It is 4 am. About eight hours ago I told my partner I wasn’t really vibing with News Tower, a handsome newspaper management sim that’s leaving early access after nearly two years. I’ve not left my desk since.
See, that was before the Newspaper Wars. Before I decided to stick it to the corrupt politicians, puritanical 1930s Karens and the intimidating mobsters. Before I hired lawyers, installed pneumatic tubes and finally added a third page to New York’s beacon of truth, its greatest paper, The Firestarter.
Now I’m a machine, spitting out hard-hitting story after hard-hitting story. Mine disasters, political scandals, bank heists, economic turmoil—and yes, the occasional bit of celebrity news, but always on a quest to inform rather than sensationalise.
And at the end of the week, I watch the numbers go up. Readership, influence, my bank balance. Sure, I have to occasionally deal with protesters jamming up the front door, or mobsters breaking in to trash all my equipment, but I’m unstoppable.
After smashing my head against the competing interests of the city’s factions for hours, I finally found my groove, reaching a zen-like state when I am the reporter chasing a story, the colossal printer churning out news, the typesetter laying out the articles, even the pristine toilet where my hardworking staff can ponder life’s biggest questions.
While News Tower does like to serve up the odd figurative paper jam, when you get on a roll, boy do you just keep rolling. How can I go to bed when there’s so much more for me to do? So many heights left for me to ascend.
The journey to this point has not been without its trials and tribulations, though.
When you get on a roll, boy do you just keep rolling.
OK, here’s the skinny: News Tower saddles you with a struggling paper that’s been mismanaged into oblivion by your idiot uncle, who ended up in debt to the mob. You need to hire and train staff; construct rooms, desks, printers and facilities; uncover potential stories, which your reporters can investigate, depending on their skills; and then you can construct your paper, picking which stories to publish, with an eye towards serving your readers.
Stories fall into different categories, like crime or politics, but a story can have multiple categories, as well as all sorts of modifiers. They can be gossipy, gruesome, exclusives, investigative—and how you actually combine these stories in the paper itself gives you bonuses.
There’s a particularly important modifier that determines if a story is informational or sensational, and as you publish more of one or the other, you drift further from a moderate paper. Different tones appeal to different advertisers and readers, and can give you all sorts of boons or problems.
So there’s quite a bit to wrap your head around, but the first few hours will ease you in as more systems and opportunities are unlocked. Crucially, there’s a lot of valuable information and feedback constantly guiding your hand. No need to sacrifice any goats to figure out what to make your lead story.
News Tower’s structure and clarity is a far cry from the publishing world of 2025, where most of us are beholden to a draconian, mercurial algorithm, trying to break through a wall of a million opinions and posts, hoping that today the tech monopolies will look favourably on us and let people read our words.
It’s become a bit therapeutic for me, I guess. Even more so, since I discovered that almost all of the parts that I don’t like about News Tower, I can pretty much ignore.
See, each week, you can target a new district, writing news tailored to the people living inside it. Like an ink-covered mob boss, you start swallowing up the city, and eventually you’ll start pinching territory from other papers. As you spread out, you unlock locations where you can spend influence—gained from completing quests, taking territory and publishing high-profile stories—on new items for your building and staff, from potted plants to machinery.
On this map of New York, you’ll also encounter the representatives for the factions controlling the city: the mayor, the mafia, high society and the military. These caricatures are one-note pests whose quests almost always task you with tossing your integrity in the Hudson.
Completing quests nets you reputation with one faction at the cost of your reputation with another, and as you work your way up the rep tiers you’ll unlock locations across New York from money laundering operations to hospitals, which will make your life easier—that’s on top of the immediate rewards for quest completion. But agreeing to even a single quest is effectively an acknowledgement that you have failed in your duty to report the truth without falling prey to third-party influence.
Agreeing to even a single quest is effectively an acknowledgement that you have failed in your duty to report the truth.
Here’s the problem: you can only decline a couple of quests per reputation rank, so you’ll almost certainly encounter quests you’re simply unable to decline. You can accept them and fail, but sometimes failure will lead to some negative consequences, like riots and office invasions.
I’m perfectly happy to play a Sith in Knights of the Old Republic, or the Dark Urge in Baldur’s Gate 3, but ask me to sell out and spread propaganda, or collude with the very people I’m meant to be reporting on, and I’m gonna get a very sore stomach. The one time I clicked “accept”, I could just feel the spectre of PC Gamer’s global EIC, Phil Savage, looming over me, sighing in disappointment. Phil has a very powerful sigh.
But while News Tower encourages you to juggle all these competing interests, working with these pantomime villains, it turns out that, counter-intuitively, you can simply ignore them. Don’t accept or decline their quests and they’ll be frozen in time, eternally waiting for you to sell your soul.
There are other ways to gain influence and cash—you don’t need these dorks! And as soon as I realised that, I was sailing through the game. Sure, I’m missing out on a few things, I guess, but my decision to pick the hidden, ethical route has not been a roadblock. Instead it unlocked my enthusiasm for News Tower.
I truly became a fan when I realised that I wouldn’t need to create a noose out of ads. See, eventually you’ll be able to install a sales desk in your offices, which will allow you to hire staff who can drum up some potential ad revenue. For every ad you include in your paper, though, you’ll need to cut a story.
Miraculously, I’ve been growing more and more profitable without ad revenue. I might actually just sack my ads team. They only bring in a small amount of cash (granted, I suspect that will grow eventually), and it’s not enough to justify leaving out one of my quality stories: the very things that bring in the readers and sales.
Folks, this is the dream. There are no outsiders trying to influence me, no third parties to please, no ads for soap plaguing my paper. Just the work of reporting the news.
Instead of splashing out on a therapy session so I can say, “Doc, I’m 40, robots are trying to take my job, and some dorks at Google can destroy my ability to earn a living on whim,” I can just play this quaint newspaper sim where quality reporting trumps everything else. This is some fantasy nonsense I can get behind.
Even if you’re not afflicted with my—granted—very specific job-based trauma, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll still dig News Tower. It’s tactile and moreish and so, so good at keeping you dangling on its hook, anticipating the imminent dopamine hit guaranteed by its myriad progression systems.
The excitement of a new page that lets you finally stop cutting great stories just because there’s no more room. The game-changing upgrades that let you embrace new opportunities, like photography, or international reporting. Tubes! Pneumatic tubes everywhere! It’s a genuine thrill.
And with each new bit of tech, each new staff member, each new porcelain throne, your demesne grows—from a pokey, one-story dive to a towering beacon of independent journalism (or tabloid trash, if you fancy). Every time you look at the screen, your successes are staring back at you.
OK, I think I can fit one more issue in before bed.