You can make two mistakes a day without penalty, so if you're good at your job, perhaps you can afford to let a rule or two slide for the sake of keeping a family together. So maybe you occasionally stick your neck out for somebody in need. The fact that a few sentences of text accompanied by retro-style graphics can make you feel as bad as you do is impressive. If you don't, you and your family will not survive the winter. Even if you're the kind of person to always take the "lawful good" route, to always take the high road in games, you're forced to commit acts for which you might hate yourself. There are rare moments of welcome levity with a few characters.īut the moral quandaries are so real, so relatable that your conscience speaks to you more than it does in most other games. The only thing keeping you from doing the wrong thing is your own conscience. Being immoral might actually make things much easier on you and your family. There is no paragon meter to fill, no guarantee of a sweeter reward on the other side. There are often no tangible benefits for doing the moral thing in these cases. Whom do you trust? How do you proceed? Think quickly, because the clock is ticking. But what do you do when the kind ones come through hoping to find a better life in your country, only to find that their paperwork isn't in order? What do you do when you know someone is going to perform vile acts as soon as he crosses your border, but you have no legal reason to refuse him entry without getting in trouble for it? There are also other forces at work here, asking you to do questionable things for what may or may not be the greater good. You meet many different people while working. The game is well made enough to keep your attention with these mechanics, but the real draw comes from the story that's told based on the decisions you make. You call "Next!" and do it all again, over and over, trying to be both speedy and accurate. You hunt for and point out discrepancies. Papers, Please sounds mundane, and in some ways it is. The simplest lines of text can lead to some of the most painful choices. This is not a game to play if you intend to relax before going to bed. The game becomes more compelling, but not more "fun," really. Before long, you find yourself stressed about every detail and how long each task takes. Every second wasted double-checking the rules means another second you can't get more money. Even with the rule book right in front of you, it's easy to lose track of what you need to look for.
Because you have to pay attention to more details, your desk becomes increasingly cluttered and hard to deal with. Papers, Please begins simply, but as time goes on, the rules get more strict, requiring you to check more paperwork and jump through more hoops to make sure you're letting in the right people.
If you don't make enough to afford everything you need, tough choices might have to be made between food and medicine. At the end of each day, you decide where to spend the money you've earned in a rather Oregon Trail-like checklist of family necessities. You aren't typically solving puzzles or progressing through dialogue trees you're merely checking facts. Every passport you process at the border earns you five credits, so to pay for rent, heat, and food (not to mention the occasional extra expenses, like medicine), you want to work as quickly as possible, getting to as many people as you can each day.Ī steady stream of citizens and foreigners come up to your inspection booth, waiting for you to decide whether or not they will be granted access to your country, whether you'll stamp "Approved" or "Denied." And that's the crux of what you do day after in-game day, making sure documents are current, making sure the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted. You are given a small Class-8 apartment with which to house your family. You begin by winning your low-wage, thankless border-inspection job in a lottery, which immediately tells you much about your country of residence. You won't get a lot of thank-yous working at the border of Arstotzka. By making the stakes high and incredibly personal, Papers, Please makes you care about virtual paperwork more than you ever have before. You are not important, you will never experience the world outside your work desk, and you will perform your job to the best of your ability or suffer the consequences. Compared to the power fantasies we often experience in games, Papers, Please strips you of just about any sense of control you might expect to have. Paperwork is never really "exciting." It's monotonous, it can be stressful, and it's rarely very rewarding.
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