Headliner is a cheap but very interesting indie game. It places you in the seat of a “headliner” at an online news agency. You’re the person who gets to choose which stories to run. This is done by simply stamping a “tick” or a “cross” on the piece of paper with the story idea. It’s quite simple.
The game is explained quickly and nicely across two days. However, the game is quite short as each run only takes 7 in-game days and the game can be completed in just under an hour as a result. Despite this, there are several potential endings depending on which stories who select to run. So in reality, there’s a good amount of replay value here and a nice amount of things to discover. For this price, you can’t get much better from a game.
While this is a very interesting game, it does have a downside. It gets repetitive relatively quickly. It’s a good thing the runs as so short. There’s very little to distract from how monotonous all the stamping can be. However, the game is broken up with a walk back home from the office which lets you see the town reacting to the news. In addition to this, there’s also a short scene with the family at the end of the day which lets you select a few speech options. This can also change the ending of the game as your daughter may or may not be caught up in whatever chaos you reap at the end of the game. It might not be chaos of course, you could get a nice ending.
Overall, Headliner is a nice little game which is totally worth checking out. Just keep in mind it is a relatively cheap game so it’s probably got around 3-5 hours of gameplay if you make several runs through the game to collect all the achievements.
