Not for Broadcast: The Timeloop

Downloadable content was once seen as a way to extend the life of an already great game with new missions and optional adventures. Unfortunately, greedy publishers have spent the last decade giving DLC a blackeye by purposely holding content back and turning it into a cynical cash-grab. But that’s certainly not the case when it comes to Not for Broadcast. The best game of 2022 just wrapped up its DLC trilogy with The Timeloop, a multiverse-hopping brain-buster that ends with a real bang. Literally. I’m not sure it will fully restore your faith in downloadable content, but you absolutely need to play this brand-new add-on. Find out why when I review Not for Broadcast: The Timeloop.

Not for Broadcast is one of those games that continues to surprise me. When I reviewed the original game back in 2022, I gave it a perfect A+ score and raved that it was one of the very few games to get satire right. Since then, we’ve survived a horror-filled episode full of scares called Live & Spooky, as well as Bits of Your Life, a retrospective episode that has you picking up the pieces when things go horribly awry. Now, nearly a full year later, NotGames is back with a big, climactic finale that is also Not for Broadcast’s most explosive episode yet.

If you somehow missed out on the core game and this is your introduction, here’s what you need to know about Not for Broadcast: You sit in the control room at a TV station and command the feed by switching between four different camera angles and censoring anything objectionable. You’ll occasionally run into technical issues and other obstacles, but most of the game revolves around switching between cameras and bleeping profanity. It’s simple and surprisingly fun.

The Timeloop takes us back in time to March 13th, 1985, the day when Dr. Charles Magnus from the Happiness Collective plans to unveil his Euphoria Device. Its purpose is to use waves and science to make everybody happier, whether they like it or not. However, the experiment doesn’t go according to plan and both you and your cranky boss, Bob Boseman, get suck in a Groundhog Day-style timeloop.

This sets up a fun scenario where we’re forced to figure out how to solve this looping problem. At first you think that it will be as easy as swapping out hosts or hiring a guard to keep people from pushing the big red button on the Euphoria Device, but that just creates a new batch of problems. This eventually turns into a puzzle you’ll need to solve in order to override the timeloop machine. But that proves to just be the start of what turns out to be an outrageous adventure that, much like the original game, goes places I’ve never seen in a video game.

Without spoiling too much of the fun, the timeloop eventually gets so out of control that you’re literally jumping between different time periods and multiverses. A lot of the fun and humor of the game comes from seeing the repeating television segment done in dozens of different ways. Since you know how everything will go beat-for-beat, it’s a lot of fun adding a new character to the mix or seeing the same scene done in a pirate-themed multiverse. Every time you think you can’t possibly add more chaos to the episode, the game finds a way to go even more over-the-top.

This gives the developers a chance to bring back a lot of the fan-favorite guests from the core game and previous episodes. My favorite is the conspiracy-minded Alan, who has a really small book to sell you. However, it’s also fun seeing celebrity chef Jordan yell and belittle everybody on set, and it won’t take you more than a few seconds of Geoff Algebra to see why everybody hates him. Even if they don’t fix the timeloop, these pompous, arrogant, self-centered celebrities send the show spinning out of control is so many delightful ways.

One thing that I really appreciated about the first two DLC episodes is that they force you to play differently than the original game. The same is true with The Timeloop. Instead of trying to censor profanity and get the best shots, a lot of this game has you interacting with the footage to find clues and solve puzzles. This small change really helps to make the game feel different from the rest of the series, and it’s just another reminder of how creative this developer is.

That said, because you’re mostly just looking for clues to solve a series of puzzles, I found that The Timeloop felt a lot less interactive than the previous episodes. A lot of this game is you watching the different versions of this news segment. It’s the kind of thing where you know that the solution you’re choosing isn’t going to work, but you can’t wait to see how it plays out. No matter if you’re swapping hosts, adding celebrity guests or going on a crazy journey through space and time, every bit of this game is fun to watch and play along to. Did I care that I was no longer in control of the TV broadcast when I was in a dominatrix dimension? Not even for a second. I couldn’t stop laughing and hunting around for clues.

This truly is one of those games where it feels like they wrote down every idea they could think of and did all of it. Between the different costumes and sets, there was a lot of time and effort put into making each of the segments look authentic. There’s also a staggering amount of dialog, which makes me wonder what the script looked like. From a production perspective, it’s hard to argue with The Timeloop. And that’s true of Not for Broadcast as a whole. Yes, there are times when you can tell that it’s not the real news and instead is done by a bunch of comedians and improv actors, but it won’t take long for you to completely buy into the game’s reality.

As a finale, The Timeloop is fitting. It’s big, it’s crazy and it leaves you feeling exhausted. Best of all, it has a good message in the end that will leave you feeling happy and uplifted. I do wish that they found more ways for this episode to be interactive, but I liked the puzzles and I couldn’t stop laughing at the different versions of the news segment. Of the three downloadable episodes, The Timeloop is my favorite. It’s full of surprises and has a few scenes that I will never forget. I hope that this isn’t the end of the line for Not for Broadcast, but if it is, then The Timeloop is a great way to conclude this amazing game.