The year is 1996. A member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea has been murdered. You are the new Editor of Dawn Times, a newspaper company that has lost signficant credibility and profit over the last few years. Your job is clear. Sell interesting articles, appeal to the public, appeal to the board, and maybe try and sell the truth along the way.

This is the Editor.

The structure of the game is fairly straight-forward. Each of the 11 chapters features a newspaper article presented by a member of staff. As the Editor, your job is to prepare the headline and the photos. Most people only remember the headline, so your words often dramatically shape public opinion. Furthermore, there's the photo to consider. Readers get confused easily and the profits rely on consistency. Take, for example, Chapter 2's arrested suspect. Your reporter has snagged a photo of the interrogation room, where the suspect in a sexual assault case was questioned. In front of the suspect, are pages and pages of confession. The police officially only released one page. The suspect's back is visble and covered in bruises. The suspect was notably uninjured before he was arrested.

In this article, and in all articles, the game very quickly asks you to make a moral decision in your framing. There's no neutral ground here. Choosing to report the facts as given not only benefits the powers that be, it also often leaves the reader unsatisfied. Thus, when editing your photo, you must consider framing. I chose to focus on how the suspect was brutalized by police and framed the article to show both the bruises and the pages of confessions. But the readers either hadn't read or didn't care that the police only released one of the alleged confessions. They saw in the photo that the confession was lengthy, and thus it's more likely that he was guilty. Including both the bruises and the stack of confession papers confused the audience and left profits stagnant.

The only way to fully succeed in retaining audience attention was to edit out the stack of confessions to focus only on the bruises. If I wanted to support the official story that the police presented, I obviously would have to edit out the bruises and only show the stack of confessions. I assumed providing as much information as possible was the responsible action, but the game's presentation suggests that I just have to hope my employee is providing those details for me.

Other chapters follow similar, politically charged patterns. Report on a mass strike, choose whether to show the salary chart that demonstrates the blatant wage gap between CEOs and workers, or the skewed corporate version that pretends the CEOs are paid less than workers. Or perhaps report on a murder suspect seen hundreds of miles away from a murder scene during the supposed death. Do you focus on the suspect's obvious alibi? Or do you point the camera at the fact he was meeting with the victim's wife, implying a motive for the suspect to hire an assassin or some such?

The game's moral intent is clear and I generally vibed with it. I'm not gonna say no to getting to expose corporate fraud.

Even so, it's hard not to feel like the game makes it... easy to be good. I kept anticipating a consequence for consistently siding with the little guy. The plot indicates that the company is losing a lot of donors over the course of my tenure. Yet, the paper also features record profits. I easily climb the ranks until I ultimately conclude my first playthrough as The Most Trusted Editor In The Country. The villains are defeated, the innocent saved, and the CEO smiles brightly as she declares that Journalism Is Saved. The Golden Ending. If I knew it was that easy to expose corruption, I would’ve gone for a degree in journalism.

A friend once teased me for supposedly getting angry that an ending was too happy. But that's not really what bothers me. I like happy endings. Love them, even. But I like for them to be earned. If everything goes squeaky-clean for the protagonists, it's hard to feel that the journey was ever at risk. Being good should be easy, but it's often not. It's not profitable to be a good person. I think it's important to be a good person because it's the right thing to do, not because you'll be rewarded for it.

The multiple endings do a lot to alleviate this feeling. You can choose to go full capitalist, promoting a financial conspiracy and making striking workers look like spoiled children. You feel like a scumbag, but you’re a rich scumbag by the end. The game is so disgusted with the prospect, there’s plenty of ways to bounce out of the boot-licking route. It's there where you get the sense of actual pushback from capitalist interests. Once you’ve gotten “donations” from interest groups, they’re all too happy to unsubscribe the second your articles deviate from the message they prefer.

Ending C is perhaps the messiest, as it warns against being too obvious about despising some rich fucks. The hammer comes down quickly, as your enemies surround you and force you into poverty with a flick of a pen. When you’re fighting against some scumbags, you gotta deliver the story carefully and thoughtfully. The public isn’t keen to believe in conspiracy and revealing all your cards overwhelms them. They won’t accept it. Slowly measuring out articles to turn the crowd to your favor is smarter, safer, and helps the conspiracy assume you know very little.

It’s a fascinating, purposeful little game. The translation is sometimes murky and the pacing can get a little strange, but I truly just vibed with it the entire game. A delight.