Image credit: Barkbyte Interactive

Static Hour is a spooky narrative simulation designed to give journalists a god complex, or at least, aggravate the ones we already have. Set in the 1980s, it casts you as a night shift news editor in a small town that has succumbed to a Happening of some kind. There are garbled transmissions about people attacking their families, outbreaks of amnesia, and overflowing ER rooms. Is it aliens? Too much sodium in the water supply? Kids playing tricks with fireworks?

Trapped in the newsroom by a government lockdown, you must try to make sense of the situation by combing your rolodex, ordering reporters around, scanning radio frequencies, and sorting hard evidence from scuttlebutt. Then, you must decide what to broadcast to a population who react and take action accordingly. Are you keeping your listeners informed, or fomenting a panic? Worse, are you fomenting a panic deliberately?

Watch on YouTube

It's both a study in solipsism, and a homage to a time when people didn't spend half their lives staring into a geyser of AI-generated swill, their thoughts melting into a sickly terran lifestream as their preferences are ceaselessly fed back to them, their capacity for anticipation and remembrance lost in the networked churn of the Now.

A better time, when just the one miserable hack with a computer terminal could tell you stupid normies what to believe. The things I'd do to your placid brain, reader, if I were the only news operation in town. The things I'd make you think, if you weren't long since lost to social media and cannibalistic search algorithms. I'd start by bringing back prog rock.

It's the work of Barkbyte Interactive, founded by Claire Sarmiento, who I understand is an actual lawyer. Seems like there's a story there. The game launches in Q3 2027, according to a press release, and you can read more on Steam. I find this pretty cool, on the whole, though some of the trailer voice-acting is a bit hammy. I do like the rotary phones.