Papers, Please

This game reminds me why I love to support indie devs. The gameplay is essentially a big memory game. Your choices influence your journey and your ending. It is fun but also makes you pause and think of your actions and what consequences you just caused. Worth a buy even at full price!

The game is about inspecting people crossing the border of a fictional country, with a gameplay loop of inspecting documents, checking for forgeries, and deciding if you want to break the law. The base game is very simple: check the documents of people crossing the border by looking for any signs of forgery, like invalid countries, incorrect expiration dates and inconsistent names. As the days pass and events happen, new rules will come into effect: checking for stamp forgery, automatically denying certain countries, and verifying claims through fingerprints. You need to take care of your family and unexpected expenses will happen, like sick relatives and broken heating, so admitting or denying people in a fashionable way is necessary to gain enough money to cover all expenses. Throughout the game, different people and organizations will ask for favors or make demands, which can result in money, returned favors, heartfelt thanks, problems, death and different endings.

When you begin, you find yourself in a crampled little booth with a tiny little shelf for a 'desk;. Upon you are thrust a myriad of responsibilities to manage the passing of outsiders into your glorious country, and a host of rules, regulations, and details to juggle and check as efficiently as you can. You must work quickly as you are paid for each person you successfully (and correctly) allow and deny into your country within the time limit alloted for each day. Quick and efficient work rewards you with more money for you to support your family, and other benefits. On the surface this game seems to be purely about stamping visas and shuffling rules, which does sound rather boring and tedious. However, this game is so much much more then simply a visa stamper. I will avoid spoilers as best I can but I must say that the amount of power you have with your two little stamps becomes quickly tangible a couple of days in, and you can really start feeling the pressure of your decisions as you encounter the various people trying to get into your glorious country and their life stories. These various stories, combined with the multiple branching decisions, allows the game to have a good deal of replayability and provides a stark commentary on the job you're playing at doing and how it compares to real people that sit in real booths and stamp real visas, every day, all day. It's really quite visceral. What starts out as a fairly uneventful paper stamper turns quickly into a world full of intruige and social commentary all centered around your two little stamps and your otherwise dreary day-to-day job and routine. If you want something different, somethign that tells a unique story, something that takes a completely new style of gameplay, or if you just want to pretend to be that jerk at the airport that won't let people through because of a typo, this really is a fantastic game, and a fantastic experience. If you read this far, shame on you! HURRY UP AND BUY IT NAO!

Much like Lucas Pope's other game "Return of the Obra Dinn," there's a tension in "Papers, Please" between what Pope wants to do and the mechanics he uses to do it. The game is basically Franz Kafka's Guess Who: You play an immigration control official in a fictional Eastern Bloc country who has to follow an increasingly detailed set of rules to find and either reject or accept various immigrants, and eventually are forced to balance the needs of your family against the fact that you're paid by the head for some reason. It presents moral conundrums and black comedy in equal measure. The problem is really in the interface. The rules extend beyond what you're issued; for example, you have to find a discrepancy in paperwork before you can interrogate somebody. This means paging through increasingly voluminous documentation, which you have to drag and drop onto a portion of the screen. This is, to at least some degree, intentional; the idea is clearly that the player feels just as trapped by the bureaucracy as the people they save or crush with the whack of a stamp. But by the same token, the political point starts to interfere with both the story and the game. It rapidly gets to the point where the game makes it impossible to see the forest for the trees, and this clearly isn't the point of the endeavor. Pope is trying, and I'd argue, succeeds, in forcing you to consider a host of political issues through gameplay, but he could be more effective. Still, it's worth playing and a brilliant example of art in video games. Just be prepared to set it aside after playing a level or two.

It has an unique game mechanic that ist not for everyone. It might appear more than work than fun and the long term value is questionable. Looking on the steam reviews it seems that most play the game very long, though the game offers a long campain with different endings and an endless mode. It is one thing to choose a retro look but fullscreen is not fullscreen in this game. Fullscreen means here a black border around the game, which is quite annoying, However, the unique mechanic and setting deserve a recommendation.