Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine liking a newspaper simulator. But it’s 2025, and weirder shit has certainly happened. I’m happy with this weird.
News Tower from developer Sparrow Night and publisher Twin Sails Interactive came out of nowhere this holiday season, and just in time. The game puts players in the shoes of a budding newspaper tycoon, who is left with the unfortunate task of reviving and surviving a family newspaper. The game’s light-hearted shell hides a wonderful and richer experience underneath, as it brings a gritty, chaotic, and fun juggling act with it. The game’s strongest points are how it asks the player to be mindful of the budget, hiring the right people, reporting and displaying the most interesting stories, expanding readership, while also avoiding any potential conflicts (like a mafia-type group of money men wanting to stay out of the news). And surprisingly, all of those elements work in beautiful harmony.
To boot, this game is incredibly easy to pick up and learn, addictively challenging, and will continually pull players into its gameplay fray repeatedly, and they’ll enjoy every second of it. Again, this is a newspaper simulator that is so much more than what it looks like on the surface. Prepare yourselves.
So, let’s break this review to the world and hope we keep readers, as we delve into the world of News Tower.
Fun Story
The gist of News Tower’s tale is a simple one. The player’s main character’s uncle has destroyed the family newspaper business, while also jetting out of town because he has failed to pay back loan sharks, who kept the company afloat with their dirty money. The tall task for the player’s main character is to keep out of trouble, revive a failing business, and try to make as much profit as humanely possible, while also being an unbiased and ethical newspaper. Not an easy task.
News Tower’s story is enough to get this game off to a strong start. It doesn’t overwhelm; rather, it just sets up the odds against the player through its narrative and presents a silent challenge to make things right. It creates the perfect amount of motivation to see the game through. You can never go wrong with a formula like that.
The small intro to the world of News Tower also creates a slow, steady learning curve about how the game works. One of the biggest issues with simulators is that they can throw everything at you at once, and at times, it can be very overwhelming just to get started. Thankfully, the story helps push the player into that initial wade into the newspaper water at the perfect speed. Because the story was so focused and engaging, it was easy to slip right into the gameplay, as the gameplay elements are easy to pick up on. That’s just an enormous plus, especially when you’re trying to sell players on purchasing a newspaper simulator, which doesn’t sound like an easy sell on the surface.
Anyway, the story is good, and the intro portion makes the gameplay easier to ingest.
Now, speaking of gameplay…
Printing a good paper
Someone looking at News Tower will probably ask themselves how deep and fun the game could be. It’s very deep, and it’s enormously fun. Let’s break things down.
Building an Empire
After players delve into the story, they’re immediately thrown into the newspaper scrum. During the introduction of the game, the player learns that they have to clean up a mess that mobsters left with the newspaper; they will also have to hire more employees, get some good beat writers, and get an interesting paper out to the community promptly on time. The latter is the most vital of the bunch, as players are given six days to create content and get it all organized and printed by Sunday. And the game makes sure players understand the importance of deadline news and getting it consistently out to readers, as missing deadlines could mean a tremendous loss of money.
Pulling back a bit, once the paper gets going, the player must hire good writers to keep the content flowing. This is probably one of the more challenging parts of the game, as each writer has specific news reporting specialties (business, politics, etc.) and selecting the right people for potentially breaking news means that players get it back detailed and prompt. While the game doesn’t throw too much complication at you from the get-go with selecting writers, it’s still a neat and accurate aspect of journalism, as people are particularly great at writing about specific topics.
Now, this also leads to timing and good content, which is another aspect of the game that determines the player’s success. The game features a globe in the top left that shows where stories are happening. The player must choose the story that crops up on the globe and send the right reporter out to gather whatever story is being offered (or that is interesting). Once the writer comes back with their notes, they have to write their story, and then have to hand it to the printing specialist, who has to physically put letters out for printing purposes. All of this takes time, which means the player has to account for the amount of time it takes to prep stories for printing. This is based on an early 1900s newspaper environment, so everything was slow and methodical in the newspaper business during that time period.
Once the stories are finished, they’re submitted for design on the paper’s front page, and then players must order the stories from top to bottom and make sure that what stories they choose as most important are most relevant to their subscriber base. That aspect of the game is amazingly detailed, and it’s a positive plus for a newspaper simulator, as identifying audiences and their interests, so that interesting content can be delivered to them directly, and readership can be gained in the process, makes for a good gameplay element to keep players returning. This gameplay element is absolutely appropriate for News Tower and is a wonderful gameplay aspect that makes the newspaper business running process so much more interesting.
Once good content is delivered and potential new subscribers are gained, the game gets a bit deeper.
Expanding the gameplay
When players think about a simulator, they may see the internal content and complications as the key elements to drive the gameplay. This means having the ability to find good writers, send them out for stories, and maybe have the end game be finding a correct writing flow to consistently bring in a profit to the newspaper business. That alone would be enough to make this game fun. Butttttt…the devs at Sparrow Night felt the need to take it further, and in good fashion.
Beyond the paper creation portion of the game, News Tower also features the ability to expand your audience into different areas, as well as face confrontation from people who don’t like finding their names in papers. Both combined mean the player is bound to get a bigger balancing act from this game.
When I first began my journey with News Tower, I expected the gameplay to focus mainly on the paper itself. That went out the window within the first two hours of gameplay. Once players get through the introduction and dig into the real meat of the game, they’re tasked with choosing an area and audience path to expand the paper. By choosing a path, the player is given an audience with specific needs and interests. This means that sending out reporters to stories that don’t matter to the new audience could have financially disastrous effects on the newspaper’s business side. So the player can’t just haphazardly choose a story, and that means the player is forced to truly know their audience and what would peak the most interest in a particular location of their circulation. Adding that aspect into the equation pleasantly complicated the gaming process, which helped to bring new considerations and elements to the table when deciding on what to publish. This is how a newspaper would react and have to take into account in the real world. It’s a brilliant aspect of the gameplay that fits comfortably into the schematic of News Tower’s world.
Whilst expanding the audience area, the player will run into groups that have specific demands that may hinder ethical writing and how the newspaper functions. This means having somewhat branching dialogue with rough and tough folks who request certain stories not be published. The player must choose whether to comply or to take the harder route of going against these types of folks. Each path creates its own set of consequences, which the player must weigh. This aspect is interesting, as it just flips in a realistic element of push-back, sometimes life-threatening, for the player. I like that inclusion in this gameplay quite a bit because it makes the entire game more than just another ‘build it and they will come’ simulator.
Of course, that’s not all this game throws at the player.
Budgeting, building, and keeping the staff happy
What players might expect from a simulator is juggling a budget, worrying about profits, building out the simulation, and keeping employees happy. That’s all in this game, and it plays a heavy factor into a player’s success with News Tower.
All of the above is led by budget juggling in the game. The player must pay attention to how much staff is getting paid, how much money the paper is making, if the paper needs a loan to survive, what equipment needs replacing or repairing, what supplies need to be replenished, and how the environment at the paper is on a day-to-day basis. That is a lot of loose ends that the player must handle during gameplay. And all of it connects back to the budget.
The player must constantly decide on how many people to hire during the game and be choosy about their expertise in specific areas. Reporters with the same types of stories won’t necessarily mean more money. Of course, writers with too different of expertise could potentially mean wasted money with reporters waiting for specific issues to report. Balancing the staff out and keeping them happy, while also making money, is central to News Tower.
Budget balancing is probably the most complicated aspect of the game and one that moves and shifts quickly when done right or wrong. At the very least, it will have players fully focused on getting things right, especially when situations arise, such as unhappy work environments or broken equipment. The game does a great job of not making this aspect too overwhelming when the going gets tough, but pulls it into the forefront of every decision the player has to make while running the newspaper. It’s a good choice for a centralized gameplay element, and its connection to every single gameplay aspect is well-designed.
Getting back to the topic of a good work environment, as the player builds out their newspaper empire, they have to design, expand, and improve the environment for their employees. This might mean adding sound-dampening wall mounts to keep the loud paper printer noise to a minimum as people are working. This also might mean adding fans or heaters to the offices to keep employees comfortable. This could even mean building multiple levels and offices so that employees feel like they have their own safe and comfortable space to work in. All of these factors into employee happiness and their ability to work well for the paper (or work at all for it). And a happy work environment generally means good money-making.
To help with gauging employee happiness and new room (and item) effectiveness, News Tower gives a red/yellow/green graph to each room as equipment and items are added (or subtracted). The red indicates a noisy or unhappy environment. The yellow indicates that it’s somewhere in the middle, while the green shows that player choices are on the right track. These indicators are easy to pick up on, and these graphs change in real-time with player choices. For example, if it’s during the summer and it’s hot in the newspaper building, then adding fans will cool down and keep the rooms happily in the green. With every new element added to the newspaper building, there is more of a balancing act with this gameplay aspect.
Now, while I think the devs might have added a bit more detail than they needed with the previously mentioned gameplay element in the last paragraph, I commend them for trying to expand the gameplay into unique directions. At the very least, adjusting/adding rooms and having to keep track of employee happiness fit right into every aspect of News Tower’s gameplay. It works fine, but it can be a bit much at times. Of course, that is the newspaper business, which is ugly and chaotic, but throwing too much at a player can turn them off. I think it edges that line with this gameplay aspect. But it is a newspaper simulator, and that is part of the business.
Overall, the gameplay featured in News Tower is engaging, complicated at times, yet not too overwhelming. It goes above and beyond just a standard blueprint for simulators and adds gameplay elements that connect well, while not feeling like they are a throwaway. While I can understand that game simulators may not be everyone’s cup of tea, News Tower is not the typical simulator. It’s fun, it’s big, and it’s addictive, as it features many challenging gameplay elements that crash into each other. I cannot recommend this enough.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
News Tower, from developer Sparrow Night and publisher Twin Sails Interactive, is a marvelous newspaper sim that goes above and beyond the typical simulator formula.
