Times & Galaxy

About

Times & Galaxy casts you as a rookie robot journalist racing against time to land scoops across the solar system. Each mission sends you to investigate quirky stories, from shuttle disasters to alien cat competitions, by interviewing witnesses, gathering clues, and navigating ethical gray areas. Your decisions shape the tone and accuracy of your articles, affecting your reputation with editors and readers. Between assignments, you’ll navigate the Scanner, a bustling space station filled with eccentric human and alien coworkers. Relationships matter: hundreds of characters react to your choices, creating ripple effects across the narrative. The game shines in its satirical take on media dynamics and its layered dialogue systems. With over 100 interactive characters and branching storylines, each playthrough molds the Scanner’s culture and your career trajectory. Developed by ex-journalists, it balances humor and critique of newsroom politics while letting you rebuild a space garden or debate ethics with a Verge editor. Early builds logged over 300 hours of gameplay for completionists, proving there’s depth in every click.

Storyline

Congratulations, You’ve landed an internship with the Times & Galaxy, the Dorp system's favorite regional holopaper and five-time winner of the Bort Jorbeller Award for Satisfactory Interplanetary Journalism! There’s never been a robo reporter before so don’t waste this (unpaid) opportunity. All the greats started as interns and you’ve only got seventeen cycles to prove that you belong in the newsroom. We’re assigning you stories that put the hyper in hyper-local news! On any given cycle choose to cover shuttle crashes, intersolar cat shows, even space ghost funerals. It’s up to you! Once you’ve chosen your assignment, head to the shuttle bay and blast off for intern adventures!! That means interviewing sources, digging up clues and investigating the scene. We hope your conversational circuits are well oiled as you earn or betray the trust of more than 100 characters and ask a lot of questions. There’s always more than meets the eye, and the more information you can gather, the more equipped you'll be. At the end of each assignment, it’s time to file your story. Use the Build-a-Story tool to construct your article using all that info you gathered. Depending on who you interviewed, the choices you made and how deep you dug, you’ll have different options to work with for your story—you were a diligent reporterbot and managed to get ALL the info, weren’t you? Your choices impact the quality and tone of the story and how both your editors and readers will react to it. Over time, the choices in each story start to shape the reputation and popularity of a holopaper. So hey, no pressure! Designed and written by former journalists, this is almost exactly how real journalism is done. Except with aliens. The staff at Times & Galaxy all live and work together on the Scanner, a sprawling, spacebound newsroom. Between assignments, you’ll have the chance to get to explore the Scanner and get to know a diverse and colorful crew of more than twenty crewmates including your fellow reporters, the editorial staff, pilots and ship’s crew. The staff come from all over the system, where you’ll find Humans, Augers, Verge, Xeel and of course, Robos. Everyone has their own thing going on and they’ve always got something to say. They’ll react to you in all sorts of expected, and unexpected, ways depending on your choices. The Scanner is more than just a newsroom. It’s where you sleep, eat, work and relax. After recharging your literal batteries in your bunk you might take a moment to recharge your emotional ones in the Garden, home to many species of plants from all over the system. Or at least it used to be. Find seeds to restore the green space to its former glory!