You might think that the solution would be to slow down the cursor in the options, which I strongly advise, but that ends up making the speed of the wide shots so slow that it’s hard to pan from one character to the next before they stop glowing. There’s no good solution to this, at least as far as I could find. In a perfect world, we would be able to set both the zoomed in and zoomed out speeds, preventing this from even being an issue.

There are a few other bugs that popped up, but nothing worth complaining about. I suppose I could also gripe about the inconsistent puzzles, the interview mini-game that basically goes away in the second half and the lack of voice acting, but I found that the story and the writing was good enough to keep me invested. I liked being a cameraman and would love to see that storytelling conceit brought back for more mysteries. Cliff Rockslide is my new favorite streaming newsman, and I can’t wait to see where he goes and what he uncovers next. Local News is an easy recommendation.