I’m already obsessed with Times & Galaxy, and I’ve only played it for an hour. This adorable, almost comic book-style indie has you playing as the first ever robot reporter, starting an internship at the prestigious, award-winning Times & Galaxy. You can customise the look of your robot, choosing the colours of your chassis as well as your name and pronouns, before pulling up to a spaceship called the Scanner, a mobile newsroom that follows stories across the universe.

Gameplay revolves around, obviously, reporting. Your first mission is to survey the site of a shuttle crash, talk to witnesses and police, and dig around for evidence so you can write a story for your paper. You can even scan things at the scene to look for more details. You then piece it all together in your Build-a-Story tool, choosing a Headline, Lede, Nutgraf, Key Quote, and Colour Copy. The things you choose to include in your piece skew it towards either informational, sensational or alien interest, affecting the reputation and popularity of your paper, as well as what your editor thinks of you. Not all the missions are as important as a shuttle crash, and your editor sends you to investigate a number of smaller stories, like an intersolar cat show.

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Playing Times & Galaxy had me reminiscing about my days as a journalism student, learning for the first time about the structure of a news article and being sent out to bizarre locations to hunt for stories. I was once given an assignment to find something local to my neighbourhood to report, so I went to the nearby dog park to nose around. I met a very nice lady who had named her dog Winter so she could say “Winter is coming”. I then wrote about the underlying tensions between regulars at that particular dog park. Times & Galaxy feels like that, going to events others might assume are trivial and hunting for the seed of a good piece.

Times & Galaxy interview

But the time you don’t spend reporting is just as fun. You explore the Scanner and talk to the ship’s crew as well as your colleagues in the newsroom, all of whom have distinct personalities and interests. Just walking around the desks and asking people what they do leads your colleagues to go on long spiels about their niches and what they love about them. Each of them is knowledgeable, competent and experienced, but have personalities outside of their jobs, too. One character is sitting at his desk, reading the competition’s paper and rolling his eyes at their bad writing. Another is an absolutely jacked crime reporter, doing bicep curls while she writes. The culture writer gives you the lowdown on the art different planets enjoy making, and the sociological reasons why they do it. I love them all.

I was struck by how much the game felt like TheGamer’s Slack chats brought to life, and realised that the game feels so true to the journalist experience because it’s designed and written by real journalists. Times & Galaxy feels like a love letter to the newsroom, to journalists who are passionate about what they do and the world(s) around them, and it makes me deeply sad that in a time of media layoffs and the shuttering of excellent news organisations, this might be the closest I get to a physical newsroom for a long time. Times & Galaxy feels like an homage to a type of journalism that might not exist for very much longer.

Times & Galaxy is slated for PC release in 2024.

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