Developed/Published by: PanicBarn / No More Robots
Released: 31/01/2020
Completed: 10/01/2025
Completion: Got the “good” ending!

It’s 2025 and we’re coming up on five years of Brexit, so what better time to play Not Tonight, PanicBarn’s Brexit satire? It’s not just because I scrolled backwards on my Switch to find the earliest game that I’d bought and not played or anything. It’s definitely because of the anniversary.

A long time ago, I was critical of Papers, Please for casting the player as a border agent in a fictional non-western country, arguing that it would bite far more if you were actually playing a TSA agent or something. To be honest, I do think I was being a bit inflexible (I mean, allegory is fine! I love Andor!!!) but it’s really nice to play Not Tonight and see a game that is not just like “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re cowards” but positively gleeful about it. The contrast between Papers, Please and Not Tonight had me going: you know what? Garth Marenghi was right.

In Not Tonight, you play as a Brit who has been stripped of their citizenship due to the vagaries of Brexit, and you are forced by an odious immigration agent to work as a bouncer in order to survive and pay him off. To not be completely bleak however the game also features a thread of resistance, as you can in small ways work to undermine the government’s ever-increasing xenophobia.

In some respects, Not Tonight feels more vital than ever. The game presents a UK that gets more and more shite as the game goes on, and I think there’s a chance that if you played it even a few months earlier you might have gone “well, the UK is getting more and more shite, but it’s not as bad as this game is making it out to be.” However, in the cold light of a Trump re-election and the lame-duck Labour government grasping at straws that all seem to say “fuck immigrants” or “uh… AI?” on them, it’s hard not to see a future coming quickly in which things get worse much quicker. I mean while I was playing this there was a huge right-wing civil war over skilled visas in the USA, that bell-end Elon Musk argued Nigel Farage wasn’t right-wing enough for him (because he wouldn’t support literal white supremacist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon!?) and a poll showed that if another election happened Reform would smash it.

It really does feel like we’re living on the precipice of another event like when Liz Truss crashed the UK economy, except instead of it all being taken back and months later Liz Truss claiming that it’s libelous for anyone to say she crashed the UK economy, whoever in charge will skip right to delusion without the “take it all back” part.

It’s grim.

Anyway, Not Tonight is very much “Brexit Papers, Please” in terms of most of the play is going to be looking at documents under time pressure, and choosing to let people in or not, with penalties and failure tied to, well, how well you can look at documents under pressure. Initially I was like “this isn’t fun” and then I was like “oh yeah, this is fun” but the problem is that you hit “this is repetitive” way, way before the game is over.

As much as Not Tonight adds wrinkles to the proceedings–now you have to scan people, now the criteria are different, etc.–the game can’t really escape that you’re doing the same few inputs over and over basically forever. There does come a point where the game is almost second nature, and you’re just speeding through it, but I can’t say that bends the experience around to “fun” again. It’s more sort of… blessedly untroubling. 

I suppose it could have been much worse–the game takes place across 3 months in a year, and when you start playing it’s January, and about halfway through the month you definitely think “fuck I can’t do twelve months of this shit.” It’s probably about a month too long, but there’s a rule of three so I know why they stretched it out a bit.

(To be honest, the problem might be that the months break the rule of three by being four weeks long, and each month that last week feels like filler. I guess PanicBarn will have to take this up with the Babylonians.)

So, it’s too long, and–most disappointingly–the game fizzles out completely at the end, with a climax that feels rushed and unrewarding. In fact, it’s a touch undermining; the game is thematically strong in its sense of place, but narratively doesn’t seem to work towards any meaningful critique. I didn’t need some sort of “Love Conquers All” Brazil ending, but a “and then everything was fine” title card is the worst of both worlds.

Despite saying all that, I liked Not Tonight, and I think it is because of the context I played it in–it may be a broad satire, but it’s not like it’s not right! Things are fucked!

Will I ever play it again? There’s a DLC that came with it that continues the story on with a side-character that I find the idea of charming enough, but as I said above, the game outstays its welcome just enough that I’m not too bothered about playing it. Maybe one day though, after a long enough break.

Final Thought: Something the game misses interrogating too deeply, sadly, is the player’s own role in post-Brexit society. It doesn’t take any moral stance on if it’s acceptable to work turning away potentially desperate people when you work jobs on the border as you are forced to and have no way to subvert your role, which I think is a bit too “only following orders” for my liking. In the same sphere in the game design there’s a exploit of sorts in that if you buy a particular set of clothes you can sell drugs with no cost to your “social score” and be massively rich by about halfway through the game, and I was struck that I didn’t just sell drugs to make the money–I did it because I was embodying the role of someone who didn’t give a fuck about anything except my own selfish survival because of how the country was treating me. 

I think both of those things would have been really interesting to force the player to consider, and the subtleties of culpability would have helped the satire hit home harder. I mean, I already know things are fucked, and I know it’s the fault of the cunts in charge. But I also think it’s fair to be asked: well, what am I doing about it? What are you doing about it?

Are we just surviving?

Is that enough?