“Papers, Please” is a game where you are a guard in a border crossing in a soviet-era-inspired fictional country. You have to check the papers travellers hand you, check for discrepancies, validity, etc of documents and approve or deny entrance to the glorious republic of Arstotzka.
Excited yet?
As dry as the game sounds, the description does it no justice… From a gameplay standpoint, it has a very “real” feel to it… You feel like your shuffling papers, checking dates, etc, which leads to a big connection between the game and the player.
Errors are heavy penalized, but you get paid by each person that you let through, so you want to let through as many people as you can, but if you let people in that have mismatching information you eventually get fines and can be judged by high-treason… So, you have the never-ending conflict of letting people pass, and doing your job right.
Add to this a series of moral conundrums (you let the husband pass, will you stop the wife because her passport was out of date? Will you let dissidents into the country so they’ll pull down the corrupt government you know leads you?), and the need to not only support yourself but your whole family, and you have a recipe for a pretty tense game…
I was very skeptical about the game at start, but everyone was raving about it, so I thought I’d give it a try, but even though I started playing thinking “don’t know what’s the big fuss about this”, I ended up feeling very tense every time I let someone through, dreading to receive the fax saying I’d made a mistake and that I was getting docked on my payment.
Finally, the game not only does a great job in gameplay and narrative, but also in the context… it makes you feel oppressed, bordering on the depressed while playing, which might seem weird to exalt when talking about a game, but it manages it perfectly…
Final verdict: It’s a great game to waste some hours (think I spent about 8 hours with it, seeing alternative endings, etc), which for its cost is a great bargain! 9/10