Ministry of Broadcast is a step platformer that follows a contestant in a deadly reality show, who must survive all manner of traps in order to win the game and be reunited with his family. Ministry of Broadcast was previewed back in August and it has an interesting aesthetic and setting, but the choice to use the same gameplay style as retro titles like Flashback and Prince of Persia turns something that could be a fun experience into a frustrating one.
Ministry of Broadcast is set in an Orwellian society where residents are cut off from each other by a giant wall. In order to reach the other side of the wall and be reunited with his family, the protagonist must compete on The Wall Show and survive a number of death traps over the course of several days. The game is framed as if it were a reality show, with the player watching the protagonist through a camera at all times. The visuals of Ministry of Broadcast combine the sprite work of the old LucasArts adventure games (like Monkey Island) with the dystopian Russian aesthetic of Papers, Please. This mixture of styles works incredibly well and Ministry of Broadcast is a treat for those who love retro-style pixel games. The writing in Ministry of Broadcast has some funny moments, as the horrors of the game show are treated as an everyday affair by the contestants.
The gameplay of Ministry of Broadcast is the same as titles like Flashback and Prince of Persia. It’s a precise platformer, where the player can carefully take steps and grab onto ledges. The player has no offensive weapons (outside of one dream sequence) so the name of the game is stealth and evasion. The death traps that appear throughout the reality show require precise timing in order to avoid.
The major issue with Ministry of Broadcast lies with its checkpoint system. The player cannot save the game, but must go back to checkpoints whenever they die. The people who have played Celeste will be familiar with this type of assistance, but there are often a lot of long mandatory sequences within puzzles that the player will need repeatedly complete if they keep messing up. These include actions such as climbing long ladders, pushing boxes a great distance, or needing to walk slowly across long patches of ice. Ministry of Broadcast also commits the cardinal gameplay sin of making the player repeatedly sit through dialogue between characters if another person appears during a puzzle or action sequence.
One cannot help but feel as if these moments were included to pad out the runtime of the game, as most players should expect to complete Ministry of Broadcast within five to seven hours. The fact that there are a lot of tricky action sequences and puzzles that will need several attempts to complete make these moments feel like a drag to sit through each time and the game would have greatly benefited from a more generous checkpoint system, or a limited number of saves per area to keep things challenging while avoiding the boring parts.
There are also a number of cheap deaths in Ministry of Broadcast that feel as if they are there to pad out the runtime. There are a number of instances where the game will just kill the player by dropping something on them, forcing them to restart an action sequence. The player will know what to expect during the next run-through, but these moments still feel cheap and they happen enough to make the game feel frustrating.
Ministry of Broadcast will sometimes break its own rules to make a puzzle work, such as with one notable puzzle near the end of the game where the player has to kill a person in a cage. The game will only let the player complete this task in one specific way, despite a number of other options that should be available to the player (such as dropping a crate on them from a nearby ledge, as the crate will just pass through the person). There are instances where dogs will chase NPCs and then won’t without explanation because it would interfere with a puzzle. There is also a crocodile that can kill a player from all angles (aka, they just teleport into the crocodile’s mouth if they get too close to its tail) to prevent the player from sneaking up behind it, which would make completing a puzzle easier.
Ministry of Broadcast is a gorgeous looking game with an interesting setting and some funny moments in its dialogue, but the whole experience is dragged down by some frustrating design choices with its gameplay. The fans of the retro step platformers of the 16 and 32-bit eras will enjoy Ministry of Broadcast as a new entry in a genre that has been abandoned since the days of Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, but it’s harder to recommend to anyone who doesn’t love brutal platformers.
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Ministry of Broadcast is available now for PC and it will be coming to Nintendo Switch in early 2020. Screen Rant was provided with a code of the PC version of the game for the purposes of this review.
