Almost ten years after its release, Papers, Please remains one of the most memorable games I ever experienced, a feat that is especially notable considering it is ostensibly a game about bureaucracy and stamping documents.
You play as a border agent in the one checkpoint at the border of the Glorious Nation of Arstotzka, which has just come out of a war with its neighbors and is reestablishing immigration. You work at the checkpoint for twelve hours a day, going over the documents of people headed into the country and ultimately allowing them entry or not with a stamp on their passports. You make some money for every person you see to in a day, unless you give them the wrong stamp. Make too many mistakes and your pay gets docked.
There are many games out there that try to evoke an atmosphere of bleakness and oppression, but too many of them fail for either being dark to the point of disbelief, or for outright killing elements that would make the game interesting. In the same vein, many games fail to establish stakes through its gameplay systems, making it so the player isn't really invested in what they're doing. Papers, Please is so stellar because it succeeds on both those fronts, giving reason for the player to stay invested while maintaining haunting parallels to the real world that make it feel like Arstotzka is not so absurd, after all.
Your daily life as an Arstotzkan border agent is dystopian. As the only one in the family with a job, the low pay often barely puts food on the table, and every mistake, every fine could spell the difference in being able to afford heating for the cold days, or afford the doctor in an emergency. By diligently performing your duties, however, you'll survive, and maybe even be able to afford luxuries like buying a birthday present for your son.
It's this feeling, your own humanity in this setting, that gets contrasted with the people you interact with at the checkpoint. So many of them have as little as typographic errors on their passports, or maybe are lost in labyrinthine paperwork requirements, that should be reasonable to just ignore, but must be followed to the latter. Because of your judgment, families are separated, jobs are lost, and worse.
When someone comes in, begging to be let into Arstotzka at the risk of dying if they stay, do you take the pay cut to save them? If someone offers you a bribe, do you take it, in an attempt to secure financial stability for a few months, but at the risk of losing your job? It's a struggle where you are, at the same time, powerful enough to control other people's lives, but too powerless to control your own fate.
And that's only part of the game: as the plot moves forward, there's friendly and unfriendly faces you'll get to know: terrorists, conspiracies, fraud... all of which make the work at your cramped desk all the less mundane. The choices you make can lead to one of twenty endings, and while some are a bit redundant, there's a legitimate weight to your actions and a fascinating story being told here.
And you'll want to work, because as dreadful as the atmosphere is, the day to day activity of trying to process as many applications as possible, slowly getting better at the job, getting into a rhythm, is fun. The Arstotzkan government is always throwing new rules out, constantly changing the requirements for entry, and in turn, you optimize your process. The limited space on your desk is a genius move from the game's developer, as you have just enough space to work with two documents, and it rewards strategizing around whatever the rules are on a given day.
As such, Papers, Please is one of those indie game gems I recommend to just about anyone. It tells a story that's all the more compelling due to being a video game, and succeeds in creating a new, unique type of experience. If you haven't checked it out yet, you owe it to yourself to do so.
Glory to Arstotzka.
You play as a border agent in the one checkpoint at the border of the Glorious Nation of Arstotzka, which has just come out of a war with its neighbors and is reestablishing immigration. You work at the checkpoint for twelve hours a day, going over the documents of people headed into the country and ultimately allowing them entry or not with a stamp on their passports. You make some money for every person you see to in a day, unless you give them the wrong stamp. Make too many mistakes and your pay gets docked.
There are many games out there that try to evoke an atmosphere of bleakness and oppression, but too many of them fail for either being dark to the point of disbelief, or for outright killing elements that would make the game interesting. In the same vein, many games fail to establish stakes through its gameplay systems, making it so the player isn't really invested in what they're doing. Papers, Please is so stellar because it succeeds on both those fronts, giving reason for the player to stay invested while maintaining haunting parallels to the real world that make it feel like Arstotzka is not so absurd, after all.
Your daily life as an Arstotzkan border agent is dystopian. As the only one in the family with a job, the low pay often barely puts food on the table, and every mistake, every fine could spell the difference in being able to afford heating for the cold days, or afford the doctor in an emergency. By diligently performing your duties, however, you'll survive, and maybe even be able to afford luxuries like buying a birthday present for your son.
It's this feeling, your own humanity in this setting, that gets contrasted with the people you interact with at the checkpoint. So many of them have as little as typographic errors on their passports, or maybe are lost in labyrinthine paperwork requirements, that should be reasonable to just ignore, but must be followed to the latter. Because of your judgment, families are separated, jobs are lost, and worse.
When someone comes in, begging to be let into Arstotzka at the risk of dying if they stay, do you take the pay cut to save them? If someone offers you a bribe, do you take it, in an attempt to secure financial stability for a few months, but at the risk of losing your job? It's a struggle where you are, at the same time, powerful enough to control other people's lives, but too powerless to control your own fate.
And that's only part of the game: as the plot moves forward, there's friendly and unfriendly faces you'll get to know: terrorists, conspiracies, fraud... all of which make the work at your cramped desk all the less mundane. The choices you make can lead to one of twenty endings, and while some are a bit redundant, there's a legitimate weight to your actions and a fascinating story being told here.
And you'll want to work, because as dreadful as the atmosphere is, the day to day activity of trying to process as many applications as possible, slowly getting better at the job, getting into a rhythm, is fun. The Arstotzkan government is always throwing new rules out, constantly changing the requirements for entry, and in turn, you optimize your process. The limited space on your desk is a genius move from the game's developer, as you have just enough space to work with two documents, and it rewards strategizing around whatever the rules are on a given day.
As such, Papers, Please is one of those indie game gems I recommend to just about anyone. It tells a story that's all the more compelling due to being a video game, and succeeds in creating a new, unique type of experience. If you haven't checked it out yet, you owe it to yourself to do so.
Glory to Arstotzka.