YMMV / Not for Broadcast

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was Julia always planning to take Advance down a path of totalitarian oppression, or was she a Well-Intentioned Extremist who snapped from the pressure of the continental blockade and the resulting famine? On the one hand, it's only after the nation entered a genuine crisis that her radical policies escalated to the point of killing millions of civilians in an act of nuclear terrorism, exterminating the elderly and infirm en masse, and tampering with the nation's crops in an attempt to lower the birth rate, inadvertently sterilizing most of the population. On the other hand, the end of the crisis only sees her double down on the oppression, and several of the endings have her display a startling Lack of Empathy and seriously self-obsessed behaviors.
  • In the "A Better Jeremy" ending, is Jeremy completely brainwashed into accepting Advance, or is he keeping up a façade to survive? While his mannerisms are stilted and forced, he hesitates to speak when reading the headline and stares blankly at the viewer most of the time.
• Awesome Video Game Level: Day 296: The Heatwave. Sure, the first half of the day can count as That One Level due to the fan shutting off and the power generator starting to overheat from time to time while trying to deal with the static interference and the censor button, but then the other half comes when the viewer performance rating bar starts getting a higher boost level due to your handling the cameras and the censors well during Jeremy's hostage situation. From the third part onward, it becomes a Breather Level when the fan stays on indefinitely, and the viewer performance rating bar is getting maxed out, which also helps to get an A+ score easily. During Jeremy's final interview with the hostages and by the time Jeremy makes a final mano-a-mano broadcast with Alex (you) alone, the only things that can stand in the way of your A+ grade are the poor handling of the cameras and the censor button and Jeremy's swearing, and even then, that's not much of a big deal anyway. Just make sure you cut to the ad before or after he dies (either by suicide or by security), or else the signal will cut off, leading to a Game Over.
• Breather Level:
  • "The Lockdown" is a weird example of this. While it can still be rather challenging due to how surreal everything is, especially once the Snugglehugs start invading the studio and messing with your controls, what makes it this trope is that, due to the whole thing being a coma dream, your overall performance ultimately doesn't affect anything as long as you don't let your viewership bottom out, unlike other levels where your performance determines your pay and how the various factions perceive you.
  • Day 2602, "The Finale", is pretty much a foregone victory gameplay-wise. While the player still needs to censor profanity, make camera cuts, and intercept or show Disrupt broadcasts, these are all fairly lenient sequences and nothing the player hasn't faced before, and the whole thing moves at a brisk but manageable pace unlike Day 1975's Marathon Level of a broadcast. The game also gives you full control over the sound effects buttons, and doesn't dock points for using them, letting the player have some extra fun messing around with audience reactions. And much like Day 296, the third segment is pretty much a freebie.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Paul Baverstock gives a brilliant performance as Jeremy Donaldson, especially in Day 296, when he makes his (ill-fated) final broadcast of the day. The other actors who play his hostages in Day 296 also count as well, and it really helps to boost viewer performance ratings (see Awesome Video Game Level).
  • George Vere's perfomance as Graham Bannon in the Telethon counts as well.
  • Stacey is a one-note Bratty Teenage Daughter, at least until the finale of her appearance, where she delivers a memorable monologue describing her struggle of surviving abuse in a state run Orphanage of Fear, until Advance won the election and actually made her life worth living. It's a phenomenally powerful segment that is delivered with pathos and heart, by Lucy Foley, a 21-year-old with a very short list of credits mostly in short films and music videos.
• Heartwarming Moments: Jeremy is often vitriolic and verbally abusive towards his coworkers. However, if he survives to the ending, he will warmly embrace a tearful Jenny upon his return to the newsroom. He will do the same with Megan if he returns without Alan.
• Memetic Mutation: Jeremy spoke in the newsroom today...^Explanation Those who listened to Pearl Jam while playing Episode 2 and its Wham Episode (Day 296) will be reminded of their song "Jeremy", about a boy who shot himself in school many years ago, and the news anchor with the same first name (Jeremy Donaldson) can do the same to himself toward the end of his hostage situation if you let him.
• Moment of Awesome: Throughout the third part of Day 153: The Tempest, Alex may be frightened by the sounds of thunder and lightning, but nothing can stop them from doing what they do best: working their way through switching the screens and censoring cuss words while electric shocks can get in the way of the buttons. They can even take a beating from getting zapped, but their willpower enables them to stay strong as best as they can during the Easter Tuesday thunderstorm, only losing consciousness after they get zapped by pressing the last ad button at the very end of the chapter. What stunning bravery for Alex Winston.
  • Jeremy Donaldson gets his Moment of Awesome too. During Day 296, he becomes overwhelmed by the heatwave and increasingly agitated about Advance's firm grip on the national populace. During an interview with three people with silly medical conditions in which one of them, Brian Truman, is getting arrested by the CCO for exposing Advance's hypocrisy and corruption, Jeremy decides he's had enough of the fake news. He takes a pistol from the CCO and holds everyone at gunpoint, threatening to shoot them all if Alex cuts to an ad before he tells them to. Jeremy then gives off a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the entire newsroom before releasing his guests and telling Jenny to lock the door. He then commands Alex to put the Disrupt ad tape into the VHS player, and, under his orders, to "Play the fucking tape." If the Disrupt ad is played, then after an interview with Jenny and Andy the CCO, he dismisses them and orders all the cameras to focus on him (with one of them on his gun) for a final mano-a-mano broadcast, in which he rattles off a number of reasons Advance sucks. And regardless of whether the tape is played or not, if you don't cut to the ads as Jenny tells you to, then it becomes a Dying Moment of Awesome for Jeremy when he either goes out in a blaze of glory by attempting to shoot one of the security officers before getting gunned down (if the tape is not played) or puts his pistol up close to his head and caps off his Final Speech with his usual (yet ironic) Signing-Off Catchphrase, "Have a peaceful night," before pulling the trigger on himself (if the tape is played). The true sign of a Badass Normal who stands up for his beliefs to the end.
  • Boseman gets one in Path A of Day 2602. After seeing the footage of Julia revealing the sterility of the Territories, he radios Alex to tell them that they have to show it, perhaps out of both his and Alex's daughters not being able to have kids. Regardless of your relationship with Boseman, if you play it, he will congratulate you for doing the right thing.
• Moral Event Horizon: Advance crosses the line when they detonate nukes in four cities, while intending to detonate 58 more unless the nations they are at war with unconditionally surrender to them by midnight.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Originally, once you completed the game, your auto-save was deleted, forcing you to restart the entire game from the beginning in order to go for a different ending unless you had the foresight to create manual saves at each of the critical decision points that affect the overall outcome of the game (and good luck figuring out where those are on your first playthrough). This is somewhat understandable for endings that are dependent on choices made early in the game, but when the sole deciding factor between certain endings is a single decision that comes in the final minutes of the game, it came off as a needless annoyance specifically designed to add artificial replay value to the game. Thankfully, an update later in the year created a separate auto-save under your main game profile which updates at every point where critical decisions are involved, making it easier by several orders of magnitude to go back and get all of the epilogues without having to play through the entire game a whopping 14 times in total.
• That One Achievement:
  • "I Can't Believe You've Done This", which requires you to complete five different segments with all five Challenge Modifiers active (see Brutal Bonus Level above). While its predecessor, "Hurting for More" (complete just one segment with all five mods active), can be cheesed by simply using the very first (and therefore easiest by a wide margin) segment of the game, you get no such luck here; you'll have to use harder segments for this one, plunging you into a level of multitasking hell roughly equivalent to the legendarily difficult "4/20" mode and its equivalents from the Five Nights at Freddy's series... that, to reiterate, you have to make it through five separate times. Your sanity wishes you the best of luck.
  • "Employee of the Month", which tasks you with collecting all of the Challenge Room rewards by completing their associated goals. While most of them aren't too terribly difficult, two in particular are a living nightmare:
    • "Target Practice", which tasks you with completing the notoriously difficult Sportsboard segment with the "Switcheroo" and "Snugglef*cked" mods active. It's already difficult enough to avoid the protesters without copious levels of Interface Screw, so good luck accomplishing that task when your camera buttons keep getting randomly swapped around while rogue Snugglehugs try to sabotage your controls from every angle!
    • "Vitals Monitor", which requires you to play a segment with the "Shocking Development" mod active and take 100 shocks while still completing the segment. This requires not only deliberately tanking shock after shock, but doing so in a segment long enough, with such perfect pacing, that you can rack up a hundred total without dying, all while still keeping the segment going as normal. It's basically what happens when you turn Video Game Cruelty Potential into a legitimate challenge.
• That One Level:
  • The second segment of Day 153, where nude protestors disrupt the Sportsboard Championships and you have to keep them off of the broadcast. They run around all over the place, making it extremely difficult to predict where they'll show up at any given time, and if they show up on the broadcast even for a fraction of a second, your viewership takes a hit. Of course, most players' natural reaction would be to rapidly switch between feeds in order to find one that's safe to show... except you also get penalized if you do that. The mistakes can easily snowball as a result, until your viewership is falling into the red zone before you even have a chance to get your bearings. And the kicker? This happens on three separate occasions throughout the segment! While passing it is very much doable as long as you don't panic, doing so with a halfway decent rank is an exercise in frustration that basically requires you to memorize exactly which feeds are safe to show and when, and switch to them with nearly frame-perfect accuracy (and good luck getting an A+). Fortunately, the game doesn't go anywhere near this level of difficulty for quite some time afterwards, making the whole affair stick out as a massive Difficulty Spike.
  • Day 1975 is more of a Goddamn Level than hard per se, but it's the longest broadcast in the entire game, clocking in at over an hour. This broadcast features another sequence involving flashers (albeit not as tough as Day 153's Sportsboard sequence) and a musical segment with very strict rules on which feed is acceptable, but the rest of the level is challenging moreso for the sheer endurance it takes to sit through it, with minutes on end being spent leaving the broadcast on a single feed. The sloggy feeling of Day 1975 appears to be intentional, highlighting what the National Nightly News is becoming: a news/talk show rapidly progressing towards the vapid end of things.

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