It's an absolutely perfect adaptation to game mechanics from something that isn't a game. First you're taking your time, looking up everything in the guidebook to make sure you make no mistakes. Then you're strategizing about which rule checks are worth skipping because they take too long to warrant worrying about the fine they might cost you. Before you know it, it's second nature. You know that Bostan is in Republia and that the line on the MOA emblem goes diagonally from bottom left to top right. On top of this, the game is so good at increasing its complexity- each new rule fits in flawlessly with the existing mechanics, with the difficulty curve, and with the story events.

Like any great game, it feels worth mastering, but it by no means stops there, because you're in Arstotzka, a world where you're never commended for doing anything correctly, only reprimanded for doing things incorrectly. A world where you're fined heavily for the act of decorating your workspace. A world where conducting an X-ray to verify someone's sex and seizing someone's passport without any real justification aren't gross violations of rights but simply burdens, items on a checklist that must be done. Ultimately, Papers, Please is about being molded into thinking, acting, and making decisions like a robot. Come across a moral dilemma and you'll more than likely make your choice on whether or not to admit someone just based on if you've exceeded your protocol violation warning limit for the day. Human beings aren't human beings in Arstotzka, they're means to an end. Through this theme, not only does the game perfectly encapsulate both bureaucratic labor and authoritarian government as a whole, but it comes to the conclusion that no other game with moral dilemmas has been able to quite reach. When working as an immigration officer, there are no people. There are only sets of information which may or may not line up, the specific details of which are so irrelevant towards whether or not someone deserves to pass that they might as well be randomly generated.

And yet, somehow, the human side of Arstotzka shines through. Jorji is more than fine with playing the immigration game, applauding you for working such a difficult job whenever he's denied entry and vying to have more convincing papers next time. Calensk tells you that you'll earn a bonus for detaining more people, and yet he's unable to pay you fully the first few times because he had to spend more money taking care of his family than he anticipated. Even Dimitri, the man in charge of overseeing your position, the man who's forced you to become this robot, will give you a game over if you follow protocol and refuse to let one of his friends into the country. Like the rest of the game, this characterization is so effortlessly natural. The game's mechanics already made going back to get all the medals and endings worthwhile, but picking up on these details adds an additional, equally fulfilling layer. This all culminates in what I think is the high point of the entire game, and what's probably the most optimistic of the major endings. You've just grinded out nearly two-hundred credits to escape the country and are now at the hands Obristan's immigration officer with your family. But you're not denied entry, like you so very much deserve to be, you're let in. Why? Maybe the officer didn't notice your passports were forged, or maybe he inferred the situation that you were in and took mercy. Either way, it's because he's a human being, not a robot, and now your family's safe. Thanks for playing, roll credits.

One of the seminal entries in the "games Brian Griffin would make" genre, except the surrounding game is decent.

Papers, Please was a game that I really enjoyed when it came out, and I think the overall gameplay loop and presentation carry the game in a way that similar disasters like Not For Broadcast can't. Unlike that game, I really enjoyed most of the cast and following their ongoing stories.

The thing that brings those stories down is that the narrative is tied to a very confused and outright reactionary view of the eastern bloc. It's to be expected, I don't think Lucas Pope mentally has left the suburbs of Virginia since his birth, but the Red Dawn tier depiction of a vaguely leftwing, vaguely slavic rogue state that willingly deprives its citizens of basic needs based on the market is a disingenuous and purposeful political statement. It's also one that's very hard to believe once you have a basic understanding of the history of these regions, and going back to the game even four years after its launch, this stood out to me.

It's also just hard to find the despotic nature of the setting that gripping compared to the immigration system of the United States, which is significantly darker and more cruel than anything depicted in this game. We have the secret police, we have the "work or die" economic system, we even go a step further and have outright concentration camps. These weren't recent developments within the writer's lifetime either. He was around for the formation of ICE! There's a version of this game, if you absolutely have to set it in the "evil gommunism" of the vague east, that cuts so much deeper than this game comes close to approaching.

It really fucking sucks, because if this game wasn't such a cowardly and confused mess of a setting, it would make the individual stories of the regulars you meet at your desk job so much more engaging.

andy blunden writes the following in Stalinism: Its Origin and Its Future:

"The bureaucracy, owing to its conditions of life, aspired to ownership of the means of production, but was excluded from this by Soviet law. Nevertheless, like all bureaucracies, they used their position to gain the greatest possible freedom from the control from the population."

blunden identifies the bureaucracy of a stalinist system as wielding the instruments of political violence on behalf of the proletariat (who won said instruments via revolutionary upheaval of a capitalist social order) while simultaneously negotiating greater and greater autonomy to conduct the state away from proletariat desires. this is specifically attributed to the isolation of the soviet state and the failure of international socialism in the wake of the russian revolution. when operating in a capitalist global economy and with the need to establish industrialized productive forces in a relatively undeveloped country, the bureaucracy organized markets and rigid economic control in order to create competitive parity with its neighbors.

these threads are woven tightly throughout your days as immigration officer in arstotzka. it presents the material contradiction at the heart of socialist bureaucratic rule cleanly: the regulatory actions of the bureaucracy can themselves be twisted into commodities. the ideal value of the officer's choice to accept or deny an immigrant's paperwork lies in its judgment on the fitness of a person to enter or exit a country; a binary moral evaluation of someone as a refugee, traveler, or potential productive labor vs an ideological dissident, terrorist, or purveyor of bourgeoisie exploitation. when this receives an exchange valuation in the form of "credits," a dialectic relation emerges. the need to keep one's family afloat in the face of daily expenses turns the throughput of the line into the driver of decision-making while the just impetus behind the officer's duty becomes less and less relevant. the game counterweighs this somewhat by instantly scoring you on your decisions, but it's only able to do so in terms of factual, unnuanced contradictions. forged seals on entry permits and stolen visas are smashed into the same category as those with minor typos in their region of origin and identification cards just a day or two expired. any means of quantifying the ideal behind the action of immigration squashes it into a degenerated new interpretation.

with this transformation of the action of immigration approval into a commodity, the state and its handlers are able to leverage it as such. when asian-expy country impor imposes trade sanctions on arstotzka, the latter fires back by cutting off access to its borders, withholding a service identical to its rival's cessation of the trade of physical goods. a fellow guard gets kickbacks off of detainments and cuts you into his share, giving the player the opportunity to reap rewards from detaining immigrants for virtually any small paperwork infraction. even terrorist attacks become easy paydays for the player, changing from unfortunate interruptions in your commission-based salary to a sigh of relief as a suicide bomber rushing the outpost is surgically eliminated by your hand. in all of these instances, the meaning behind these bureaucratic, theoretically necessary actions are gamified through their transformation into commodities. even the physical passports themselves are commodified by the end of the game, where surreptitiously confiscating above-board foreign passports gives your family the opportunity to create forgeries and emigrate into a different country.

in this way, the game forces the player's hand by accelerating a bureaucratization of the mind. I denied entry to a woman because she lacked an ID card even with a valid domestic visa; I immediately rationalized this because her excuse ("I left the country before ID cards were distributed") seemed incongruent with a supposed history that I had literally no basis for. at the same time, I applauded myself for making "morally correct" choices to weigh out my perpetuation of injustice, such as letting a woman join her husband even when missing her entry permit or denying entry to a pimp trafficking women through your checkpoint. in essence, the existence of the service I provided as a commodity gave the illusion of perpetual justice when I made discrete choices that defied the imposed exchange value, buoying the contradiction between moral ideal and commodified existence in the process. any sense of personal gratification off of these actions stemmed entirely from the fact that I wielded complete control over these people's lives, even if I occasionally offered benevolence. it succinctly shows the inability for meaningful revolutionary action by a single actor when perpetuating a regressive mode of a production. rather, only organized methods can viably allow for a true, international struggle for a classless society.

mechanically the game perfectly conjures the claustrophobic doldrums of work giving way to dull bouts of relief at the absence of any citation. chump sums it up rather tidily in their own review. virtually never a possible contradiction that doesn't appear during regular play at least once or twice, encouraging thorough play while simultaneously rushing you along.

I think about this game a lot. At least once or twice a week. It used to be more, but then I became self-employed.

There are a lot of great journalistic thinkpieces and independent navel-gazing out there that very accurately surmise Papers, Please as an excellent depiction of the inherent inhumanity of border control as well as what it's like to live under a fascist regime even in a position of 'power'.

Those are all valid and well done, I love them myself, but there's one angle I rarely if ever see come up:

This game is a shockingly and deeply uncomfortable representation of what it's like to work in customer service, administration, or - god forbid - Human Resources.

It's easy to nod and maybe even laugh when you're told "Dismiss anyone who seems suspicious. Typos are the devil. Anyone from [x] region." I sure did when this game came out.

Then I was put in charge of filtering out CVs and highlighting 'suitable applicants'. I was told to dismiss anyone with inconsistencies or oddities, to immediately shred a CV with any typos, and to be [direct quote] "cognizant of anything unusual on the name front". Many of the people I authorized made it to the interview and failed miserably. Suddenly, the game becomes a lot more real. I quit that job after a year or so.

People often bring up how awful it is to be faced with someone who's broken the rules or is a 'valid rejection' despite making earnest pleas, having family or some other such reason. I often bring up how, working for both a large retailer and a branch of the government which dealt with benefits claimants, this was my average shift. Indeed, if you've been on either side of claiming benefits in the UK (I've been on both), this game goes from uncomfortable to stomach churning. There's a reason I quit the latter job within three months.

And, in both the game and bureaucracy, 'doing good' is at best inconvenient and at worst actively self-sabotaging. It's nice to do good. It's nice to be nice. But apartments cannot be warmed as easily as hearts, and while you may be okay with a heartfelt 'thanks' from a desperate customer/claimant, landlords tend to prefer cash. In PP the consequences are an immediate citation, in reality they're far more insidious. 5 shifts on the schedule turns into 2, and 2 turns into 0. All without a word, a tyrannical silent punishment for the sin of having a soul. Not as instant as a citation, but the effects are the same.

Unlike reality, however, PP believes in empowerment. You, a lowly border control inspector, can potentially dismantle the fascist regime you operate under and really stick it to the machine. It's nice, cathartic even. This game's most emotional moments are often the understated weight of a hopeless person coming up against the dehumanizing maws of fascism and passing through unscathed, conveyed with little more than sprites and brief popup text. Lucas Pope's specialty, honestly.

But in a game so deeply steeped in the miserable, beige parts of the modern world, it's the one part which is sadly divorced from it. A world where middle managers can effortlessly snuff out any act of rebellion is not a world where one goblin in a cubicle can tear down capitalism. Sometimes, your rebellion never gets further than sighing and offering someone a 100% refund when they're only entitled to 75%, and then bullshitting your manager that they had a 'convincing story' (your dad lies better) and 'you were tired' (of the job, perhaps, but the 3 coffees in my body are necromantic).

I come back to this game a lot. I own it on Steam and have for about 7 years now, but I always play it on a pirated copy I stuck on a USB stick ages ago. Dunno why. Maybe it makes me nostalgic for using it to slack off at, ironically, my old receptionist job. I like to read what people think of it, but am always a bit disheartened to see a somewhat rigid interpretation of the game as just about border control, fascism or the Soviet Union. No other game has captured just how corruptive, anti-human and so deeply boring the evils of bureaucracy are.

There's an ending you can get if you remain loyal to the government. You only need to be loyal. Doesn't matter if you're bad at your job, only that the Arstotzkan government knows you say 'thank you sir' as its iron grip tightens around your throat. I got this ending on my most recent playthrough. It reminded me of a good 60% of my managers, and a co-worker I had named Charlie who they kept on despite being in the throes of dementia. I hope he's getting the care he needs.

I don't work admin/clerical jobs anymore. I don't have the inhumanity in me, I'm afraid. The last job I ever worked told me not to say "terminate" when closing a call with a distressed customer because it might make them upset.
The closest I get is when I help people fill out forms for the DWP, or fight sanctions imposed on them for missing an appointment scheduled at 7am when they live 5 miles away. Companies and agencies are staffed by people, and people are easily inconvenienced. Not even the most ardent DWP believer wants to read a 4000 word rebuttal to a sanction they lazily approved on a Friday evening. Sometimes, being annoying is more effective than being compliant.

So, anyway, do you remember Jorji Costava?

Consistently a huge fan of games that have you more passively experience the world around you rather than causing you to be someone who feels inherently above the way the world functions just because of your own role as a protagonist in the narrative. It never feels like you're actually learning anything about the way the setting functions on your own terms, with the story mainly being told through newspaper clippings, the people you talk to, and the ever increasing laundry list of mechanics that you're given. In this sense the game proves itself to be an incredibly effective example of how the pure gameplay itself is able to provide such powerful context to the story going on, with the increasingly large list of conditions you have to keep track of reinforcing the oppressive nature of Arsotzka as you're simply trapped in this hellish position and forced to abide if you want to feed your family.

The constant sense that you're doing something wrong eats away at you as you're practically forced to deny people for what can often feel like rather minor or immoral reasons. This is further elevated once you start paying attention to the mindset the game forces you to fall into, one of constant distrust where you're going out of your way to essentially hunt for anything that could get you to deny people, with moments of satisfaction if you find a discrepancy early especially reinforcing the way that the job you're given here has essentially forced you to stop seeing these characters trying to enter the country as anything resembling people and instead just your ticket to being paid more if you can get through them quickly. At the same time however, it's remarkably interesting to then see the way that despite this, it's also incredibly easy to see so many people regarding this place as a place of hope for new beginnings and being able to escape whatever situation their respective nations had left them in as well. It's handled in such a way that it ends up feeling nowhere near as black and white as you'd expect once you think about it that bit more. It all plays together really nicely and ends up providing a lot of character to a world that's comprised largely of procedurally generated entities which is cool to see.

The gameplay itself is also really well put together, with the act of simply reading and dragging pieces of paper around being a surprisingly entertaining and engaging time when applied the way it has been here. The steady increase of things to keep in mind is paced in such a way that your first playthrough will constantly have you being thrown off balance, always feeling as if you're just about to get a grip on what you need to do before you have another element thrown in to further confuse things, never feeling quite complicated enough to fully make you want to stop playing or anything, just enough for you to literally never feel in your comfort zone. Really the only thing bringing this game down a notch is a certain feeling of tonal inconsistency and predictability in certain regards. The idea of disobeying the higher ups by letting certain people in would be a far more interesting dilemma if the punishment you got for going against protocol was a bit more dynamic. Allowing someone to enter the country and not noticing that one of their documents misspells their name should not be treated equally to confiscating a diplomat's passport for no valid reason, and the fact that these two offenses (along with literally every other one in the bulk of the game) are treated the same strongly cuts back on the nuance that it could have had and ends up feeling very disconnected from the rest of the experience, far closer to an artificial game construct than the more living, breathing setting that the rest of Papers Please takes place in.

I also feel like there are a few too many instances where you do end up contributing to something a bit too large for someone of your character's calibre, which detracts pretty badly from that core feeling of just being another meaningless cog in the wheel that can only make marginal differences on your own. It's definitely not enough to entirely derail the experience but there's enough dissonance there that it can make the atmosphere far murkier than it feels like it was aiming for. Even with these gripes I still really loved my time with Papers Please, and while I'm almost certainly never going to actually try getting all 20 endings that it has, it's also a game that I'll be returning to for another couple of playthroughs at some point for sure.

Just utter genius. So well plotted and designed to properly convey political anxieties and frustrations. Maybe one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played; so many times the past couple of days I found myself worrying about things that the dear border agent is stuck thinking about. The immersion is very tactical, too. No matter what your political leanings are in real life, you will find yourself feeling satisfied to catch a discrepancy and stamp a big red mark onto passports. A game about beauracracy where the routine actions of scanning documents meet the firing synapses of call-and-response interaction. Ugh.

The fact that your family are just circles of their status; you only know as how much trouble they’re to cause you, how much money they’ll cost. On my first run, I found myself constantly having to sacrifice heat or food because of my beginner performance, and on my second run I found myself not having to worry about money at all up until the end.

Beaucracy is inherently discompassionate, anti-thetical to human connection and relation. Documentation as absolute truth, under rule that is absolute, it only begets a shedding of everything that makes you human. You are only the sum of your government approvals; under authoritarian capitalism, the government gives you existence, and labor gives you purpose. The way to gain back your humanity is to be humane. Chances to be compassionate, to be empathetic, even when it’s not allowed. Even when it might cost you.

I've had Papers, Please on my wishlist for many years. Finally picked it up for very cheap recently as part of the game's 10 year anniversary. Playing it taught me that I've been 10 years late to the party.

In this game, you are an "Inspector" at the border to Aristotzka, and your job is to check entry documents of everyone trying to enter. At first, you grant entry to Aristotzkians and deny it to every foreigner, but with every passing day, new rules are added and present ones change. By Day 20+, passports can be forged, both natives and foreigners need multiple different entry forms, you check for fingerprints to confirm identities, search bodies to check for contraband, detain criminals and also take part in shady activities as part of the main story if you want. The main story takes a lot longer than I imagined based on the premise, but the game keeps presenting new challenges to keep things interesting.

Whether you will enjoy the game yourself depends on how you feel about the core gameplay loop. As someone who does enjoy doing "mundane" tasks like looking over passports for discrepancies, I've enjoyed Papers, Please's gameplay a lot. It also sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The number of times I made mistakes in this game is staggering. The game does a great job of making you feel and look dumb as hell. And it will happen to you often, simply because in the latter half of the story, there just is way too much to look out for that something small is tiny to slip by you. The only things I found a bit unfair were single letters being different in certain words (Citu instead of City is very hard to discern) and invalid height being a criteria too, since heights don't seem consistent enough.

There is also the part of the game being a low budget indie game. Not a bad thing, the game is a creative beauty, but the visual look is very simplistic and repetitive, there are very few sounds and tracks in the game, there are only a couple dozen faces in the game so they get repetitive too and all this combined adds to the repetitive feeling that comes up herre and there overall. This is one of those games though where a bigger budget wouldn't necessarily have done a whole lot for the overall experience relative to the potential income for the developer. As it stands, this is a very fun experience for the right player, a very unique experience no matter who you are (unless you're a border patrol agent irl) and one of the more creative games I've ever played. Check it out!

I've yet to play a game that so thoroughly allows for such compelling moral decision making, weaving narrative and mechanics perfectly. While you yourself are a victim of the totalitarian regime you work for, you wield a large amount of power with that stamp. Of course you have to think of your family, but what benefits your family often time comes at the expense of other innocent people. It's not about whether you are complicit or not but about how complicit you are willing to be. Making these decisions are not easy and are made even more difficult due to your limited time and need for enough money to survive. I felt a ton of pressure to just send people one way or another as quickly as possible and put them out of mind so I could focus on the next person; the constant stream of monotonous work is numbing and yet there are real consequences to your actions whether you know it or not.

But sometimes there aren't. Sometimes you send someone away who desperately needs to get in and nothing happens, you just have to live with what you've done. Games focused around morality are difficult to make because they require confidence that your audience with fully engage with the game and unfortunately I don't think Lucas Pope had that confidence because the inclusion of an endless mode gets rid of everything that makes this game amazing and is not something I'd ever want to play. Yes, being good at the job is very satisfying, but that is a source of horror for me not one of pride or accomplishment.

At the end of each day you get a report on your earnings, expenses, and the well being of your family. It is incredibly distressing to have to decide if your family will go without food or heat for the day, or having to pick which sick family member gets medicine and which does not. Choosing who to trust, who to help, who to ignore, who to throw under the bus, all while keeping your family safe, is virtually impossible and creates an incredibly stressful and sometimes disorienting experience. One moment that really stuck with me out of all the little story threads is when your son gives you a drawing of yourself, calling you a hero. Of course, if you make it to that point in the game you most certainly are not. I'm amazed at how well made this game is it's so fucked up.

This kind of detail oriented, bureaucratic, deadline enforced puzzle solving is exactly the kind of thing my monkey accountant-brain excels at. This game was tough and it stressed me out.

I loved the aesthetics and the subtle world building that encourages you to piece things together through various small hints. There were some legitimate moral quarrels I felt throughout the game which added to the stress of it all.

I wish there weren't so many insta-lose scenarios, but other than that I loved this game. Lucas Pope has suddenly cemented himself as a favorite game developer.

Glory to Arstotzka!

88/100