Headliner

Headliner is a thought-provoking simulation game set in the dystopian nation of Galixia, where you assume the role of the Headliner (Chief Curator) of a local news channel. Amidst genetic engineering controversies and civil unrest, you curate national news stories, influencing the fate of the country, your career, and your family, with multiple unique endings that highlight the impact of media bias.

Headliner: Review

Introduction: The Weight of a Green Stamp

In an era where the very concept of objective truth feels perpetually under siege, Headliner (2017) emerges not as a grand AAA spectacle, but as a razor-sharp, intimate intervention. Developed by the singular vision of Jakub Kasztalski at Unbound Creations, this compact simulation adventure tasks the player with a deceptively simple Power: to control the national news of the fictional, genetically-divided city of Galixia. Released to a world grappling with “fake news,” media consolidation, and social fracturing, Headliner’s legacy is that of a perfectly timed thought experiment. It is a game that understands its limitations—a 45-minute experience built on a modest Phaser engine budget—and transcends them through unwavering thematic focus and a brilliant, morally agonizing core loop. My thesis is this: Headliner is a foundational text in the “critical simulation” genre, a title whose true measure lies not in its graphical fidelity or length, but in its ruthless, compassionate demonstration that in a mediated world, there are no clean choices, only weighted compromises that echo through the lives of others. It is a game that asks, “What is the cost of your bias?” and then forces you to live with the answer.

Development History & Context: From Beer Idea to Political Provocation

Headliner was born from a casual conversation over beers, as recounted by Kasztalski in a ModDB interview. The initial prototype was a fast-paced, dexterity-based game about approving articles against a clock, with elements of evasion and curfews. However, the rapidly escalating political climate in the United States around the 2016 election and the rise of the “fake news” discourse prompted a crucial pivot. Kasztalski and Unbound Creations consciously steered the project away from pure gameplay towards a narrative-heavy, commentary-driven experience. This was a significant risk for a small indie studio; tackling head-on issues of media bias, genetic discrimination, and civil unrest could alienate as much as it engaged. Yet, as Kasztalski noted, it aligned perfectly with Unbound’s brand: “All my games… are very story driven, focusing on a lot of issues that parallel issues in the real world.”

Technologically, Headliner was built using the Phaser HTML5 game framework, wrapped in NW.js for desktop deployment. This choice reflects a practical, accessible indie development ethos—allowing for cross-platform releases on Windows, Linux, and macOS from a single codebase, but also constraining the visual scope to stylized 2D scrolling and simple 3D models. The team was tiny: Kasztalski handled design and development, with Emmy Toyonaga providing sprite art, and a handful of collaborators for ports and localization. The budget was self-imposed and strict, a fact Kasztalski Would later reflect upon when developing the sequel, Headliner: NoviNews. The game’s release in October 2017 placed it in a fertile, if contentious, cultural moment. It arrived alongside—and was inevitably compared to—other “paper-pushing” societal simulations like Papers, Please (2013) and the Orwell series (2016), carving its niche with a specific focus on the editorial room rather than the border checkpoint or surveillance terminal.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Fractured Mirror of Galixia

The narrative of Headliner is a masterclass in economical, branching storytelling. The player is the Chief Curator (implied to be a woman, based on most promotional art and the Steam tag “Female Protagonist”) of a local news channel in Galixia, a city-state simmering with tension between the naturally-born “Nats” and the genetically-modified “Gens.” The plot is not a linear tale but a framework of systemic pressures. Each “day,” the player reviews a stack of incoming article pitches from their reporters, using a green stamp (publish) or red stamp (reject). These choices—covering a protest, demonizing a synthetic drug, framing a refugee crisis—are the game’s primary verbs.

The narrative depth emerges from the consequences. The game is divided into two interlocking perspectives: the first-person editorial office (where you stamp articles and receive calls from your boss, your journalists, and your family) and a side-scrolling view of Galixia’s streets. Strolling through the city is where the fiction solidifies. Your published headlines manifest as tangible changes: pro-Gen legislation leads to Nat protests and barricaded streets; anti-immigrant rhetoric results in beggars huddled on corners and your husband losing his job to a “foreigner.” The family subplot is the emotional anchor. Your spouse (whose job is directly impacted by your choices) and your brother, an aspiring comedian battling anxiety and depression (a storyline Kasztalski said was personally meaningful and carefully handled), provide intimate, non-professional stakes. Their dialogues, which shift from supportive to hostile based on your media output, ground the global politics in personal tragedy.

Thematically, Headliner operates on several levels. Its most explicit theme is media bias as active construction. There is no “neutral” option; every selection is an endorsement with ideological weight. The game smartly avoids simplistic left/right dichotomies. For instance, publishing a pro-Gen article might please your corporate sponsors but ignite ethnic violence; rejecting it might protect a Gen friend’s job but demoralize your Nat spouse. Underpinning this is a critique of corporate media control. Your channel is owned by a conglomerate with investors (like the synthetic alcohol company, “Synthohol”), whose interests constantly conflict with public interest or personal ethics. The “genetic engineering” backdrop serves as a potent metaphor for any systemic, in-born division—race, class, nationality—exploring themes of biological determinism vs. social construction and the politics of scapegoating. Finally, the game is a study in administrative complicity. You are not a rebel journalist but an editor within the machine, and the most tragic endings often come from the most “successful” professional climb, achieved by sacrificing your relationships and integrity. The tagline “Truth is what you make it” is not a celebration of relativism, but a melancholic acknowledgement of the editor’s god-like, terrible power.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: The Calculus of Consequence

Headliner‘s gameplay is elegantly bifurcated, creating a potent feedback loop.

1. The Editorial Phase (First-Person): This is the game’s brain. The interface is a minimalist desk: a stack of article cards (each with a title, a short summary, and sometimes a requested bias from the reporter or your boss), two stamping tools, and a phone. The core mechanic is a binary choice system with profound ramifications. Each article belongs to one of several issue tracks: Gen/Nat relations, Synthohol, healthcare, the neighboring country’s tensions, etc. The player must manage a rough “public opinion” meter for each track, though the game rarely spells this out explicitly, encouraging intuition and reflection. Complexity arises from competing demands: your boss may want a pro-Synthohol piece; a journalist may beg you to publish an exposé; your spouse may call expressing fear about Nat radicals. Deferring or ignoring calls also has consequences. The pacing is deliberate, almost meditative, forcing the player to read and contemplate each choice.

2. The Exploration Phase (Side-Scrolling): This is the game’s heart. After a day’s editing, you walk home through a diorama-like city street. This perspective is crucial. The consequences of your morning’s work are displayed as ambient vignettes: graffiti on walls, conversations between NPCs, police patrols, homeless figures, shuttered businesses. You can stop to talk to specific characters—your spouse at home, your brother at a comedy club, a Gen friend at a café. These conversations are where the butterfly effect crystallizes. A rejected article about police brutality might mean your Gen friend is later shown in a police lineup; publishing a xenophobic headline might cause your spouse’s immigrant coworker to be fired, a detail mentioned in passing. The walking segments provide emotional context for the statistical shifts from the office.

Systems and Innovations:
* The “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” Pillar: Kasztalski cites this as a core design philosophy, borrowed from Telltale. Every choice has a positive and negative ripple. Help the Gens, and the Nats riot. Publish the truth, and your ratings (and your boss’s anger) plummet. This ensures no “winning” path, only the path that aligns with the player’s prioritization of values.
* Community-Endings: After completing a playthrough, the game generates a unique “story code” that can be shared. You can also input others’ codes to see what choices they made, creating a meta-conversation about moral paths. This was a forward-thinking social feature for a 2017 indie game.
* Replayability: The article pool is partially randomized, and the branching is extensive enough (leading to “multiple permutations of unique endings”) to encourage experimentation. The promise of “seeing what the Headliner before you did” directly incentivizes replay.

Flaws: The system’s simplicity can also be its weakness. The cause-and-effect, while poignant, occasionally feels reductive or deterministic. A single headline causing immediate, large-scale societal collapse (like “dozens of beggars” appearing overnight) can strain credulity, a point highlighted by a critical Steam review that called the game’s “false dichotomies… incredibly obnoxious and offensively extreme.” The lack of a neutral or “moderate” publishing option in many cases forces a binary that doesn’t reflect nuanced editorial reality. The gameplay loop, while tight, can become repetitive across multiple playthroughs, as the core activity of stamping remains unchanged.

World-Building, Art & Sound: Stylized Dystopia

Headliner presents Galixia through a distinctive hybrid visual style. The editorial office and character portraits use clean, flat 2D art with expressive, slightly exaggerated character sprites. The city exploration sequences utilize a 2D side-scrolling perspective but with layered, parallax backgrounds that occasionally incorporate simple 3D models (like cars or buildings) rendered in a low-poly, stylized manner to fit the aesthetic. This creates a charming, slightly dissonant look that feels deliberately artificial—a world constructed for your editorial gaze. The color palette is muted and corporate, with splashes of яркий color (like the red and green stamps) to signify player agency and consequence. The design is notably colorblind-friendly, a specific accessibility goal mentioned by Kasztalski.

The sound design is minimal but effective. The office is filled with the bland, repetitive tunes of “corporate music” (a direct audio cue for the Sisyphean nature of the job), the clack of stamping, and the tinny sound of the phone. The city soundscape is more ambient—distant chatter, sirens, the hum of the synth-heavy city. The soundtrack, composed by Kasztalski and others, consists of a few looping, melancholic synth tracks that underscore the game’s resigned, futuristic mood. The audio doesn’t overwhelm; it scaffolds the player’s imagination, leaving space for the textual choices to do the heavy lifting.

The world-building is almost entirely textual and environmental. Galixia’s lore—the Gen/Nat divide, the presence of a neighboring hostile country, the omnipresent Synthohol—is drip-fed through article text, dialogue, and visual cues in the city (like Gen-only districts or Nat graffiti). This “show, don’t tell” approach makes the world feel researched and lived-in, despite its small scale. The atmosphere is one of dystopian banality, a city perpetually on edge under the glow of news screens and corporate logos.

Reception & Legacy: A Cult Critical Darling with a Polarizing Core

At launch, Headliner was met with strong critical praise. The lone critic review on MobyGames is from Gamer’s Palace (86/100), describing it as a “deep, indie game that… triggers intense emotions despite short runs.” Broader critical reception, echoed in the Steam store page quotes from outlets like GeekWire, Rappler, and DLive, consistently praised its thought-provoking nature and its successful evocation of the “just one more turn” compulsion seen in Papers, Please. It was nominated for the Get IT! Indie Prizes in Odessa and exhibited at the Seattle Indies Expo.

Commercial and player reception is more nuanced. As of 2025 data from Steambase, Headliner has a “Mostly Positive” rating (77/100) from over 900 Steam reviews. This indicates a solid, if not spectacular, commercial performance for a niche title priced at $4.99. The “Mostly Positive” tag masks a significant polarization. Positive reviews (712 on Steambase) celebrate its emotional impact, replayability, and political relevance: “It forced me to slow down and grapple with hard, complicated topics.” Negative reviews (211) often take issue with what they perceive as a heavy-handed, simplistic, or ideologically extreme portrayal of complex issues, as seen in the review that condemns its “clueless false dichotomies” and “offensively extreme” takes on immigration. This divide is itself a testament to the game’s theme: it provokes strong reactions because it reduces vast societal complexities to personal editorial decisions, a process that feels both empowering and infuriating.

Its legacy is growing and multifaceted:
1. Genre Refinement: It stands as a key title in the “social impact” or “critical sim” subgenre, alongside Papers, Please, Orwell, Beholder, and Not For Broadcast. It specifically carved the “journalism simulator” niche.
2. The Sequel and Iteration: Its direct spiritual successor, Headliner: NoviNews (2018), is widely considered by its creator to be a refinement in every aspect—addressing the original’s short length, sparse interactions, and “low-budget” feel while expanding the narrative scope and character depth (particularly the brother’s depression storyline, which received specific praise). This demonstrates a successful model of indie iterative design based on community feedback.
3. Community & Localization: Unbound Creations fostered a dedicated, discussion-oriented Discord community. A unique initiative was the encouragement of fan translations, resulting in complete or in-progress localizations for Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, and French. This grassroots expansion into non-English markets (where themes of media control and government surveillance resonate deeply) is a significant aspect of its cultural footprint.
4. Educational Potential: Perhaps its most profound legacy is its emerging role in media literacy education. As Kasztalski noted, teachers at expos suggested its use in high school ethics or journalism classes. Its formal engagement with an organization like foundry10, which researches games for teaching, points to a future where Headliner is not just entertainment but a pedagogical tool—a simulated ethics dilemma for the digital age.
5. The “Short Form” Argument: It is frequently cited in discussions about the power and viability of short, dense, narrative-driven indie games. Its 45-minute length is a feature, not a bug, allowing for multiple, varied playthroughs in a single sitting.

Conclusion: An Imperfect, Essential Mirror

Headliner is not a flawless game. Its cause-effect chains can feel provocatively reductive. Its world is small, its visuals simple, and its core loop, while brilliant, may not sustain interest for those not invested in its moral puzzles. For some players, its political framing will feel like a polemic rather than a probe.

Yet, to dismiss it on these grounds is to miss its monumental achievement. In a media landscape awash with content, Headliner gives the player the role of the curator, the editor, the person who holds the stamp. It simulates the quiet, constant administrative violence of bias, the way a headline can be a weapon or a balm. It understands that in a polarized society, the center is often a myth, and every choice is a betrayal of someone. The game’s true ending is not the screen that says “The End,” but the lingering unease as you close the game and scroll through your own news feed, suddenly, painfully aware of the invisible stamps being applied everywhere you look.

Its place in history is secure. It is a touchstone for a generation of games using interactivity to dissect power structures. It proved that a game built by a handful of people with a clear, urgent idea could cut deeper than many blockbuster narratives. Headliner is a testament to the idea that video games, at their best, are not about escape, but about engagement—a difficult, necessary, and unforgettable conversation with oneself. It is, as one Steam review succinctly put it, “the most in-depth 3€ I’ve spent on a game.” In a world that desperately needs media literacy, Headliner remains an essential, if uncomfortable, textbook.